Pedaling Revolution, Chapter 5

Chapter 5 of Pedaling Revolution covers the rise of bicycle culture in Portland and the city's substantial investment in bicycle infrastructure over the last couple decades. After an introduction that unfortunately focuses on the more whimsical side of Portland bike culture, Mapes pivots to a discussion of what the city has done to get cycling closer to being a mainstream form of transportation.

Given Portland's reputation (often challenged by other cities) as the bicycle capital of the US, it is easy to forget that even ten years ago Portland was not nearly so bike-friendly. As Mapes points out, it was only recently that Portland added good bike access and crossings to most of the bridges across the Willamette. Bike Boulevards (later rebranded as Neighborhood Greenways) are another relatively recent phenomenon, spreading throughout Portland very quickly due to their low cost. Bike corrals can be spotted every few blocks in some commercial areas and are often full of bikes, something that a decade ago would not have been imagined.

After several pages of praising Portland in a rather uncritical manner (for example, he accepts without question the dubious claim that the streetcar has promoted dense housing), Mapes draws a connection between Portland's land use planning, with its emphasis on compact development and limiting urban sprawl, and the rise of bicycling. While he is correct that compact development helps make bicycling a better option for short trips and commutes, I would argue some of his other points. He often argues that the Portland grid of small blocks is part of what promotes cycling. This may be true, but the same grid encourages a lot of car traffic on the same streets, interfering with bikes and making it less safe.


Let's compare this to the Netherlands. Dutch cities rarely contain anything like a grid system--on the contrary, most new neighborhoods have very limited access points for automobiles. The key seems to be that they limit access for cars while at the same time maintaining a high degree of permeability for bikes using bike/ped-only access points. This not only makes cycling safer, but also makes cycling very competitive vs the car for many trips since only bikes can make a direct path. 


The grid neighborhoods in Portland may make cycling somewhat direct, but driving is still the most convenient way to get from A to B. Portland has started to utilize traffic calming techniques like traffic circles, speed humps, and diverters to deal with this problem, but hasn't come close to the Dutch willingness to actually affect mode choice through altering the street network to make driving less convenient and useful.


The section covering Mia Birk's tenure at the City of Portland was very interesting because it helps to explain a contradiction I have continually noticed regarding Portland's commitment to cycling and traffic-calming. The contradiction is that despite the clearly impressive number of road diets and pedestrian crossings and bicycle facilities installed in the last decade or so, the pace appears to be slowing and projects are becoming more compromised. Part of this surely has to do with limited funding during a bad economic time, but Birk's story points at another explanation.


My main takeaway from this section was that Birk was a no-nonsense administrator with a commitment to results over process, an attitude that probably extended to much of the rest of city government at the time. The story of her instituting a road diet on SE 7th Ave with zero public process, far from being the cautionary tale Mapes makes it out to be, was refreshing to read about after being frustrated by the years-long process and poor results of the recent N Williams traffic safety project. As Mia Birk is quoted as saying, "It was easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission." I wish more planners had this kind of professional attitude. 


No other profession has such a willingness to abdicate responsibility and expertise in favor of decision by plebiscite. In the case of N Williams, city planners led by Ellen Vanderslice allowed a so-called citizen advisory committee to take over the project and not only advise the project but also decide it. Their choice of a left-side buffered bike lane that isn't even continuous was not even one of the options put forth by the planners, and certainly is no improvement on the current situation. If only Mia Birk were still working for the city!


This whole issue reminds me of visiting Portland years ago and being impressed at the city motto: "Portland: The City That Works." It was such a great contrast to other cities' grandiose mottos, instead reflecting a practicality that says the city wants to get things done. Even though it appears this is still the official city motto, I haven't seen it used for quite a long time. The new one popping up is "Portland: Your Sustainable City," a meaningless and trendy moniker that I think reflects the new commitment to process over results.


