We spent Thursday and Friday with Meredith Glaser of the Urban Cycling Institute. She gave us a scavenger hunt that was designed to get us looking at how the city is designed and how the urban form changes as you move away from the city center to areas with lower density. The game involved taking multimodal trips to experience biking as well as the subway and tram. We talked to lots of people and it was very interesting hearing about different people’s experience with transportation in Amsterdam. The next morning, we met up for a bike tour where Meredith showed us a few intersections where the road was redesigned based on videos of people using it. In one location, this meant making an oval buffer into a “banana shaped” buffer so more cyclists could fit. At another big intersection, all of the lights were removed and now it operates smoothly as travelers can negotiate the space through human interaction. After the ride, we met back up to talk about the scavenger hunt and what we plan to do with what we’ve learned when we go home.
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