BB Biking

 In this blog post I will explore the different facets of safety - personal safety and infastrcuture safety. First, personal safety is my measurement of how safe I feel traveling around a city alone as a female. It's something that’s hard to measure, but somehow the built environment and culture have created safer space. In other cities I have travelled to, I get nervous when I go down the "wrong" street or that I'm going to be immediately robbed. Here, I feel like I could bike for miles before I ever felt safe - and that's probably only just because I went so far! At our discussion with Copenhagenize, they spoke about how biking culture has elevated the sense of safety. At any moment, bicyclists can add up to 30+ people out on the street. When a road has heavy car traffic, with a lot of people inside the vehicles, I don't feel significantly safer. Additionally, since bicycling is the main source of transit, late into the night you can still find people biking...

 Unsurprisingly, Copenhagen has taken the top spot on my list of favorite cities, knocking down Lisbon, Portugal. Walking from the Metro to the hostel on the first night I felt like I was in some sort of replica city like Disney. There were no cars, everything was quiet, clean, and still. Most days, I take a bike ride on my own to explore the city. Biking is so easy and loss stress, that it's an easy transportation choice. When I go to a new city, I normally walk around everywhere and easily get a lay of the land. I've noticed that with biking everywhere, it's taken me longer to find my way around. I look around while I'm biking when I'm on less crowded streets, but it's still a bit confusing. On Saturday, I didn't ride my bike anywhere because I felt like I was missing out on the walking aspect. I also feel like it's easier to miss out on shops and such while biking. But, I'm biking around as a tourist, not a commuter. If I lived here, that tension ...

This week we visited a few playground around the city. We visited three around the Kobenhaven and Osterboro neighborhood and one in Reffen. I also have seen a few while biking and walking around throughout the week. One of the things I noticed here was the abundancy of green space, whether playground or park, and the sound of birds. Not only are the parks abundant but they are large. In college, I used to think that I was a city person and would have no problem living in one, but over the years I've come to realize that isn't true. If I had to pick a city of those I've traveled to, I would pick Copenhagen because of the accessibility to abundant greenspace. You can also walk through the city and smell nature instead of trash or grime.  On Thursday, we visited Traffic Garden, which is a staffed playground, primarily for youth, that teaches people how to ride bicycles. The playground was built to simulate what biking around town would be like so children can practice beforeha...

 I am graduate student in the community and regional planning program at the University of Oregon. Coming from a background in Interior Design, I enjoy thinking about how people interact with and shape the built environment. Continuing education in the planning field has allowed me to shift my focus from the inside to outside and work on a larger scale. Before making the decision to go to graduate school, I was already reading books like Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design for fun! I’ve read about sustainable transportation and urban planning in Europe (see Houten on our itinerary!) and I’m excited to be able to experience it firsthand. Sustainable transportation is just one facet of a walkable community that brings together climate action, accessibility, and overall well-being. I hope to take my professional and educational experience to help design and plan for more holistic communities. The top 4 things I am looking forward to are: - Biking from to city to c...

I chose to do the transit patterns observation for my pre-assignment. I sat on the corner of a 5-way intersection of E. Main St in Ashland, OR. Ashland is a tourism based town with access to mountain biking, hiking, and theater. The downtown area is highly developed and active, offering a variety of shops, dining, and green space. I observed the traffic patterns on Thursday, June 6th from 2:45-4:15pm. The weather was sunny and 85 degrees. I tracked the number of cars arriving from the north end of town and the pedestrians using the adjacent crosswalk (See Image 1).  Image 1: Observational Location E. Main St. is the primary arterial road through town and an alternative to I-5. I picked the location because I knew it would be busy and capture tourist and residential traffic. The speed limit is 25mph but it seemed that many cars were going faster - it was hard to keep up with the counts! For the most part, traffic remained steady over the 90 minutes. With each 15 minute interval ther...