It also makes me think about how different it appears to be in the Netherlands. While I still don't have a full understanding of how planning works that country, a couple planners who spoke to the class mentioned that their primary guides are national and regional policy documents rather than public process. They mentioned that they do public outreach, but it sounded like a rather top-down process that focuses more on feedback, advice, and dealing with potential problems than actually designing a project through public process. While many contemporary American planner would call this "tokenism," I would call it by the simple name of "representative democracy." It is entirely appropriate for the people to elect their leaders in open elections, after which those leaders write policy documents, which are then used by planners to guide projects. If the people are unsatisfied with this direction, they are free to elect new leaders. This is, in fact, precisely what happened recently in the Netherlands. In the US, especially on the west coast, direct democracy has emerged as a poor but obviously popular substitute for representative democracy, and the public process endemic in modern planning is a manifestation of this.


Another key section of this chapter deals with Sam Adams rise from City Commissioner to Mayor and his commitment to making Portland even more of a cycling city. While Adams was really just continuing a long trend, it is notable that this more recent era marks a focus on bike boulevards rather than the previous focus on bike lanes. Without a doubt the bike boulevards have been a massive success that has also been very cost-effective, but again Mapes seems to accept without much question that these bike boulevards will be enough to reach the city's goals. The fact is, they are wonderful for getting through inner Portland's grid-based neighborhoods on quiet streets, but they are useless for accessing destinations (which are pretty much all on major arterials) or accessing the bridges across the Willamette. 


As Peter Furth points out in his recent report on Bike Level of Traffic Stress, it is the most stressful link in a  network that will determine if someone rides a bike to work or other destinations. If someone with a low stress tolerance has a comfortable bike boulevard like SE Salmon St most of the way to work downtown, but then gets spit onto a tiny bike lane on SE 7th Ave with heavy cross traffic, is that person going to keep riding to work? This is a case where a cycle track on a major road would make all the difference. 


We also have the problem that bike boulevards are rarely the most direct route. Furth's research has found that cyclists, like all travelers, have a pretty low willingness to go very far out of their way. Diagonal roads like Sandy and Foster currently have no bike facilities, so we have a system in which cars get a direct route and bikes have to go the long way around. This is the opposite of the Dutch system, of course. The point is that while bike boulevards are a wonderful addition to Portland's bike network, at some point the city needs to move beyond the low-hanging fruit in favor of substantial separated facilities on major roads where people really want to go.

Pedaling Revolution, Chapter 1

As part of my class on Sustainable Transportation in the Netherlands, I was assigned to read Pedaling Revolution, a book about cycling written by Jeff Mapes, a Portland native and reporter for the Oregonian newspaper. Mapes focuses on the way cycling culture has grown over the past several decades and how public policy and planning is starting to catch up with the need for more and better bicycle infrastructure and safety measures.

Overall, unfortunately, the book feels a bit weightless, as if it started as a long magazine article but was puffed up to achieve book length. Mapes displays a distressing surfeit of credulity, uncritically accepting the idea that cities like Portland and New York are doing all the right things when it comes to cycling policy. Some of the chapters come close to hagiography, both for cities and the individuals involved. In general he takes a typically journalistic approach to the material, relying a great deal (too much, I would say) on interviews and profiles of the people involved rather than digging very much into the nuts of and bolts of what cities need to do if they want to dramatically increase cycling rates.

Chapter 1, in particular, is a long and tiresome rundown of the major figures in the cycling movement since the 1970's, when a temporary cycling boom gave birth to the idea that cycling could someday become a mainstream form of transportation. Mapes commits the common historical fallacy of focusing on individuals rather than the broader forces that influence people. It is the same approach to history that tells the story of America by telling the story of one President after another.

Despite this deeply flawed approach, there is one aspect of chapter 1 that is worth focusing on, as it represents a fundamental conflict within the bike movement in the US that still affects public policy to this day. Mapes spends a substantial chunk of the chapter profiling John Forester, the foremost proponent of what has come to be known as "vehicular cycling." The vehicular cycling movement, active since the 1970's, opposes the use of separated bicycle facilities in favor of treating bicycles as just another vehicle on the road along with cars, trucks, and motorcycles. The theory is that separated facilities like bike lanes or cycle tracks are inherently unsafe, since they create major conflicts at intersections that would be avoided if bikes and cars shared the same lane.

