Very good to have all of you here today. Today, I'm going to talk about Cycle Highways. Bicycle highways are perhaps one of the upcoming innovations in bicycle infrastructure design, both here in the Netherlands and North of Europe. Basically, this paper tries to grapple with the different types of modes that we use to get around and how cycle highways should be conceptualized. Is it more like a car highway, which some of us we have experienced driving? Is it more like a pedestrian path or is it something distinct on its own? I set out to find out. The research question of this paper, how do practitioners conceptualize cycling experience in relation to the design of cycle highways? What is it about the experience of the person riding a bike that perhaps separates this mode of transport and makes it distinct from the other ways that we get around. This is one advertisement from the planning department of the rural area in Germany. They're busy on a quite national and provincial level on building out many of these bicycle highways. As you can notice here, they're very literal people. They've put a bicycle in the middle of the highway. That got me thinking, do we really want this? Is this how we're going to proceed with the building of our Infrastructure? Is this nice to cycle on? What kind of emotions does this invoke? Even if we took away all the cars, is this appropriate for the mode of transport? Is it pleasant? What causes urban planners and designers to try to make something like this? What's the point? Now, we come to the definition. What is this bicycle highway thing? Because I think it is very well defined by the way we try to conceptualize it. I think right now the definition is really on the engineering side of things. This definition you can see, it's focused on width. It's saying that you can have a four-meter profile, 1, 2, 3, 4. It's about that wide, and that is what makes it a bicycle highway. Plus, you have some metrics on what kind of separation you need and then how much flow you get through there. It's very engineering logic. Then it gives you the other alternative, which is something slightly wider. Nowhere in this diagram does it cater to this idea of experience. Does it say that it should trees? Does it say that it should create something that's pleasant to cycle through? Not yet. But maybe that's something that we should head towards. How do we think about this? What I would argue is today's technical conceptualization and how do we move towards something that could be different. The question I bump across is, are bicycle highways more in the traffic zone, or is it more in the social zone? If you consider the traffic zone as a place where people drive their cars, and the social zone as approximately the sidewalk, then where do this infrastructure called bicycle highways fit in? What kind of logic do we want to design it with? That is what I'm curious about and that is what I move the head to the methodology where I interviewed 11 practitioners from all over Europe, and I asked them basically this question. How do you conceptualize Cycle Highways? How do they fit in? Who are user groups, and what kind of experience are you designing for? This is approximately what I found. Cycle highways are built as functional connections. The name cycle highway, something to get you from home to work very quickly. This functional criteria must be met for funding opportunities, so if you build a four meter wide bicycle highway with priority crossings, for example, then you get extra money from either provincial, or federal level of government. But they do say added value in designing for experience. How do you go beyond the funding criteria to make something nice? They also have the realization that cyclists have different needs, so someone who is out cycling for children, might be very different from someone who's out on a Sunday ride for sport, for example. That the design of cycle highways, it's actually quite flexible at the moment. No one has really pinned down what this is, and we'll get back to this later. The questions, I asked, what is a cycle highway? Can you describe your ideal cycling experience? How is experience considered in design? What's the relationship to design, to topology? Then you go through a few slides here. This one most of you know, perhaps, or maybe it's this peculiar to the bike nerds. This is a hoven ring. It's actually right here in the Eindhoven, and they built this a few years back as a way to separate an intersection. Put the bicycles on top, and you can see the traffic goes below. They would name this a part of a bicycle highway. But, doing so, then separates the bicycle path from any form of street life. Scarce as it may be in this area. That's one way to go about it. This is a bus car way from Germany, and this takes us through a slightly different environment. You have the four meter wide profile, with a two meter wide sidewalk. But I think what's interesting about this, is the environment in which it goes through. This feels like a much more recreational path. The question to the planners here was, what are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to achieve slides through nature? Are you trying to achieve just building automobile highway street from A to B? Or are you trying to create some curves, and designing for the experience here? Here's another thing that's named a bicycle highway. They call a super highway in Copenhagen. As you can see, this has barely any green in it at all, and barely any separation from the main traffic. Their bicycle paths are done in normal black asphalt, which makes a very big visual difference. It's a very wide bicycle path, but you don't see the red like we do here, so it could be visually confusing, and that is their sign for the bicycle highway. Here back in the Netherlands, this is the Arnhem-Nijmegen path, and now we're getting into the area of mixed traffic, so automobiles and bikes share this space. But it's built very much in the same way. Could be room for confusion. Finally, we get to the cars track, the designers of the space have put one-way car traffic and two-way bicycle traffic. But it's not clear from which direction then that has on the experience. I think I prefer going North, but because it's in the flow of traffic. But if you're going very slowly, like if you're in a wheelchair or a scooter, then you have a lot of other bikes and cars passing you, so it might be less comfortable. I don't know. But in either way, lots of parking, lots of movements like these people backing up, and lots of loading. They've also, in their Eindhoven city traffic plan, also named this as part of one of their fast cycle routes or bicycle highways. Very interesting. We'll go through some of the things that they said. I went through 11 interviews, so I'm going to select some quotes here. Some clearly have no clue, they don't know. So the cycle highway is being pitched as a way to get funding from say, automobile-oriented thinking and the end product doesn't seem to be what matters. What matters is that we're getting people out of their cars onto a bike, so we're trying to compete basically, that brings you to the logic of competing on speed and distance and how they get people there faster. The first one has no clue. Second one, it says there should be something different than ordinary bike path, which when I interviewed this practitioners, Netherlands was kind of peculiar because all the bike paths here are already of very high-quality. So how do you differentiate something of an even higher-quality? Many practitioners expressed that Dutch bike paths all look like bicycle highways and to me that also seems to be the case. But in other places, yes, the special differentiation is there. This brings us to the question of what does high quality mean in terms of a bicycle highway? Some say it's from a functional definition, so as long as you have the four meter wide criteria and you have smooth pavement and you have priority at intersections, then you're good to go. But in practice, sometimes you have to make compromises as well and that's where some of the confusion, the typology comes in, is when is it okay to bring automobiles and when is it okay to mix with pedestrians? These are mostly left up to the street level design. What is a bicycle highway? Still not clear. Another approach is in terms of how the design process works, the process, the mentality, how cyclists are prioritized. This person thinks, well, bicycle highways should be something dedicated in the process of designing them and the process of designing them should involve them front and center and not as an afterthought. Now, this practitioner is from London where there's significantly less cycling. So my question to you again is, well, do we already do that here in the Netherlands? If so, then what makes it special in our context? Oh yeah, we just need to do something, put a little bit of paint and there they go. They're trying in London, go against that logic and make something truly dedicated. We're going to try and take those conclusions a bit further, so here. How can functionals cycle connections then be designed to attract other users? This is my question back to practitioners. What needs and experiences are unique to cyclists? So the practitioners kind of mention that they should be including these experiences in the design of cycle highways but what are they? That's an open question to be answered from the user perspective. What is the added value? How do we include now these experiences and qualitative criteria in the funding instruments? Then how can we deal with this flexible typology and is it desirable? These are the four questions that I'd narrowed in on as part of the conclusion to go forward with. At the end, we have the also added problem of a proliferation of different types of vehicles on the bike path. In more busy places like Amsterdam, you can see that this is already causing a problem. For example, they just banned the motor scooters from the bike path, but there's more to take their place. They have these large bike taxis for tourists, they're hogging up the space, there's cargo delivery bikes. So as bicycle paths get more busy, how do we accommodate those without making everyone's experience worse? This is also an open question that I going to look into and that's it. Thanks very much.
