Building the Cycling City, Chris Bruntlett
Building the Cycling City, Chris Bruntlett
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Building the Cycling City
The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality

Author: Chris Bruntlett, Melissa Bruntlett

Narrator: Christina Delaine

Unabridged: 8 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/28/2018


Synopsis

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.

About Chris Bruntlett

Chris Bruntlett is cofounder of a marketing and communications firm focused on inspiring healthier, happier, simpler forms of mobility through words, photography, and film.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Dave

This was a terrible book to read before trying to sleep. Every chapter left me wanting to be a bike advocate, open a bike shop, ride my bike, or visit and see some of the bike architecture that was described. This book forced me to re-think the utilitarian, including electric assist. It described a......more

The byline to this book should be “Socialism in Action” because this sort of society only exists in the socialist democracies of Western Europe, where I’ve lived for many years. This is the boogeyman Fox News uses to scare the daylights out of the ignorant hicks who tune in to their smorgasbord of l......more

Goodreads review by Heather

First, this book smells like a new college textbook and I kept smelling the fumes of paper and paste and it’s lovely. It also reads a bit like a textbook and I can totally seeing future city planners reading this for a class, though it’s also accessible to the layperson. It outlines the auto and bic......more

Goodreads review by Nadia

This book uses examples from Dutch cities to describe how a city can be human-sized and livable by reallocating space given traditionally to cars towards other transportation modes, particularly walking and cycling. The book talks about the cycling city, and over and over we realize that this really......more