While my instinct was to dismiss this idea out of hand, I soon recalled the case of Kathryn Rickson, a young woman who was killed by a right-turning truck in downtown Portland even though she was riding in a bike lane and had the right-of-way. In that case, it is true that had there not been a bike lane, she would have been behind the truck and the collision may have been avoided altogether. Clearly there are cases like this that vehicular cyclists can point to in which the added confidence provided by bike lanes may be illusory and contribute to conflicts. John Forester and others long ago pointed out these problems and successfully convinced many state and local transportation departments to adopt their approach in the name of safety. Even today the AASHTO guide recommends against the use of cycle-tracks on safety grounds.

The counter-argument, advanced by other bike advocates like Bill Wilkinson and Andy Clarke, is that well-designed, separated bikeways can be more safe than on-street riding and are a necessary prerequisite to turning cycling into a mainstream form of transportation. Vehicular cycling is a more elitist approach, in this view, because it will only ever appeal to what are now known as the "strong and fearless" type of cyclist who is willing to drive in high-speed and hostile car traffic. If we care about getting all kinds of people to regularly ride bikes, even the elderly and children, it is unreasonable to think we can achieve that with vehicular cycling alone. The bike movement in the US over the past decade has decisively moved in this direction, and cities have begun to install bike lanes and even a few cycle tracks, along with other improvements like bike signals and bike boxes.

And yet, cases of right-hook collisions and other problems continue to crop up even in the presence of what we would consider high-quality facilities. So are vehicular cyclists correct? One response is that a small decline in safety may be outweighed by the total increase in the number of people cycling. There is also the idea of safety in numbers brought about by increased numbers of cyclists. These arguments, while they have merit, provide little comfort given that collisions still occur fairly frequently in supposedly bike-friendly Portland.

While Mapes doesn't discuss the Netherlands until a later chapter, I will go ahead and jump ahead to say that the answer to this dilemma is found in the Dutch approach to cycling. Decades ago the Netherlands made a clear policy decision based on the use of separate bike facilities on major roads and completely rejected any notion of vehicular cycling. While low-traffic local roads do feature a shared-space concept with bikes and cars sharing the road, cars are expected to match bike (or even pedestrian) speeds, not the other way around. On all major roads, it is simply expected that bikes will have either a bike lane or more commonly a cycle-track. Even motorways typically have a nearby parallel bike route.

By all accounts, the Dutch approach has been a resounding success both in terms of promoting a high bicycle mode share and in improving safety. The Dutch approach to a problem like the above right-hook scenario would be to recognize that route as a priority bike route with potential conflicts and make the necessary investments to improve safety. Most likely this would take the form of removing the bike lane  leading up the Hawthorne Bridge and replacing it with a fully-separated cycle-track with separate bike signals at intersections. This investment, combined with prohibitions on right-turns on red, would give bikes a safe way to access the bridge with much less fear of turning cars. The tradeoff would be that the city would need to accept somewhat lower speeds and more delay for cars.

A Visit to the First Woonerf

One stop on our bicycle tour of Delft was a small, innocuous residential street that at first glance seemed just like hundreds of others we had already ridden through on that day and previous tours elsewhere. This impression turned out to be correct, but only because this street was the first example of a model replicated all over the country in later years: the "woonerf."

The basic idea of a woonerf is to have a street where cars, bikes, and pedestrians all share the same space in a safe way. Traffic calming techniques, signs, and the elimination of mode separation are all used to get cars to travel no more than walking speed on these residential roads. This not only allows all users to safely use the road for travel, but also allows children to play on the street without fear of harm, an important feature in row-house neighborhoods that generally lack dedicated yard space.

