It's hard to believe, but I have been in the Netherlands for 4 days already! It's about time for a post about my experiences so far.
First of all, a bit of explanation. I am here for just over 2 weeks with fellow transportation planning students from Portland State University as well as engineering students from both PSU and Northeastern University. The class is titled Multimodal Transportation Engineering Applications and Innovations in the Netherlands and is taught by Profs. Rob Bertini, Peter Furth, and Peter Koonce.
My first day consisted of 3 classmates and me wandering around Amsterdam in a jet-lagged haze after a 10-hour flight and a short train ride from the airport. Even in our state of exhaustion, we had a great time exploring the city and marveling at the way transportation somehow seems to work in such a dense and chaotic city.
Small streets in Amsterdam and in much of the Netherlands operate on a "shared space" concept that can be pretty alarming when you are not used to it. Most of these streets have a very narrow sidewalk of sorts, but the expectation is that pedestrians can walk in the street to pass each other and cars and bikes are expected to yield or pass carefully.
In contrast to the smaller streets, major roads try to separate modes as much as possible. We saw roads with sidewalks, cycle-tracks, 1 or 2 travel lanes, and exclusive bus/tram lanes, all sharing one wide right-of-way. On smaller arterials, the cycle-tracks would become bike lanes and the bus/tram lanes became shared with traffic, but the networks remained intact even if the available space restricted the level of bike and transit priority.
It was very impressive to see so many modes accommodated on these streets, although the general impression to our untrained eyes was utter chaos. It was pretty difficult to know where to cross sometimes, or what to look out for, but overall it seemed to work safely and efficiently.
Given my passion for public transportation, I was particularly interested in how Amsterdam's extensive tram network operates compared to the MAX light rail system in Portland. For those who may not know, a European tram is essentially the same technology as American light rail, although some tram systems use smaller vehicles like the Portland Streetcar. Most of the trams in Amsterdam were similar to MAX, but we saw a few small streetcar-size ones.
One observation is that we saw trams in 1-car, 2-car, and 3-car configurations, as opposed to the 2-car configuration that is standard in Portland. This suggests that in Amsterdam they try a lot harder to precisely match capacity to demand on different lines. My suspicion is that they have standard configurations for each line, since some of the platforms we saw were only big enough for one car, but they clearly have certain lines that benefit from higher capacity.
We spent a long while sitting at a cafe drinking beer and watching pedestrians, cyclists, cars, and trams all zoom on by. I was particularly impressed by the speed of the trams, even in mixed traffic. In Portland we are accustomed to on-street light rail moving rather slowly through the downtown area. It seemed like the tram was able to move faster in Amsterdam because their main roads go many blocks without any major signalized intersections, whereas in Portland there is generally a signal at every block due to the grid. The trams also came at very high frequencies compared to the Portland system.
The tram system isn't perfect, of course. Many of the vehicles appeared to be very old and most platforms were extremely narrow (only a few feet wide). A lot of the stations looked more like bus stops than light rail stops. Another problem, in my opinion, was the way the light rail often acted as a major pedestrian barrier or put people in danger. One street was pedestrian and tram only, which sounds like a nice idea but in practice seemed very dangerous, with crowds of people barely able to get out of the way of a fast train running right through them.
After a day wandering around the city, we caught the train from Amsterdam Centraal to Delft, our home for the next two weeks. My next post will focus on my initial impressions of Delft and of the course itself.
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