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Showing posts with the label conference

Peak Travel and Outdated Projections

I had the pleasure of speaking at the Eco.ch conference in Basel last Friday. The theme was "Nature & Mobility - Increasing Mobility with Reduced Traffic". I gave a version of my Bicycle Urbanism by Design talk. One of the other speakers was particularly great to listen to. Adam Millard-Ball from the University of Santa Cruz spoke about Peak Traffic and the future of traffic demand. Future patterns of travel demand have enormous implications for energy supply and the environment. How far will we travel in the future, and by what modes? Has travel in the industrialized world ceased to grow – "peak travel"? Are developing countries likely to follow the high-travel, high-emissions path of the United States, or will their travel patterns look more like Europe or Japan? He highlighted how engineers and traffic modellers insist on using the same old same old techniques for predicting future travel demand patterns. Despite the fact that they are hopelessly wr...

Love Handles and Blogging the City

So, slapped up a Copenhagenize Love Handle in Amsterdam last week, when I was speaking at the brilliant Blogging the City conference. As I promised the audience. Maybe it's still there. Maybe it's not. Let us know if you see it. More on the Love Handles can be read here . The Blogging the City conference , organised by Jeroen Beekmans & Joop de Boer of The Pop-Up City , featured a great line-up of speakers. - Brilliant talk by Charlie Hilton of Urban Times . - Zef Heme l head of the urban planning department of the City of Amsterdam, and blogger at Vrijstaat Amsterdam . - Stefan Höffken from Urbanophil talked about his work and inspiration. - Wouter Boon talked about his successful Amsterdam Ad Blog . - Antonia Märzhäuser on the always brilliant and fascinating Freunde von Freunden site . - Régine Debatty highlighted the story of her inspiration for her blog we-make-money-not-art - Luc Harings from IloveNoord.nl about placemaking and civic pride. -...

Danish Police Ignorance About Cycling

Last week I attended the National Cycling Conference in Fredericia. To my surprise, I discovered that the town was in Jutland, the Danish mainland. I thought it was on the island of Funen. So I got a geography lesson, too. I was invited by the Road Directorate and the Danish Cyclists Federation to take part in a debate with sociologist Anette Jerup Jørgensen and Mogens Knudsen, police officer and Superintendent in Copenhagen's Police Traffic Unit. Journalist Adam Hannestad from the newspaper Politiken was the moderator. Anette started by discussing some her findings regarding the behavour of cycling citizens. In the blue corner, Mogens was representing the police's tradtionally staunch conservative line that cyclists should just obey every single rule. Period. I have since learned that this is perhaps more Mogens' personal line rather than the entire Danish police. In the red corner, yours truly. I was on the other side of the scales, saying that traffic laws should b...