Welcome to Zandam the Netherlands and this place has to have one of the quirkiest implementations of transit oriented development that I have ever seen. Just look at this place. It is like a post-modern Disney land but believe me or not, low all of this is a giant train station and plenty of bike paths. So what we're going to do today is I'm going to show you around the town of Zandam the Netherlands and then we are going to give it a human mobility score for each mode of transport including walking cycling, bike share and public transit. This train station has just been finished in the year 2020 and it's almost brand new. From this train station you can get trains to Amsterdam every 10 minutes with a ride time of only 12 minutes and to the airport every 10 minutes with a ride time of just under 20 minutes. So there's lots of options from here to get to the big city. Taking a walk out from the station which was right back there you see that there is plenty of things to do behind us. That is a hotel up there with all the stacked houses and you'll see a movie theater place to get all the things to eat and there's even a downstairs level which feels a lot like one of those American malls and if you proceed further this canal takes you all the way to the Zand River which is the center point of the city. Wow what a great environment around the train station you might be thinking but you'd be fooled. There's actually a giant highway running under the entire thing. You can see now that we're down here it's just really a giant parking lot but you've got all the nice houses still going on up there and coming around to the back of the station you can see that this is not nearly as nice as the front of the station but you see that the architectural style continues all the way in the background and this is cool they built this new bicycle bridge that spans across this road for you to get to the other side. Of course the Dutch train station would not be complete without an amazing bike parking facility and here is the free one which is unsecured, unmonitored though even this one is very very nice on the inside and I imagine these ramps to be very fun to ride down. What we're going to do now is go rent a bike from this Ove Feets Parking which is the Dutch version of the bike rental and this is an automated system so we'll go through the process here. So now that I've got my public transport bike the Ove Feets let's go for a ride around Zandam. I'll show you some windmills some cool bridges and even the ferry on the way to Amsterdam. Let's go! What's cool about these blue dots is that it marks the way of the bicycle highway and you can follow these blue dots all the way to Amsterdam. Well look it's a pickup truck. What do you normally do with the highway underpass? Normally you would put a parking garage or something like that but look at what they've done here they put a grocery store under the highway underpass. Now I'm not precisely sure how wide this bike path was but I do know that I am 1 meter 76 which is about 5-10 for my American audiences and I guess that makes a bike path like 4 meters. Now I'm riding my bike a bit north of the Zandam area up to the windmills. Oh look the drawbridge is up this is always fun to watch and I love seeing this. Some beautiful windmills here and as you can see most of them are actually functional. We're only about 20 minute bike ride from Zandam and there is a train station right across the water over there which places you about a 10 minute walk from this wonderful location. It's a working town the houses are real people do live in them and I'm so amused by how they put this whole village together. Apparently they've had to bring in houses from from elsewhere the materials and such and and really made this a place of historical preservation and along with the refurbishing these really interesting homes here they've also made a good use of the public space so that's a boat dock with a nice seating at the end of it and check out that view. I hope you enjoy that tour of this quirky little town called Zandam in the Netherlands and now we're going to end off by giving it a human mobility score so on the front of transit access we're going to give it a five out of five for its ease of accessibility to the train station and how easily it takes you into the major city of Amsterdam and beyond including the airport. On the front of cycling well it's a Dutch city so I'm going to have to give it a five out of five plus we are in the middle of a bike path right here so that's more than bonus points. Walking a four out of five because while this pedestrian mall that they've done is very nice we are basically on top of two major highways and a bridge spanning a canal so you can walk one way but the other way isn't so pleasant and for that a four out of five and finally a two out of five for bike share because if you're a local resident you can get one of these nice yellow bikes but if you're from abroad or anywhere else then you are really out of luck. I hope you enjoy this tour of Zandam the Netherlands and hopefully this video has given you some ideas about how to implement human scale transportation in your city. See you next time. Guess what they make here? Chocolate. Chocolate. So this whole place just smells like chocolate everywhere but also cool houses right?