How Cycling Can Transform Cities Across Portugal

In conjunction with the Netherlands Embassy in Lisbon, the Dutch Cycling Embassy presents this hour-long digital seminar. Experts from Portugal and the Netherlands share their knowledge and experience from decades of political processes, transportation planning, and infrastructure design. The aim: to create attractive and safe cycle networks for all ages and abilities, and see where Portugal and the Netherlands can learn from each other’s experience in building safe, user-friendly, inclusive mobility infrastructure.

so and hello dear participants in the seminar on cycling it’s it’s a great pleasure to see such a great turnout for our first webinar on cycling that we hope will be the beginning of a series cycling is gaining traction in many places is the world as a safe and healthy way of transporting yourself and in the netherlands using the bicycle is a normal way of transport for decades already you have to imagine in the netherlands there are 17 million inhabitants but 23 million of bicycles and i myself i’m a big fan of the bicycle and i always say jokingly that children in the netherlands they learn how to bike before they learn how to walk and you have to imagine that in the netherlands 75 of children in secondary school go to school by bike and i think the fact that kids can use their bikes so easily to go to school to visit friends to go to their sports clubs is a reason why the netherlands always scores so high in unicef’s survey on the happiness of children but it’s certainly not only children that make use of bikes grown-ups elderly use it to go to their work to shop to visit friends and uh yes uh we have a country where it’s easy to use a bicycle because it’s flat and in our country the amount of kilometers by bicycle is the same amount as the amount of kilometers that is spent on a train and that’s 15 billion kilometers but i think also in hilly terrain nowadays with electric bicycles the terrain can be conquered by the bike user but one important thing is different i think in our country 35 000 kilometers are we have of segregated cycling tracks for us it’s clear to stimulate the bicycle you have to plan and you have to invest and we keep on doing that and we may be convinced that it’s good for ourselves but we love to promote using the bicycle everywhere because we think using the bicycle as a normal way of transport helps us deal with challenges that we all face climate change healthy lifestyle and making transport affordable for many i think in times of the pandemic it’s even more clear how important this is so i’m very happy that we have been able to create this platform and i’m very glad to see people from so many different backgrounds i saw landscape architects i saw representatives of ngos of municipalities architects it’s really interesting to see how many people are involved in this and indeed portugal doesn’t start from scratch either portugal has a national strategy for active cycling mobility there are plans to stimulate cycling for academics and for school children and a big surprise to me actually is that portugal has one of the biggest cyclone producing industry in in in the world it’s the biggest in europe and last but not least lisbon is going to be velocity next year the webinar will give hopefully answers to questions of why what and how but i also hope not only that you get some answers but that this webinar also creates a platform of people interested to together stimulate this in my view and in my experience fantastic means of transport and with these words i would like to give the floor to the moderator chris bruntland from dutch cycling embassy chris the floor is yours thank you so much ambassador and uh good morning everyone it’s a pleasure to be with you today uh my name is chris brundlet and i am the marketing and communication manager with the dutch cycling embassy we are uh very excited to uh have worked quite closely with the netherlands embassy in lisbon on this event and we have quite a a great program put together for you uh this morning so uh just a brief introduction to our organization and and what we do um the dutch cycling embassy has been around for almost 10 years now we’re a public public-private partnership between the national government here in the netherlands and about 75 organizations that work internationally in the field of cycling there are public organizations such as municipal governments academic institutions like universities and there are also private consultants transportation planners engineers and you can name many many more but they are all experts in this field of cycling and have been working in the field of cycling for a very long period of time and uh our goal our our task is to help them export the knowledge and expertise that they have in their respective fields and help cities around the world uh become more cycle friendly we have uh two such members uh who will be speaking to you today along with a third portuguese speaker to give a bit of a local perspective um our work up to this point has been uh twofold we do a lot of study tours where we host international delegations here in the netherlands we take them on bicycle tours of cities that are similar to the context they came from um and show them the streets the way they are the way people use them and then also put them in a classroom setting to help them understand uh why it is that way why it’s so important and and how those streets got to be that way and then inversely we also take uh teams of dutch experts to uh cities around the world uh and conduct think bike workshops on uh specific challenges to address specific challenges uh that they’re experiencing their city as you can imagine things have changed significantly in the the world of uh covid where we’re not doing so much international travel we’re not able to host groups here and a lot of the work we do now has switched to a more digital format but that’s not to say we’re not busier than ever working with all kinds of places around the world as they now struggle with their corona related mobility challenges so as i’ve said we have three speakers for you uh lined up this morning um here is a quick look at our program i just want to remind you to submit your questions in the the chat function below in english ideally please uh so that we can uh go through some of them at the end of the session and i also just want to remind you that this session is going to be recorded so um we will everything is on the record uh and uh we will be distributing the youtube link and the uh the slideshows to