This "first woonerf" (apparently there is some debate whether this really is the first one) has some key features that are used to calm traffic through the neighborhood.  The first is the use of special paving materials and raised areas. While the main road space is paved using the standard brick pattern found all over Delft, the intersection is raised up to sidewalk level and is paved in a slightly different pattern and color of brick. Speed humps are also used at regular intervals and are visually distinct in the same way. This treatment sends a visual and physical message to drivers that they are entering a pedestrian zone and must be cautious. A similar treatment is often used in the Netherlands where local roads intersect with major arterials--the sidewalk continues at grade through the intersection, which cars are forced to go up and over in order to access the road. This tells drivers that they are guests in that space and in my observations they did in fact drive very carefully in these situations.

Another interesting treatment found in this woonerf is known as a "chicane." This refers to any measure that forces traffic to move laterally rather than going straight. In this case, large stone bollards mark the transition point and parking is moved from one side of the street to the other. Drivers naturally slow down whenever they do not have a clear straightaway to drive down, especially in such a tight roadway. I suspect that chicanes play a much stronger traffic calming function then speed humps for this reason. In Portland, it is common to see cars driving very fast over the speed humps on our neighborhood greenways. The suspension on most cars can deal just fine with the wide, shallow speed humps used on these roads, and many drivers decide they can deal with the discomfort of going over them at high speed. With a chicane, by contrast, it is unlikely most drivers would be willing to take the risk of switching from one side of the road to the other at high speed.

I was surprised to find that this first woonerf still has a separate (albeit tiny) sidewalk, as my prior understanding of a woonerf was that it eliminated separate facilities for different modes. In later tours, in fact, we did encounter some newer woonerfs in which curbs were completely eliminated in favor of a completely shared space. As I understand it now, this is a later evolution that came out of concerns that traffic-calming and signage were not really enough to create an idea of shared space.

The idea of having calm streets that are safe enough for kids to play on has been one driver of the widespread use of cul-de-sacs in suburban neighborhoods in the US, but the lack of pedestrian and bike connectivity and the use of very wide streets often prevents them from being actively used by anyone not in a car. Many planners promote the Dutch woonerf model as an alternative, both for new suburban neighborhoods and urban infill projects, but actual implementation continues to be rare due to safety concerns. US traffic engineering has long focused on signs and signals as the keys to safety, whereas in the Netherlands they seem to focus more on roadway design. There are certainly some signs, like the one denoting shared space found on many woonerfs, but these are less important than designing the roadway to discourage fast driving through use of paving materials, speed humps, and chicanes, among many other techniques.

Fast and Reliable Light Rail in the Netherlands: How They Do It, and Lessons for Portland

One of the first things I noticed about transit after arriving in the Netherlands was how incredibly fast the trams are here compared to their counterparts in Portland. (Reminder: a tram is sort of halfway between MAX and Streetcar in terms of size and capacity, but they are all technically forms of light rail). Anyone who has spent much time riding transit in Portland usually comes to despise how slow our vaunted MAX system moves through the Downtown and Lloyd Center areas. The Portland Streetcar is even worse, moving barely faster than walking speed. It is naturally tempting to blame this slowness on the fact that we use surface-running rail rather than underground or elevated, but the Netherlands manages to have a massive amount of fast-moving surface-running rail in its major cities. So how do they manage this?

A typical tram--bigger than a streetcar, smaller than light rail

One reason for faster transit has to do with the nature of Dutch cities themselves and their hierarchical approach to traffic engineering. Most major roads in the Netherlands have widely spaced major intersections, so a tram can routinely travel for a half-mile or more without encountering any signals or much cross traffic. Most blocks, if you can call them that in cities with no grid system, are very long and are often permeable to pedestrians and cyclists but not to cars. The major roads that trams generally use are also very wide, although the right-of-way is divided between pedestrians, bikes, cars, and transit in such a way that it doesn't seem very wide from the ground. Compare all these factors to downtown Portland, which has very short blocks, narrow streets, a grid system with lots of signalized intersections, and a lot more pedestrian crossings, and you can see that moving light rail in Portland is inherently more difficult.

