Three weeks in Amsterdam was the mobility version of a yoga retreat for me. The daily ritual of riding, reading, learning and reflecting left me feeling a lot more nimble not just flowing through the streets of that great city but in the way I think about the opportunity here at home.

The academic programme had a huge amount of content to digest, and was designed to ensure we didn’t get the sales pitch version of how the Dutch came to have such a high mode share for cycling. We needed to become ‘confused at a higher level’.

Marco Te Brömmelstroet – the Dutch cycling professor – was our guide. He started by debunking common myths such as ‘build it and they will come’. He corrected that one to be ‘Built it, connecting meaningful destinations in a robust network, then maintain it, sell it, evaluate it and adjust it, and over time they will come.’ He informed us that much like a virtuous football player, the Dutch are ‘unconsiously skilled’ when it comes to designing for cycling and their situation came about with very few cycling related policies or plans. The Dutch were protecting city heritage and local commercial vitality, making pragmatic decisions around road rules and crucially, attempting to stop so many of their kids getting killed by traffic. We weren’t going to receive a step by step manual (doh!), we were going to learn how to ask better questions.

Giselinde Kuipers, a professor of cultural sociology, gave a guest lecture on the Dutch ‘national habitus’ of ‘conspicuous non-consumption’ which helped provide some context for why everyday utility cycling stops at the border. Riding in the Netherlands doesn’t define you, or say something about your personality – it’s just a habit. The bicycle kept the Dutch grounded, including their political leaders and royal family, all who recognised the egalitarian symbol the bicycle represents. In stark opposition to the countries our classmates represented, people ride there because it’s normalising.

The absence of a car industry in the Netherlands and Denmark is also thought to have contributed to the less enthusiastic embrace of the automobile. Have the rest of us been duped? Our Italian colleague from the most polluted city in Italy, and home to Fiat and Ferrari, was certainly reflecting on the impact the automobile industry had on their mobility culture.

During our summer course, we were introduced to auto-ethnography as an approach to research. This basically meant we were feeling our way to understanding, with help from experts and literature. Our assignments were to write up the reflections we’d made as we moved around using different modes of transport – how we felt, what we observed others feeling, how mobility was functioning etc.

Coming straight from my desk at NZTA, it all sounded a little wooly to me. It was in fact a very eye-opening experience and a refreshingly intuitive alternative to more technical study. It made me wonder whether we should be incorporating auto-ethnography into the business cases approach – eg. how would these options feel? Here’s an excerpt from my first assignment:

The very first thing I noticed when I landed in Amsterdam a week ago was how quiet it was. Not dead silence, but human-scale noise. As I walked through the city, I could hear people chattering to each other, the purring of bike wheels and the church bells ringing. I smelt a mixture of pastries and sweet ‘coffee shops.’ ….After a few hours I noticed that my body was relaxed, and all the tension I seem to carry around when you’re crossing busy roads at home....wasn’t there – people just seemed to flow.

The programme naturally exposed us to the mouth-watering infrastructure that has become like mythology in our countries. But even that wasn’t quite as we thought and we quickly learnt that the history of separating drivers and cyclists was an automobile-centric response to growing conflict on the road. The Cyclists’ Union was initially very resistant to being cast aside on the road, as they felt it was an affront to their fundamental rights. Still to this day you see large-scale investment in cycling infrastructure made from motorway budgets that are seeking travel time savings for motorists.

The Hovenring in Eindhoven is a good example of how a Dutch “car city” approaches transport improvements.

The high quality separation reminded me of our very own recently completed Hemo intersection in Rotorua. I was thrilled to see this New Zealand example come to life while I was overseas contemplating our own context.

When I visited the Hovenring, this was my observation:

Ruth Oldenziel presented a challenging perspective on modal separation, and employing ‘technological’ rather than ‘user-driven’ design in her article on ‘Contested Spaces’. We had this in mind while experiencing Eindhoven yesterday, where cars and people are in many places literally travelling on different levels. On one hand it appears to be seamless travel paradise, but on the other hand, I noticed a distinct difference in how much interaction we were having with others. We weren’t using eye contact, we had less priority at the lights and people in cars weren’t giving way.

So did all this mean separation wasn’t the nirvana we all thought it was? Well, it was more complicated than that of course, because separation is the safety cousin of slower speed, and they play complementary roles on an urban network. Both are needed, but in different contexts.

A large percentage of residential and urban areas, especially in Amsterdam, seemed to be made up of slow mixed streets where speed had been democratised and the bicycle was usually the most efficient way of getting around. The slow speeds serve several purposes. Firstly, they balance out the attractiveness of modes so that for short trips, the faff of getting in your car to go to your nearby shop doesn’t really stack up – especially because finding a carpark isn’t easy.

