Something TERRIBLE happened to the streets in #LegoCity and we need to talk about it!

🧐 Why did @LEGO_Group decide to WIDEN the streets?
🚙 What does it teach us about real #autobesity?
🛣️ And how can we change it?

A thread🧵:

2. 'With Lego you can make anything' is a marketing slogan often heard. If you want to create a city however, you have to work with the standard road plate sets.

Between my cities and those of my kids, the sidewalks lost three studs and each street became SIX studs wider! WOW!

After years of #carsharing, I am considering buying an #OwnCar. But before I decide, I have a few questions to confirm that this is the right solution for me. Please help me out in this thread 🧵: 1.🎫 I heard that I have to pay extra for an #insurance for my #OwnCar. And pay to have an annual inspection done. That would make it very expensive. Is there a way that I can easily get around that?

Today #Amsterdam starts a transition experiment of 6 weeks that reclaims a car dominated street as public space.

There are already some important lessons about the importance of language. 1/🧵 The Weesperstraat has been seen as important link for car traffic to get in and out central Amsterdam for four decades.

Businesses fear for their accessibility & refer to the street as 'an artery'. Invoking the classic metaphor of cities as bodies, car traffic as blood . 2/🧵

Todays worldwide #KidicalMass illustrates that the call for more child-friendly streets does not come from a small minority.

Look at the kids and parents having a party!
Music and laughter instead of #VroomVroom

📹 of #Barcelona by @jordihoney
Over 1⃣5⃣0⃣.0⃣0⃣0⃣ joined one of 500 different #KidicalMass rides across the world.

Here are 3⃣.0⃣0⃣0⃣ in #Koeln by @KidicalmassK.

Why should children have a Right to the Street?
❤ Health?
💨 Emissions?
👫 Access to friends?
🏘 Exploration & attachment?
👥 Children’s citizenship?

Whatever the reason, people want change and will show it this weekend across Europe kidsonbike.org. Children across the world have lost their right to roam in just four generations. There are many reasons for this, but for a large part this can be traced back to how we design our streets.

NL 🇳🇱 is known as the country of bikes. And Dutch cities are often heralded as inspiring utopias. In many ways they are.

But this blinds us for a key shortcoming of the Dutch approach. For that, we need to talk about cars.

A MINI-LECTURE (based on: english.kimnet.nl/publications/p…)🧵: Dutch individuals and companies collectively own 8.7 million private cars. With 17.4 million people and 8 million households that equates to 500 cars
per 1,000 inhabitants, or an average of just over 1 car per household. [2]

VOTE now for the 2021 election of the #PowerfulMobilityMeme! Below are the top 10 candidates that were uploaded to the hashtag.

Every 🔁&💙 counts!
Vote as often as you like (before 01-01-2022) Candidate #1 for 2021's election of most #PowerfulMobilityMeme:

'Uneven attention for sustainable mobility solutions'
—via @DonaldShoup
(Used a lot around #COP21 in #Glasgow)

It is not easy to fix the historical mistake to let cars dominate public space. But #Catharijnesingel (Utrecht) shows that cities can heal from the inflicted wounds. Radical change is possible. But it takes strong leadership.

Connect the dots:
😱 Danish🇩🇰 kids cycle less far (-25%), less often (-32%) in last 10 years
🚙 Proportion of kids cycling to school dropped 30%. Car journeys doubled/tripled
🤸‍♀️ Only 26% gets enough physical exercise
⛑ Helmets became the norm

See: …oerncykleralliancen-dk.translate.goog/bornecykling-i… As a background statistic, overall road violence is on the rise: thelocal.dk/20191212/denma…

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.”
~E.F. Schumacher

A developing collection 🧵...

(pics from 'A short history of innovation' by @efesce) (2) of developing 🧵

Fiat 500 (Cinquecento)

MINI LECTURE: Urban structure and mobility behavior

[1/12]
If you have ever heard people saying: ‘cycling cannot work here! Our city is much bigger than Amsterdam!!1!’

🧵👇👇 [2/12]
The City of Amsterdam is a central part of a much larger daily urban system.

The Amsterdam Metropolitan Region (@MRAsamenwerking ) spans 2.580 km2 and houses 2.5 million people.
This includes @Schiphol, @Lelystad, @almere, @ZandvoortaanZee.

