People-Centered Planning With Dayna Lazarus

“Stop killing our children!” This phrase halted the Netherlands’ steady slide into a car-oriented system when automobiles were at their peak popularity. Outrage over loss of life brought an entire nation of people together to demand change. Regular people marched in the streets and lobbied their representatives and worked to elect politicians from parties that would listen to them. To the Dutch, the death of even one child was too many. In the 1970s, the Dutch protested the skyrocketing popularity of cars. They rallied around one simple concept: Kindermoord, meaning child death. And they were successful. This is why the Dutch build their cities around bicycles. Meanwhile, in the U.S., we drive past overturned vehicles that must’ve flipped five or six times before crashing to a halt, pickup trucks billowing firey smoke, and motorcycles shattered into a million pieces on a daily basis without batting an eye at the carnage. To us, the death or maiming of our neighbor is only a...

What if I told you that you could guarantee zero traffic deaths in your city? Imagine having the creative freedom to build a city from scratch. You'd have to consider how much green space to include, where the city center would go, and what modes of transportation to support. If you could prevent thousands of traffic deaths, would you orient all car traffic to a single ring around the outside of town like the City of Houten did? Houten is medium-sized, at 58.99 km² (36.65 miles²) with a population of about 50,000 people. Believe it or not, since its conception over 50 years ago, there has not been a single traffic death in Houten. That's zero traffic deaths, total. Houten was built in the 1960s from the ground-up, an initiative of the national government that was dealing with a massive population boom like most Western cities during this period of post-WWII prosperity. The Netherlands government essentially said, "Okay, we're going to have ten million more peopl...

I have been working to push USF administration to embrace a bikable campus master plan for the past year with little success. Our final project for this class allowed me to think a little deeper about how I would redesign my least favorite/most frequented corridor on campus - the walk/bike sidewalk between BullRun Drive and Leroy Collins Blvd. See my group's final PowerPoint presentation here . During my first year as a Master of Urban and Regional Planning student, I lived in the Sunridge Palms Apartments on 50th Street, directly across from USF Elm Drive. I chose to commute to class by bike since I was less than a 0.5 miles from my furthest building, and I didn't even own a parking permit because I needed to save money as a broke grad student. The route I took everyday to class along USF Elm Drive to USF Apple Drive was the route I worked on for this project. It's the primary route that the thousands of students who live in housing on 50th Street take to access ...

I really enjoyed our second experiment with the TU Delft PhD students because I think it could be extremely useful to how we prioritize the development of bicycle infrastructure in my hometown. We created a rubric for grading the “stress level” of bicycle infrastructure, then we rode our bikes around town and "graded" different routes based on that rubric. This data can be used to create a bicycle stress map like the one pictured below. Some places, like Madison, Wisconsin, have created phone apps similar to Waze and Google Maps that allow people to choose a bike route based on the stress level of that route. Pictured is a stress map of Madison, Wisconsin.  We first split into groups. Each group generated a list of physical attributes of a street or route that might make a bike ride comfortable or stressful. For example, the type of bike lanes (if any) available, the width of the facility, the smoothness or bumpiness of the road, nearby greenery, traffic volume...

Today we linked up with doctoral students working at TU Delft under a grant called Allegro . The purpose of the Allegro grant is to study bicyclist and pedestrian behavior. Surprisingly, this subject is terribly understudied. The purpose of the grant is to collect data and test theories on how bicyclists and pedestrians behave under different conditions for micro (individual behavior) and macro (group behavior) applications. Here's our class on our bikes! You can see markings on the ground where we had to place our front tire to create different bunching formations. This might be a low- or medium-density formation because folks haven't pulled up to fill in empty space. In the Netherlands, all doctoral students are guaranteed full funding for the entire three years of their doctoral work, which is very different than in the U.S. where students generally must earn their own funding year after year and it's rarely guaranteed. The doctoral students we worked with were su...

Today I learned a few interesting things about disability and race equity in the Netherlands. Racism definitely exists here. Can't say I'm the least bit surprised, considering most of the people I have seen here have been white; well over 75%. I'm sure if I dug into the history and current political climate here, I'd find plenty of context. I also learned a bit about building public transportation with people in wheelchairs and mobility limitations in mind. Racism in the Netherlands Man who has lived in the Netherlands since he was four years old:  "If a person from say, Morocco applies for the same job as say, someone who looks like you or as a Dutch person, that company will definitely hire the Dutch person over the immigrant any day." Me:  "Do you not have a national law similar to the Civil Rights Act here which makes discrimination like that illegal?" Him:  "We do, but it is impossible to enforce. Nobody enforces it. They w...

Within minutes of arriving in Delft and stepping foot into the sunlight, I was passed by a person in a motorchair zooming along cheerfully smack-dab in the middle of the bike lane to my left. It reminded me of how back home, people in wheelchairs often have no choice but to roll cautiously alongside speeding vehicular traffic in dangerous 3-foot bike lanes that are separated from cars by nothing more than a thin white line. I regularly see people in wheelchairs in the bike lane along 56th Street between Fletcher and Fowler in Tampa, for example, where traffic often goes over 50mph. But this was very different. These wheelchairs had motors and they went fast - nearly as fast as bicyclists. And they were on separated bike lanes and bicycle tracks that were far from car lanes. I found that I didn't fear for the lives of these people. The man seen here cruises down the center of the bike lane in his motorchair. The more I observed and thought about it, the more it began to mak...

From above, the Netherlands is checkered with neat multicolored squares. The land itself is incredibly structured and aesthetically pleasing. Much of what I saw below was rural, with large structures concentrated in cities. This was my very first impression, but in fact, I would describe my overall experiences thus far with the infrastructure and way of life of these folks the same way: highly structured, and absolutely beautiful. This photo is a placeholder - I want to take a pic from the plane on my flight out. But yeah, that's about what it looks like. Hours after landing, I walked with my classmates towards TU Delft which is where we'll be staying for the next 15 days. We quipped about our initial observations - all of them positive; even envious. Staring in awe at the lovely dedicated bicycle infrastructure, one student said, "It's settled. I'm definitely moving to Europe." We had only been off the train a few minutes! I looked up at her and said,...