Bikeology Guild of Canada (@bikeologyca)

I just came back from a course in Amsterdam, focused on advocating for safer streets in the context of people not believing research. It was offered by the Urban Cycling Institute, and put together by Mark Ames of Strategic Cities, and Dr. Meredith Glaser, UCI’s CEO and professor at the University of Ghent. I've learned so much and really enjoyed Amsterdam as a learning laboratory. I highly recommend the course! One of my favourite takeaways was about a neighbourhood that the city was encouraging to go car free. Residents and city admin were very skeptical about giving up car parking. So skeptical the city spent €35M to drain the nearby canal, build an underground parking structure below it, and reconnect the canal. So people in those car-free blocks of the city received a secure underground parking area dedicated specifically to those residents, with the spaces allocated factored on the parking that was being lost from the street surface. Now, a few years later, the neighbourhood is lovely: quiet, with garden planters on the street outside people's homes, bird houses in mature trees, a community vermiculture composter and trencadis mosaics on street furniture; children walk, play and ride their bikes safely; there are shops and cafés nearby. The dedicated underground car parkade has *excess capacity* because so many people have given up at least one (or all) of their cars. At the same time, the cost of the parkade's construction has been repaid in the revenue from people paying for underground parking, and the excess space has been permitted to local venues, so that they don't need surface parking either. The city effectively monetized that public space that was being given away for free when there was car parking on the street, and gave residents a more pleasant, safer, place to live and play. Oh, and residents' property values have gone way up relative to streets that still have car parking on them. [Heather Young-Leslie, President, http://Bikeology.ca]