Secondly, the slower speeds reposition the car as a guest and shift the power dynamic on the street. Their road sign ‘auto te gast’ literally means ‘Car to guest’ – a beautiful verb we don’t have in the English language. This means they can avoid spending significant amounts of money on separation, special features or lots of signs and signals. At 30kph, humans can actively negotiate and the negotiations are much fairer between modes.

Thirdly, slow speeds feel safer as well as making it actually safer. Every few days, you experience an awkward interaction with someone as you weave around a parked truck, or come up to an intersection but as your tyres or feet ‘almost’ collide, actual conflict was rare because people had enough time to react. On the one occasion I saw some wheels actually collide, there was an embarrassed laugh and a rub of the knee, not an ambulance siren and a family that won’t have someone coming home that night. No doubt slower urban speeds are a large contributor to the significantly better road safety record the Netherlands has.

It was encouraging to hear from my classmates about the growing global movement of cities using a range of low cost tools to slow residential and inner city speeds to 30kph. Our class was particular enchanted by the ‘Superblock’ approach that Barcelona is taking. The city is implementing a plan to open up streets within a three by three ‘superblock’ by closing it to through traffic. The ambitious plan seems to have cross party support, and the first two, while initially facing the usual fierce opposition, now seem to be working. The plan is not only seeking to improve the safety, attractiveness and environmental performance of the city, it’s main selling point is that it’s reclaiming around 670 hectares of public space for people to enjoy at a very low cost.

Vancouver was also taking a simple approach to humanising their residential areas. A small garden, only permeable by foot and bike, at the end of every second residential street – creates a very inexpensive walking and cycling network while still allowing every resident to get to their house by car.





So what did all this mean for mobility in Aotearoa?

To me it means we need to keep working to broaden the conversation so we can seriously challenge the cultural hegemony of the automobile in our cities and embrace the opportunity to improve people’s day to day lives.

Transport in New Zealand has been primarily a technical discipline. It seems that what we’re after from our urban mobility systems at the moment may be adaptive, rather than technical, change. Adaptive change is “more difficult to define, involves the giving up of beliefs and habits, involves loss and risk, requires experimentation and new ideas and is inevitably countered or opposed at a systemic level.” This will require us to reach out and bring in different expertise. We need some change managers. We need some branding experts. We need story tellers, children, migrants, academics, human-design experts, sociologists. Maybe we even need some therapists.

When did transport become so technical? The innocuous way we all use the word ‘cars’ where we mean ‘car drivers’ is probably just one symptom of the fact our transport system was designed with machines, rather than people in mind. While this seems a harmless mistake, how much does it represent a wider trend towards technical, rather than human responses to mobility problems? Is the way we’re currently framing road safety sending us down a similar trajectory?

And how much does that serve to further weaken a culture of trust and tolerance on the streets, and reduce our ability to negotiate using our brains and senses rather than blindly following signs? There’s no amount of ‘Share the Road’ billboards that can replace collective trust but trust isn’t built by optimising machines, and marginalising humans.

I also think we need to carefully consider some of the language we reach for when we talk about transport. ‘Freedom’ and ‘choice’ are two great examples. Turns out it doesn’t matter if you drive an SUV, ride a Harley Davidson or get around by bicycle – we all consider our preferred mode of transport to embody freedom and provide us with choice so, to steal a term from marketing, neither of those words provide a ‘Point of Difference.’ If we’re trying to inspire change in our towns and cities, maybe we need to be more specific. Are we talking about a system that provides choice or the private choice of individuals? Or are we talking about rebalancing the choices so they are equally convenient, meaning some choices will become more attractive, and some might become less attractive.

We should also be asking questions about our transport models. On our course we spent a day thinking about how ‘All models are wrong, however, some are useful’ (Box, 1978) and how even our transport models have been embedded with machine-centric assumptions. Are the transport models we use in New Zealand still serving our needs in urban settings or could alternative ways of modelling, like system dynamics, lead us to different, more useful and people-centric conclusions?

When you visit Amsterdam you see a different version of mobility paradise than the driverless car techno-utopia that’s currently in vogue. It’s not complicated in a way an algorithm could figure out, it’s complex. It’s pragmatic anarchy but people have been empowered to operate using their human abilities and good nature. It made me view the Wellington waterfront in a completely different way. Rather than feeling frustrated and annoyed at the ‘conflict’ between people on foot and people on bikes, we should be celebrating our ability to actively negotiate with each other and be looking for more opportunities to put these skills into practice.

On a final note, one of the most delightful pieces of evidence that confirmed for me the impact of creating a human scale city was when our classmate Felipe reported that his three year old daughter Lucia, who had been riding around in a cargo bike for three weeks, had asked if the family could move to Amsterdam from Washington DC. This from a tiny person with no concept of urban design, transport planning or engineering – all she knew is that it felt good. What would happen if we replaced travel time savings with that metric as our new performance measure for urban mobility?











