Utrecht

After our brief stop in Nijmegen, it was time to head to our last city of the trip, Utrecht. It was a quick train ride over. Once we were there, we met with Ronald Tamse, who would be our ‘local guide’ (/professional) that would be joining us for the week. For those unaware, Ronald is a traffic engineer for the city of Utrecht. He is actually a familiar face to me, as he came to Eugene during the spring to visit our professor (who he’s friends with) and in the process, also gave a lecture to my class at the time. 

It was very exciting to finally be in his city. From the few videos of Utrecht I had seen before the class started, it seemed like a great place to go. Unlike the previous cities, our Utrecht hostel is right in the center of the action for the city. I had many walks through the busy car-free streets surrounding the hostel. 

Canals of Utrecht, nearby our hostel

Before riding around on our bikes I rode around on their public transit system for a bit. I was very impressed with how their system works. Not only do all of their buses accept contactless payments, but they also have many bus lanes and priority signals. The first bus I rode 20 minutes over to Utrecht University. Not once during that entire ride were we on public streets, nor did we have to wait for a traffic light! It was crazy! Bus systems set up like that are really hard to come by.

The next day we had a morning ‘lecture’ from Ronald at the municipal building. He gave a great introduction to everything there is to know about bicycle transportation in Utrecht.  We also got to see the cute architectural models that are posted at the municipal office. A couple things I learned from this include:

• The only big shops allowed in the suburbs are for furniture and cars (such as Ikea). On purpose, they can’t have a large grocery store on the outside of the city.
• By law, there needs to be a shed for every household. This is conveniently the size for a bike
• Most bike-share companies move away within a year because of low usage. (This answered a question I had asked in one of my previous posts). Many people just have their personal bikes. Natives can also use the 'OV-Fiets' bike rental system from any train station.

All these little details are so cool to learn!

City of Utrecht Architecture Models

After our lecture with Ronald, a group of the class went to the Spoorwagen Museum, which is the national Dutch train museum! There was so much at the museum, we honestly didn’t have time for everything. My favorite part about going to these museums is being able to walk through the historic trains of the past. 

The following day, we had a full ‘out and about’ day with Ronald. After having some snacks at his house (thanks to his wife) we were guided by Ruud (another transportation professional from the area) and Bradley (a local transit planner) to the suburb of Houten. Houten is a small, ‘sleepy’ town (as we would say in the States). Since their train station is within walking distance of most residential areas, they have very limited public transit options. Speaking of their train station, just like Utrecht's, it has a bike parking garage right beneath the platform! Very neat and convenient. 

One of my favorite things from this ride was seeing all of the 'moped bumps' (btw, not an official term, but they are not the same as a speed bump). In most cities in the Netherlands, mopeds are allowed on the bike lane, but they can get kind of annoying since they go twice the speed as bikes. To help slow mopeds down, these bumps are periodically placed throughout bike lanes.

Moped Speed Bump

After a little break, we biked back through the countryside (on an advisory bike lane) to Ronald’s house for dinner. As I have stated before, it's quite nice to know that one can bike endlessly on completely safe bike infrastructure. Most of the roads near farmlands in America are not bike friendly...

Later that weekend, Ronald also took some of us on an ‘optional’ ride to the school where there is a bike ramp on the roof! It was one of the things that was talked about in the videos of Utrecht that I had seen before, and even cooler to see in person. 

Our last ride with Ronald started with checking out the rainbow bike path at Utrecht University, before using the number system to get to Zeist. For those who are unaware, the number system allows folks to navigate from one place to another by simply memorizing a series of numbers. It seems like a cool system, but with all the modern technology offered by smartphones, I am curious how many locals actually use it.

Map with node locations/routes

We then continued following markers, biking out to a pyramid in Austerlitz. Luckily we had gotten there just in time because moments after we arrived a severe rainstorm came in. I'm not sure if it is just during the summer, but it seems like when it rains in the Netherlands it comes down HARD. We would have gotten seriously soaked if we hadn't gotten cover by then. (Back home, most of the time it will rain for a long time, but only have light drizzles). On our long ride back, we stopped at the pancake house for dinner. 

Our last few days in Utrecht were spent finalizing our final presentations, so we only got to do little exploring then. With that being said, on our final day in Utrecht our class went on a canal boat ride around the city. While it was great to not only see the city from a different angle, we also got to see a river which at one point was converted into a freeway, then converted back to a canal! Funnily enough, I also learned on that ride that there is a number system for waterways, just like there is bikeways!

All in all, we were in Utrecht for a week. I really enjoyed what the city and its suburbs had to offer. Not only is the area extremely multimodal, it feels much less chaotic than the busy Amsterdam, but not as quiet as Nijmegen. Words do not express the freedom one has to navigate a human-scale designed city like Utrecht. It was a perfect city to end the class in.

**Sidenote: I will likely make one more post summarizing the final moments and key points of the trip as a whole in the coming days. At the time of writing/publishing our class portion has ended, but I just now have the time to get these posts up!