People-Centered Planning With Dayna Lazarus

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,...

My favorite Mark Wagenburr video on his channel Markenlei is the video titled Potterstraat, Utrecht (Netherlands) . In it, he describes how the historic city of Utrecht, Netherlands actually went down a similar path that the United States went down in the 40s and 50s. They, too, demolished their historic buildings to make way for a new transportation era dominated by cars. They, too, created grand city plans to endlessly widen streets to make way for the automobile. In fact, the buildings they so carelessly flattened were centuries old rather than decades old like the ones in America. This fact makes me feel a little less embarrassed about our country's car-centric development path. However, the 1960s and '70s generation of Hollanders chose a drastically different path than ours did. In Utrecht, traffic continued to grow no matter how much they widened their streets. Life in the city center was simply awful, and this created a widespread a change of mind. So in 1965, ...

Effective Speed or Social Speed is a more descriptive way to express how long it takes a person to travel from A to B using different modes. While regular speed is a simple distance divided by time calculation, effective speed is the total distance traveled divided by the total time devoted to the mode of transport, including time waiting in traffic, time waiting for your mode to arrive, time filling up the gas tank, and more. When I am deciding which mode to use to travel to my destination, I typically use Google Maps to see how long it will take me using various modes, like walking, driving, biking, and taking the bus. Because our infrastructure in Tampa was built and designed around the automobile, it is twice as fast to drive as it is to bike from my old house in Old Seminole Heights to where I worked at USF, and three times faster to bike than to walk. When I am driving, I am going an average 25mph, biking I am going about 10mph, and walking I am going about 3mph. That...

When you were a kid, where did you live? Maybe you lived in an apartment in a city, a cottage in the country, or a duplex in mid-town. Me? I lived in a single-family home in the suburbs of unincorporated county land in Tampa Bay, Florida. At first it was okay. My neighbors were two little girls around my age when I was very young. We played every day until they moved away when I was 14, at which point I was very, very alone. This is my actual childhood home. So many circles were biked around that driveway. All through middle and high school - seven of my most formative years - I was bused nearly an hour away to go to school. The closest city bus stop was four miles from my house, and my parents hated driving me more than ten minutes away to play with friends, so I had extremely limited friendship options. We lived in a neighborhood with only about ten other homes on a block the size of one-square-mile. The memory of forcing myself up to each neighbor's door, knocking and as...