01.3 - Cycling and Urban Planning - DCC-UMX

Urban Planning is a key component of designing a city to accomodate cycling.

The picture shows a frame of a 5 min time-lapse of the center of the city of Groningen in the Netherlands. In the 5 min, the intersection was passed by 157 bicycles. What's impressive is that there is no cycling infrastructure in this area.

Sometimes the best bike lane is no bike lane at all.

The city didn't really build many bike lanes. It just made it impossible to cross the city center by car forcing cars on ring roads outside the city. The center was of course kept open to bycicle, pedestrian and Public Transportation.

Ghent also followed a similar approach despite not having proper ring roads.

In Rotterdam, the city looked at its structure and turned a lot of space from car space to bike space. It also build particularly large bike tracks, much larger than other dutch cities.