Hey everybody it's Clare from Street Builds, so here in Delt with the Brunlands and family we're going to go riding. What are we going to see? We're going to see some bike parking, we're going to see some intersection, we're going to see some cycle tracks, we're going to see some car-free street. Delt is a cool little city, you've seen a track, you've seen Amsterdam, you've seen Growningen, now you're going to see Cups the best. And now what's so different about here about riding? I mean we bike all over the city without over putting our foot down half the time and one of the great things we're going to actually experience when it's like to ride with our son on his bike ride home from school and then we're also going to catch up with our daughter who is going to ride herself home because she's a teenager and that's a teenager too. Let's go pick him up! Awesome! This is Etienne's Dutch Public School, it's where he's been going since we moved here and it's our way of having him be fully immersed in the school program and learning Dutch. We were very fortunate to live in a city that had a lot of opportunities for kids to walk just school together but biking wasn't really something that they did independently but here since moving Etienne is now cycling to and from school on its own and we see kids doing that as young as eight or nine they're able to bike on their own and it's part of the culture here of building that freedom and independence and a lot of that is afforded because they've created such a safe space for them to cycle. I feel like if other cities had what the Netherlands have it would be a much safer place for children. We anticipated when we moved here back in February that the kids were going to have free rain of delft and it still really struck us how quickly that happened within a week or two. Etienne was cycling not just in and around delft but to some of the neighboring cities as well and the two of them will cycle there or they'll take the tram. The intersection directly behind me is delfts plain initially they were four and six lane roads and the intersection has been transformed into a roundabout that increased the capacity of those two streets each of those streets are now just one lane of cars in each direction they have a bus or a tram way down the center. The priority is given solely to people on bike and on foot so there's little sharks to telling the cars they have to stop and wait and it's pretty amazing to be able to cycle through here continuously we've done a few loops to loops ourselves making cars stop and all it means is that the safety and priority is given to the most vulnerable road users. So if a car is going through and then there's a bike or a pedestrian about to cross the road the car has to stop and wait instead of there being a traffic light feels really nice so I don't have to wait. Right now we're standing in front of Abst Faud de Brouk so the bridge is 100% car free only has people traveling on motorized scooter bike or foot and sees 20,000 trips per day so that's pretty astounding for the city of just 100,000 people. The first things we noticed walking and cycling around Delft is how few stop signs and traffic lights there are in the city and I think that's a result of so much of the traffic here being human scale and human powered when 80% of all trips in the city are made on foot or bicycle. As you can see with the intersection here people are just left to their own devices and negotiate the intersection through eye contact, through hand gestures, through subtle little cues to each other about which direction they happen to be going. Seeing where the wheels are turning where they plan on going assuming where they're going if they're looking at me like saying go or I'd say go it's all about communication. So we are on the TU Delft campus, the Technical University of Delft where there's about 20,000 students and 10,000 faculty living and working and studying here. This main stretch here is Muckovag which was built in 1969 and was initially a four-lane arterial road. They've taken what was four lanes of traffic and made it into an exclusive bus and tramway. Rest has been turned into a linear park and then there's a nice four meter wide cycle track. So this is a really interesting little intersection that they put in on the TU Delft campus. They've actually had to add a traffic light because of the number of cyclists that are traveling through this particular cycle path. The light will stay green for the cyclists all the time and for pedestrians crossing the street. If a car wants to cross the cycle track or the footpath they actually need to trigger a sensor in the street which will turn the light red for cyclists and turn the light green for cars but only for about 10 or 15 seconds so it's kind of a complete reversal of what we're used to seeing elsewhere in the world where the light will stay green for the cars and the pedestrians and cyclists have to ask permission to cross the street. And we've traveled here on our own. We noticed instantly how many teenagers ride around and I remember thinking to myself even though at the time Coralie was only 10. It wouldn't be great if she could grow up in a place where it was normal for her to bike around with her friends and so now that's what she does. We were talking about how I felt more free here that I could do anything without people staring at me. I could ride from one city to the other on my own. There's not that many cars, it's very quiet and basically the only sound you hear is ringing of bells and people talking. It's been probably about 20 or 30 year process of taking all the cars out of the city center that's taken basically one street at a time and one square at a time the city has removed cars. So now most of the city center is now car free, it can be accessed for freight and delivery service vehicles. And during certain hours of the day it's a pretty pleasant place to walk and cycle and we spend plenty of time in there as a family.