The Netherlands also employs a lot of transit priority treatments that speed up the trams as they travel through the cities. The major one that jumps out immediately is that trams virtually always have dedicated right-of-way either in the center of the road or along one side. A typical cross-section for a major road in Amsterdam or The Hague or Rotterdam would be sidewalk, one-way cycletrack, 1 or 2 lanes for cars in one direction, tram tracks in both directions in the middle, car lanes in the other direction, one-way cycletrack, sidewalk. Occasionally a road is divided so the trams are on one side and all car traffic is on the other side. Less common treatments I have seen include running trams on either side of a canal, running trams through pedestrian/bike-only areas, and even running them through buildings.

Trams and cars each get one exclusive lane in each direction

Several tram lines in the Hague run through this building.

Sometimes trams run through pedestrian zones, but they still go fast

In any case, the pervasive use of exclusive lanes and right-of-way removes the danger of congestion-related delay, at least in the spaces between intersections. Another benefit is that the tracks can be covered by grass if they are tram-only, adding green space to the roadway. It is also notable that I have never really seen trams running on the outside lanes, which is common practice for streetcars in the US. By using center lanes and platforms, pedestrian access is slightly worse but in exchange the trams are out of the way of right-turning traffic and connections between overlapping tram lines are much easier.

Many tram tracks are surrounded by grass instead of concrete

In Portland the use of exclusive right-of-way is much more limited. The Yellow Line on Interstate is the most similar to what I have seen in the Netherlands, using the center alignment to good effect, but once MAX hits Downtown it becomes more problematic. The exclusive right-of-way in Downtown Portland is only marked by paint, for one thing, which results in cars illegally using the lane and makes it easier for cars to stop in the middle of an intersection blocking the tracks. The lane is also shared with buses on the Transit Mall, forcing MAX to go much slower than it could in an unimpeded lane. Some tramways in the Netherlands can also be used by buses, but the schedules are coordinated so there are no conflicts. Major busways where several lines come together do not appear to ever share space with tram lines.

Portland Streetcar, of course, has almost no exclusive right-of-way and uses a couplet design with vehicles in the right-hand lane of each one-way street. This design would never be used in the Netherlands. The Streetcar gets stuck in traffic constantly and is sometimes blocked by parked cars, and the couplet design results in a smaller walkshed (remember, people need access to both directions). This design is even worse for the new Eastside Streetcar line in Portland. In that case, the two directions of streetcar will be divided by 4 lanes of fast-moving traffic in each direction and one city block. This could have been avoided by running the streetcar two-way on Grand (decoupling Grand and MLK for all traffic in the process), or by running it on the left side of both streets. In either case, it should have also been given exclusive lanes, especially since Grand and MLK have so much right-of-way to spare.

So now that trams in the Netherlands have priority between intersections, how do they get through intersections without delay? The answer is true signal priority at almost all intersections. I have seen countless instances of this: a tram is approaching an intersection at full speed, special "tram" lights start flashing and bells start ringing to warn people, all the lights turn red, and the tram barrels through without slowing down. After it gets through, the normal signal phasing starts again. Sometimes another tram arrives immediately after the last one, and amazingly the lights all turn red again to let it through. The basic message here is that traffic engineers in the Netherlands are willing to deal with the possibility of a few extra seconds of delay for cars so that a tram full of people can pass through without stopping.

This tram is able to move through the intersection without slowing down

The general practice in Portland is to try our best to time the signals downtown so that buses and light rail and streetcar can move through the lights without stopping, but this barely ever works in practice due to the inconsistencies of loading times at stops. The closest thing we have to signal priority in the Portland and the US in general is the ability of transit vehicles to keep certain lights green for a little longer than normal in order to get through an intersection. This only helps in certain situations, and is no help at all when the light is already red or when a vehicle has to make a stop right before the intersection. It is common for a MAX train to stop and open the doors for loading during a green light ahead, which then turns to red right when the doors close. Then the train has to sit there for a full signal, resulting in delay for potentially a couple hundred people while a much smaller number of people in cars are able to cross the intersection. Again, Portland Streetcar is even worse since it also has to stop at lots of stop signs in addition to signals. Even buses, supposedly inferior to streetcars, almost never have stop signs to deal with on their routes.

