A Lego Kid Becomes The Cycling Professor – Podcast

This Lego-maniac kid has become an authority in planning, and in particular in cycling. If you’re a podcast lover check it out.

Marco te Brömmelstroet is Associate Professor in Urban Planning at University of Amsterdam and founding academic director of the Urban Cycling Institute. His research focuses on transportation, urban cycling, and social mobility, with a particular focus on policy change and improving city planning.

TRANSCRIPT

MtB: I’ve always been fascinated with how cities evolve, as a young kid already and especially fascinated throughout my educational career in how cities evolve, regions evolve in relation to their mobility system. So, I studied urban planning and then I was very interested in how mobility played its part there.

I blame Lego for that. When I was I think seven or eight, I was already building my own cities out of Lego and playing with them in terms of my own narratives, my own fantasises but I always built Lego cities that were realistic as far as you can call it realistic. So, they were always real cities.

KR: As well as being a Dutch Lego Master, Marco te Brömmelstroet is a keen cyclist and known in certain circles as the Cycling Professor. It’s a title he wears with pride. His interest in urban planning and love of cycling led him to some interesting discoveries about how cycling can influence our behaviors while navigating transport infrastructure.

In this episode of How Researchers, we’re getting into the saddle, and travelling by bicycle, a vehicle of social, political and environmental change.

[How Researchers Changed the World introductory music]

Listen here…

https://www.howresearchers.com/episodes/episode-8/

What Are We Going to Do About It?

If you wouldn’t let your kids ride a bike or walk across town in your city, or if you, as an adult are fearful of riding your bike around your town or for a bike ride to another town, there’s something seriously wrong.  And the tragedy is that we know what it is. It’s cars. We know cars kill.  We know that streets and roads are engineered to move cars quickly, and not to enable people to move about safely. So what are we going to do about it?  Check out the podcasts.

We Need a Sea Change in How We Think About Roads and Streets

March 12, 2019

“You are grossly negligent if you show a conscious indifference to the safety of others. In other words, you’re aware that the safety of others is endangered, but you don’t do anything to act on that knowledge.”

— Charles Marohn

#8 in our Greatest Hits collection of the best Strong Towns Podcast episodes you may have missed the first time around, here’s “Gross Negligence” from June 2015. In it, Chuck Marohn describes:

  • An exercise from army basic training in which he had to crawl through a trench while an expert marksman sent bullets whizzing nearby. No parent would let their child do this. So why do we accept that this is basically the condition of being on the sidewalk of an American stroad?
  • Why we tend to associate speed with mobility and economic opportunity—and why we’re wrong.
  • The incoherence of common responses to tragedy on our streets, such as a proposal to remedy an unsafe highway through a park in Buffalo by simultaneously making it more like a city street… and more like a high-speed road.
  • What we would do if we actually wanted to make safety the number one priority on our streets.  The podcast:  http://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/greatest-hits-7-gross-negligence/
Read more…

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/12/we-need-a-sea-change-in-how-we-think-about-roads-and-streets