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    Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality
    Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality
    Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality
    Audiobook8 hours

    Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality

    Written by Melissa Bruntlett and Chris Bruntlett

    Narrated by Christina Delaine

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    In car-clogged urban areas across the world, the humble bicycle is enjoying a second life as a legitimate form of transportation. City officials are rediscovering it as a multi-pronged (or -spoked) solution to acute, twenty-first-century problems, including affordability, obesity, congestion, climate change, inequity, and social isolation. As the world's foremost cycling nation, the Netherlands is the only country where the number of bikes exceeds the number of people, primarily because the Dutch have built a cycling culture accessible to everyone, regardless of age, ability, or economic means.

    Chris and Melissa Bruntlett share the incredible success of the Netherlands through engaging interviews with local experts and stories of their own delightful experiences riding in five Dutch cities. Building the Cycling City examines the triumphs and challenges of the Dutch while also presenting stories of North American cities already implementing lessons from across the Atlantic. Discover how Dutch cities inspired Atlanta to look at its transit-bike connection in a new way and showed Seattle how to teach its residents to realize the freedom of biking, along with other encouraging examples.

    Tellingly, the Dutch have two words for people who ride bikes: wielrenner (“wheel runner”) and fietser (“cyclist”), the latter making up the vast majority of people pedaling on their streets, and representing a far more accessible, casual, and inclusive style of urban cycling-walking with wheels. Outside of their borders, a significant cultural shift is needed to seamlessly integrate the bicycle into everyday life and create a whole world of fietsers. The Dutch blueprint focuses on how people in a particular place want to move.

    The relatable success stories will leave listeners inspired and ready to adopt and implement approaches to make their own cities better places to live, work, play, and-of course-cycle.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 28, 2018
    ISBN9781541448421

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    Reviews for Building the Cycling City

    4.5/5

    23 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Very eye opening and inspiring! I want to travel to the Dutch cities described here and experience this, and it also made me want to be more involved in the decisions taken in my city. A big recommend.
    • 5/5
      This book discusses success stories of building cycling infrastructure in several Dutch cities (Groningen, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Eindhoven, etc.), the history of urban planning in those cities over the last century, and how lessons learned in those cities can be and are being applied in North American cities to promote cycling and "human-scale design." This isn't a topic that I know much at all about, so I learned a lot from this book and am now really interested in what's going on in my city.I listened to this audiobook on my bike commute, which was probably the ideal way to listen to this, and I found it really thought-provoking. A few things that I found especially interesting: the authors sing the praises of non-"traditional" bikes like electric-assisted bikes, cargo bikes, and upright bikes as a way to encourage biking among people of varied ages/abilities. I hadn't thought much about how useful these could be. The in-depth looks at the different Dutch cities were also really interesting. Most broadly, though, I found one of the main ideas, that the impressive bike infrastructure and system in the Netherlands isn't just a foregone conclusion/how things have always been, really compelling; though people in the Netherlands have ridden bikes for a long time, there have been active decisions within the last century regarding how traffic in cities is conceptualized and how the flow of traffic (of various kinds) is directed. There's a lot of optimism in this view, I think, regarding how these kinds of decisions could also be made elsewhere.