The only place in the Netherlands where I have seen a tram slowed down or delayed was in Rotterdam, which generally had much worse car traffic than anywhere else I have visited. In that case, the trams were given full signal priority but traffic was so bad that cars had queued up into the intersection, blocking the tracks. This can happen anywhere, of course, but I suspect this problem may be worse in the Netherlands because they use near-side traffic signals. The lack of signals on the far side of intersection means that drivers close the intersection may not be able to see that they have a red light and are more likely to end up stuck on the tracks.

Portland's built form and street network, with its small blocks and one-way couplets, creates many challenges to running efficient surface-running light-rail that are not as much of an issue in the Netherlands. However, it is clear that Portland could do a great deal to improve its surface rail system by employing the other techniques used here. Exclusive lanes, ideally two-way in a center-road configuration, along with much more advanced signal priority systems, could do wonders for the Portland system and lead to increases in ridership as speed and reliability improves. All it takes is a recognition on the part of our political leaders and traffic engineers that transit (along with bikes and pedestrians) should be given clear priority over automobiles as we move people through the city.

An Overview of Public Transit Service in the Netherlands

So far, the content of our program in the Netherlands has focused more on bicycle infrastructure and land use planning, but we have covered some aspects of public transit during lectures and we have seen a lot of public transit service in action during our bike tours.  It’s incredible to see such a wide variety of transit services in operation and gratifying to see such huge numbers of people using transit to get around.

Our homebase of Delft is part of the Hague region that includes Den Haag (The Hague) and its surrounding suburbs and towns. We are also very close to the Rotterdam region. From what I can tell, both The Hague and Rotterdam have their own internal transit systems (bus, tram, and metro), most of the smaller towns run their own bus networks, and there is also a regional light-rail system called Randstad Rail. As if that wasn’t enough, there is also a very extensive and frequent train network connecting most cities in the Netherlands. Locally, there is a train line connecting The Hague and Rotterdam via Delft with departures several times an hour.

The Hague’s transit system is operated by a company called HTM and consists of 25 lines. Most of these are tram lines, which are comparable to modern American streetcars but usually use longer vehicles and only rarely run in mixed traffic.

A typical tram in The Hague region

Multiple tram lines converge at Den Haag HS train station

HTM does run a few bus lines as well. I suspect they run buses in areas with lower demand (hence less need for the higher capacity of a tram) or where right-of-way is constrained. One thing I find interesting and gratifying is that the HTM transit guide gives every line a number and does not separate out bus from tram service. They are only differentiated on the maps and in the guide by a small bus or tram symbol. This is a subtle way of saying to people that buses and trams are part of the same network and that mode should not determine whether someone uses that network. This contrasts strongly with Portland, where MAX is strongly differentiated from the bus system even though many bus lines are just as frequent and useful as light rail.

 HTM also has two relatively new light-rail lines (similar to MAX in Portland) that connect The Hague and Zoetermeer and operate under the RandstadRail brand. Zoetermeer is one of the many so-called "new towns" that are completely separate communities built with relatively high densities, and planners made sure to include light rail to The Hague in their plan for the town. This is a great example of how transportation and land use planning are more coordinated here. 

Many local transit systems supplement the HTM service. Rotterdam has its own system with bus, tram, and metro (heavy rail) lines. Most of these serve the Rotterdam area, but the E metro line runs all the way to The Hague. We visited a very interesting station in Nootdorp which uses a dual-level platform to accommodate both low-floor light rail and high-floor heavy rail lines that overlap. This is a creative solution that probably saved a lot of money in the construction of this station, although it may limit capacity as ridership on the system grows and frequencies increase.

RandstadRail light rail vehicle

Note the upper and lower level platforms

Each little town or collection of towns have their own local bus systems to supplement the main HTM tram and bus network. Most of these local buses are run by a company called Veolia Transport. I asked a planner here about the local buses in Delft, and he surprisingly said that only young and elderly and poor people actually ride the bus, a very similar sentiment to what we find in America. However, in this case the reality is quite different. The tram and train network is so good here, and bicycling so convenient, that the local bus system really does serve more of a social service function for those few that are unable to ride bikes or afford a car who live in areas not served by tram lines.

