I'm here at this abnormally nice office park near Schiphol Airport and my first trip to the Netherlands is sadly about to end. But before I go, I want to share three lessons that I and urban planning student learned from this incredible country while visiting. Lesson 1. Don't treat bike routes like highways. When I biked the heavily traveled cycling route from Amsterdam to Harlem, I expected it to be off-street bike trail the entire way. After all, this country could make it happen. But instead, it features six different types of bike infrastructure, some of which is actually shared with cars. But the important part is that safety is continuous, with the route adapting to the environments it travels through. Compare that to how Radner Township PA is handling their portion of the circuit, a partially completed network of bike trails connecting the Philly region. Their job is to connect the existing Radner Trail to the Norristown High Speed Line, where it will follow the tracks to Southwest Philly. This one mile gap should be easy, just connect it to this existing bike path, extend it a thousand feet under the highway, build some crossings in Voila. But instead, Radner is planning to create a duplicate trail into the woods, where it will dead end until they somehow find the money to build two massive bridges over this highway interchange. My question is why are many opportunities that we have to do with the decision-making trail? Why would we be duplicating the trail just because it's not our money? It's not a duplicative trail, Rich. It's an extension of the Radner Trail, which the goal is to hook up with a larger trail system eventually. Brute Force bike trails are not the Dutch way. If we want a massive continuous safe cycling network, we have to use our limited funds on cheap, easy, and practical connections first, because there's no Robert Moses for bikes. Lesson 2, Know What Not To Build. When people talk about bike protection, they often describe it as an accessory for after a city finishes attending to the needs of cars. This idea, besides being just plain evil, contains an unspoken assumption that streets are dangerous to cyclists by default. Quite the opposite. The world's roads and streets used to be pretty safe for cycling, because cars were not able to travel at high speeds on historic cart paths. It's only after millions of dollars are spent widening, straightening, flattening, shouldering, and paving a path that sidewalks and bike lanes are required to protect people from the manufactured problem of high speed traffic. The genius of the Netherlands is that high speed road upgrades are limited only to corridors where they can also afford a parallel bike path, and everything else is kept windy, narrow, and safe. Look at this road near Stainvike. It's not unlike an American suburb, long driveways, big yards, but there's one huge difference. This road is designed to be shared and navigated slowly. Red advisory bike lanes guide cars toward the center, keeping them alert to other road users, and it's a snug 5.5 meters wide, keeping traffic slow. It's so effective this high speed police chase just looks like normal driving in America, and this local bus can still navigate the road with ease. Now, let's see what happens when you try this common design on a 7 meter street in California. These lines popped up overnight. Really just confused. Not knowing where to turn. This tragedy waiting to happen. Are you trash our communities with this crap? You're going to have bright lights hanging towards you that's going to confuse the drivers. We want to offer sincerest apologies on how this project was implemented without any outreach or education with the community. Plain is simple, we messed up. Workers removing those confusing street signs this morning, which was a welcome sight to a lot of the residents who are long, gold coasts drive. Look, when 99% of your road experience is spent cost-playing as a 6 foot wide metal box, it's easy to get the bone-headed idea that a road with a higher design speed is safer. Because it gives you more room. But scale this windshield perspective up to an entire society, and you see these high-speed designs making their way into official codes and manuals. Like this one, from the award-winning Chester County Planning Commission. So this Dutch neighborhood gets safe access for cars, transit, pedestrians, and cyclists all for the price of basically a driveway. A maintenance burden that 25 households per kilometer could financially support. But if this were built to American safety standards, the maintenance cost would outpace the tax base of the residents. And it would be too dangerous for any of these people to even go for a walk. And the technical term for this would be an improvement. This in three culture counts. Erbidus will often downplay cultural differences between countries to avoid distracting from the policies that shape transportation. But the power of culture was made undeniably clear to me. When I traveled to see the famous car-free village of Heathorn, despite having actual boat traffic jams, it's not a big place. Only one bus serves this tourist town, an hourly route stopping at 6 p.m. I've ridden a lot of buses like these, so I knew what to expect. I might be the only one riding. But instead, this bus was packed both ways with commuters, locals, and tourists from around the world. My point is that in absolute terms, this is not good transit service. It's far worse than what most middle-class Americans would ever consider riding. But people here still use it a lot because of the cultural expectation that transit is the way to travel long distances in the Netherlands. This is not a good bike lane, but it's still safer than most protected bike lanes in the US because of the cultural expectation that you respect bike infrastructure. There's even a cultural expectation that drivers look both ways before turning onto one-way streets. Since in most cases, bikes can go both ways. Multiple times I stopped my bike for a crossing car like 10 meters ahead of me, but they refused to go until I did. So does this mean America is doomed to car dependency because of cultural differences? Well, I don't think so. I think it just means we have to come up with ways of influencing culture directly, like using schools to indoctrinate the youth. Taking the subway is fun! We are... Okay, no, but seriously, many suburban school districts have been struggling to hire enough bus drivers to transport their students. But I'm not exactly sympathetic because this crisis is being worsened by suburban districts refusing to shift any kids to public transit. If you look closely, you'll see there are tons of suburban kids who could be given a student transit pass just like in cities. Same thing for field trip packages. Transit authorities can afford to offer schools rock bottom prices since these are trips that wouldn't have happened otherwise. And the value of exposing kids to transit before they turn 16 will pay off for decades to come. In the meantime, Philly is doing something similar, but with grown ups. This winter Philly businesses with 50 or more employees will have to offer pre-tax fair benefits or transit passes to their commuters. The perfect gateway drug to get people hooked on transit. Cities can also get more bikes on the street by incentivizing small deliveries to be made by cargo bike through parking policy or air quality regulations. Defeating car culture means normalizing other modes of transportation. Because if we're going to bootstrap ourselves out of car dependency, we can't just improve transit cycling and walking and hope people are rational decision makers. They're often not. Americans and Canadians have been brainwashed into seeing cars not as a tool, but as an extension of themselves. And coming here has made me feel that I've been brainwashed a little too. Who is that, a Thales? Yes, it is. I have to say Amsterdam has felt weird, almost unreal because there are so few cars. I have never been in a city so dense and vibrant where the air isn't tainted with the smell of exhaust, where the roar of traffic gives way to bird song, and your destination is never on the other side of a parking lot. It's not like anything I've ever experienced except maybe, I don't know, like a college campus, Disney World. The thing is most Americans haven't seen an urban environment free from the oppressive burden of cars. And when they do, when Americans come here, most assume that we could never become like the Netherlands, that the streets of American cities could never be clawed back in the name of humanity, like they were here decades ago. But of course, I don't believe that. Because if I did, I wouldn't be going back. Oh, also another thing, there's this whole community garden in this business park, and also mini vegetable gardens everywhere, and also cows for some reason. This place is incredible. Jason, you're totally right. And going back is going to be an adjustment.