MINI LECTURE [1/16]

How do we frame systemic traffic violence: As glitches in the machine or as unacceptable human tragedies?

Based on the Open Access paper: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
(pic via @EdwardLamb) [2/16]

Traffic violence represents the largest threat to life and limb that most people in contemporary, car-based society experience on a daily basis in public space.

(statistics of @WHO)

[Mini lecture on Systemic Traffic Violence: 1/11]

If you manually operate a machine of 1300 kilograms (the average weight of a car)…

Pictures by:
@schmangee
@andyjayhawk
@hurtado_alvardo
and....@Audi themselves (H/T @StripyMoggie) [2/11]

…that offers you relative protection, but can easily be lethal for everybody around you…

Picture via @EdwardLamb

MINI LECTURE: Street appropriation [1/13]

Cars have taken over our public space. That APPROPRIATION happens in stealth. Government responses to it seem a-political and technocratic. This hides a 1-directional process that should be highly politicised.

Case: BLOKKENWEG (Ede 🇳🇱) [2/13]

The BLOKKENWEG parallels the train tracks between Utrecht (to the west) and Arnhem (to the east).

It links directly to an important railway crossing for traveling between Ede-South and Ede center. The street and tracks are separated by public allotments since the 1980s.

Adapting streets to a "six-foot-city" is certainly a question of geometry & space, but also how to govern that space, how to develop capacity to deliver #humanscale networks.
3 principles explored in our latest commentary bit.ly/3h6bkWZ
Photo: @dutch_ish Principle 1 for #humanscale streets: leverage #accessibility to meaningful destinations. Entire street networks that offer a range of mobility options need to be realized. bit.ly/3h6bkWZ

[1] Iedere schooldag vinden er in NL gemiddeld 17 verkeersongevallen plaats rondom scholen waar politie aan te pas komt.

We kunnen dat verkeersgeweld aanpakken. Maar @VeiligVerkeer hangt liever elk jaar wat spandoekjes op: "De scholen zijn weer begonnen"
nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/08… [2] We zijn gewend geraakt om systematisch verkeersgeweld te zien als onvermijdelijk gevolg van onze mobiliteit.

Dan is het logisch om mensen te leren er mee om te gaan, i.p.v. het op te lossen. Maar wat als we dat geweld op straat niet voor lief nemen?
decorrespondent.nl/11507/loopt-he…

'Who caused the accident?' is a question often used to avoid asking 'What allowed the accident to be so destructive?' (@mrendell) Unbelievable! While car-makers are flooding our streets with increasingly lethal products, we focus our policies on disciplining 'distracted pedestrians an cyclists'.

Stop the Child Murder.

My heart beats faster for that little child and her predator.

https://twitter.com/AudiOfficial/status/1289848460368257033

Shameless ad of a killing machine.
This has to stop...!

We don't address:
🚫 rape by only talking about the clothing of women.
🚫 gun violence by only talking about bulletproofing victims.

So why do we think it is OK to only address SYSTEMIC TRAFFIC VIOLENCE through statistics of those who are killed?

Source: hetongeluk.nl/statistieken/a… [2] Systemic traffic violence represents the largest threat to life and limb that most people in contemporary society inflict on each other on a daily basis.

Media reports it as 'a glitch in the oiled machine'.

Why is that so problematic?
Read: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

COVID-19 revealed that it is possible to reclaim our streets as meaningful public places from vehicular traffic.

Join our FREE online course covering opportunities and threats for transformative change.

First group starts Juli 26th: coursera.org/learn/reclaimi… In WEEK 1, you will:
👨‍🎓 understand how change happens in the mobility system at different scales
🕺 learn to dance with your first followers
👩‍🏭 identify where your efforts can be best applied in reclaiming your street

Sign up: coursera.org/learn/reclaimi…

CHALLENGE:

What is according to YOU the most powerful infographic/video/cartoon that you have seen to advance sustainable mobility?

Add it 👇here 👇
Use hashtag #PowerfulMobilityMemes
And tell us why!

By Karl Jilg.
Revealing road space injustice Rapidly expanding list of #PowerfulMobilityMemes!

For those that want to help building it further: please add an explanation AND tag the creator of the work you want to add to this list.

Greatly appreciated!