A typical bus in Delft, about 40 feet long with 3 doors

Bus service in the Delft is privately operated by Veolia Transport

And then of course there is the incredible train system which allows people to get to just about any city in the country in a couple hours, with trains coming and going with very high frequency. Imagine using intercity trains where you don’t even have to rely on a schedule! Plenty of people drive on the motorways (freeways) between cities, but especially during peak times the train service is probably a much more attractive option. The extensive use of 4-track configurations allow for both local service (Sprinter trains) and express service (Intercity trains). There is also a high-speed service called Fyra between major cities.

Sprinter trains provide local service, stopping at most stations

Intercity trains provide express service, only stopping at major stations

First Day of Class

On Monday we had our first day of class, which mainly focused on introducing us to the Netherlands and the class. Classes are held in one of the engineering buildings on the Technical University (TU) Delft campus south of the Old Delft area where our hostel is located. The campus is very large for only having 15,000 students, and is filled with huge and architecturally magnificent buildings. The library, in particular, is a pretty amazing structure, with a sloping green roof accessible from the ground and attractive glass facades on the other 3 sides.

First we got an introduction to the Netherlands from Piet Opstal and Paul Wiggenof TU Delft. After some basic information about the country, he spent most of the time talking about the canal system in the Netherlands and the function it serves. The basic idea is that much of the Netherlands is below sea level, so to create arable and buildable land, they build several levels of dikes and canals. The canals at the lowest level collect the rainwater, which is then pumped up the next level of canals. This used to be done with the famous Dutch windmills, but is now done with pumping stations. Water is transferred from level to level until it gets to the major canals that are much wider and eventually connect to actual rivers like the Amstel or the Rotter. 

PSU and Northeastern students in class

The whole system is a massive feat of engineering accomplished over many centuries, and the result is a landscape that has been extremely altered by humans and yet is very attractive. The canals, while entirely artificial, ensure that everywhere you go there are attractive waterways. The major canals often have paths alongside them through the countryside, and the smaller canals go right into the middle of cities, creating the famous canal streets so associated with the Netherlands. Another great thing about canals are all the drawbridges that cross them. After living in Seattle and Portland for the last 5 years, I have a certain fondness for drawbridges in all their many varieties.

The main canal around Delft

After getting lunch at PSOR, a student pub in the engineering building (apparently every department has its own pub!), we returned to the classroom to get a lesson on surviving in the Netherlands from Peter Knoppers. He gave us lots of good information on basic life in the Netherlands and how to survive as a visitor. I think we were all very interested to learn that there really is a difference between Holland and the Netherlands! Holland is only one part of the country along the coast, roughly from Den Haag (The Hague) to Amsterdam. Peter was also kind enough to distribute Stroopwafels to the whole class! I've been a fan of the Stroopwafel (a delicious caramel-syrup cookie that goes great with coffee) and am very excited to find they are very inexpensive here compared to the ones I have found in the US.

Stroopwafel!

Peter Furth of Northeastern University in Boston also gave a short talk about the course itself. The three main themes he said we will explore are Cycling, Public Transportation, and Urban Planning. Another theme we will touch on to a lesser extent is the idea of pricing (i.e. making driving more expensive). Pricing can take the form of directly making driving expensive through high gas taxes and registration fees, but it also takes the form of making driving less convenient. They do this to an extent by making most local roads fairly difficult to use for through traffic. On the other hand, they have some of the most gigantic freeways I've ever seen (albeit more attractively designed). In any case, most of our tours will be on bike and some on public transit as we explore how the Dutch have prioritized those modes of transport while also planning their land uses to take advantage of those modes. I'm really looking forward to the next couple weeks as we get out there and see it for ourselves!

Initial Impressions of the Netherlands: Transportation in Amsterdam

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.