🚸 What if the street outside your child’s school was car-free, green & safe? 🌱 Paris is making it real with its “Rues aux écoles” program.

Here’s how the city is rethinking school streets—and why it matters. 🧵👇 Launched in 2020, “Rues aux écoles” transforms streets around schools by:
🌳 Replacing asphalt with trees & plants
🚦 Banning or slowing traffic
🎨 Adding play areas & colorful ground designs

The goal: safer, cleaner, more welcoming spaces for kids & families.

🌳 Paris just transformed one of its most iconic squares: Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. Once a vast stone esplanade, it’s now an urban forest.

Inaugurated on June 21, 2025, this project is reshaping how the city tackles climate, space, and livability. 🌍 The numbers behind the project 👇
✅ ~150 trees planted
✅ 50 full-grown trees + 100 younger ones
✅ 1 of 120 greening & pedestrianisation projects in 2025
✅ 1 of 2 new “urban forests” (Hôtel de Ville + Place du Colonel Fabien)

On June 4th female college students cycled 50km from #Zhengzhou to #Kaifeng to try the city’s breakfast specialty, soup dumplings. Their 4-hour journey gained attention on social media, celebrated as an expression of "youth, passion, vitality". [🧵] Soon, thousands of Zhengzhou college students joined this night cycling adventure. Every Friday night, numerous shared bikes vanish from Zhengzhou, posing challenges for bike coordinators and commuters. Despite this, the activity has received widespread support.

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 #OwnInsurance for my #OwnCar. And pay to have an annual inspection done. That would make it very expensive.

Is there an easy way to get around that?

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'.