blog
June 2024
Conference / Cycling / Cycling infrastructure / Facilities / Infrastructure / Mobility / Network planning / Public Spaces / Traffic safety / Urban Mobility Design / Workshop
Walk/Bike/Places: Sharing the Dutch Approach to creating safe, inviting streets
Walk/Bike/Places takes place every two years, bringing together walking, bicycling and placemaking professionals in North America. Produced by Project for Public Spaces (PPS), the event consists of nearly 100 breakout sessions and workshops. Due to COVID-19, this year’s event will take place entirely online. The program will still feature a wide range of breakout sessions, as well as more inventive session formats.
Mobycon is excited to participate in this modified format to provide our international best practice expertise and knowledge to help North American – and global – cities create more welcoming and safe streets in their communities.
Taming the arterial. How to build safe, low speed, high volume streets
Thursday, 6 August; 10:00-11:30am
Part of a larger session titled, How to Make a Safe Street, Lennart’s sessions will discuss the tools planning and engineering professionals are looking for to create safer environments for people walking and cycling. Separated bicycle ways, comfortable footpaths and safe crossing points and intersections form part of the standard toolbox in most jurisdictions across North America. Many of these tools require a reallocation of street width from the motor vehicle to vulnerable road users. While this is a necessary part of creating mobility options and addressing the challenges of equity, climate change and vision zero, it is often met with resistance from within or outside the organization.
In this presentation, the concept of LARGAS in The Netherlands (an acronym that means as much as “driving slower goes faster”) will be presented, the necessary, and optional design elements will be explained and the North American design concept used in Canmore, Alberta, Canada presented. It will provide inspiration and guidance to traffic engineers, planners and city officials to expand the toolbox and re-imagine the possibilities of road diets. This design concepts helps to humanize arterial roads without needlessly compromising on traffic capacity.
Transportation Systems to Alleyways – A crash course in streets as places
Mary Elbech (Mobycon) and Nidhi Gulati (PPS)
Saturday, 8 August; 12:00-3:00pm
A hands-on training packed with actionable strategies to transform your streets into places and to reclaim their rightful place as shared front yards in the public realm. The curriculum is jointly created by the Streets and Transportation team at Project for Public Spaces, and the renowned Dutch consulting firm – Mobycon. This interactive session aims to build a stronger understanding of transportation and its role in creating (or disrupting) community. We will begin with an introduction to multi-modal systems at the city/town level that prioritizes people on foot, bicycles, and transit led by Mobycon. The second half of the training will dive into the place value of our transportation infrastructure and tactics to transform streets into places in their own right, an approach championed by Project for Public Spaces. Both segments of the workshop will have breakout sessions with exercises designed to apply the tools shared.