everyone who’s registered with an email address today so that you have a record whether you were able to tune in or not so with that we’re going to get started with our first speaker bernardo pereira who is an architect and a sustainable mobility consultant based in lisbon and i will hand him hosting duties so that he can share his screen and get started good morning i will share here my presentation okay uh first i’ll give a quick uh quick run through in english uh we’re going to do i’m going to do a quick diagnosis of portugal’s urban cycling context with the first six slides and then i will do [Music] uh five slides on policy and planning and nine slides on simple high impact measures that we’ve done here in portugal or that other technicians have done and that are achieved in this country that have been achieved so i’ll start now and i’ll run over into portuguese [Music] [Music] together [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] is [Music] um uh [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] is [Music] organizations [Music] is [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign m a is okay is foreign [Music] much [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign is [Music] is [Music] foreign thank you very much bernardo i’m going to uh hand the floor directly over to our next speaker who is jason colbeck uh jason is in urban design and mobility consultant based in delft in the netherlands for a private consultant named mobicon good morning everyone um is everyone able to see that my screen brilliant thank you yes um so thank you everyone for joining um as chris said my name’s jason i’m an urban design mobility consultant at mobicon which is a dutch international consultancy um we are based in delft in the netherlands as well as having offices in zwolle and denbos and we also have offices in north america in ottawa uh canada and in durham north carolina in the u.s um so today i’m going to be talking about having a bit of a whistle stop tour of the dutch principles of traffic calming and mobility network planning and design so i will be focusing on the network level planning of um of mobility networks in the netherlands the principles of sustainable safety and when to separate and mix different modes and the behavior and traffic psychology that has informed these choices i’ll then be talking about how that maps onto the street level and design choices that uh that you see in the netherlands that created the environments that we experience here so first of all um to reiterate a bit of what bernardo was talking about in the portuguese context in the netherlands uh the netherlands experienced very very similar um issues as much of the world in the post-war era with the rise of car use this culminated in um in the early 70s with a huge rise in in traffic related fatalities um and the netherlands um like much of the world um experienced other problems including the oil uh oil crisis in the early 70s and a num a significant rise in uh traffic related deaths of children as well so a lot of these things culminated in um in a growing movement for change and as a result throughout the 80s and into the 90s the the concept of sustainable safety was developed and implemented in in 1992 so i’m not going to go too much into sustainable safety because it could uh it could form a webinar in itself but one of the things that sustainable safety um developed was an idea of the functionality of roads and um helped establish how uh roads and mobility networks in general were planned and laid out so um one of the key principles of sustainable safety is the idea that all traffic related fatalities are unethical and preventable that people make mistakes and that people even break the rules and that this shouldn’t cause a death and serious injury to to users um and the and the idea that speed is such a determining factor um and that the the higher the speed the the greater the probability of death and the need therefore to reduce speed in especially in urban areas so this helps to inform when to separate different modes of traffic and when to mix so focusing on urban areas in particular this means that speed limits are established for different types of roads and that these are categorized generally by inter-access roads which are typically residential streets um distributor roads uh and through roads and through roads uh tend to be the strategic road network and motorways so i’m not gonna talk about too much about those but focus on distributor roads which are you know can be fairly high traffic roads that um that allow people to get from a to b and to access a smaller network of residential streets and they typically have um in the netherlands you typically see cycle tracks along them because speeds are high enough and traffic volumes are high enough to justify separation whereas access roads typically residential streets the speed should be low enough and volumes reduced to the point where separation isn’t considered necessary and you’d have a mixed profile so um one of the the ideas that this is based on is uh monument hans vonderman’s study um which demonstrated the the behavior of traffic users um in the system in which people are willing to travel at a certain distance at set speeds so here you can see that um drivers are willing to drive for six minutes uh for six minutes on access roads at a low speed um until they start to feel the need to speed up um and that has i informed the way that the mobility network is laid out with distributor roads being uh a set distance uh apart um and and that has informed the uh the mesh width of the network so very quickly uh to put that into context mobicon uh helped uh conduct a study with the city of cauda in the netherlands to determine its mobility network and so here you can see that you’ve got a pedestrian car in the center surrounded by a low speed environment that around the center that does allow traffic and then in green you can see the areas of residential development surrounding the city center um between which you would have movement patterns so uh here we have an overlay of the uh the bicycle network um with regional primary and secondary cycle routes uh and then the road network for motor vehicles which as you can see is significantly uh reduced so cars um can travel and through routes and distribute distribute sorry distribution routes um throughout the city but they don’t have as many options and if i go back you can just you can see that at times the cycle routes sorry the cycle network and the the car network might go inside sometimes they might not uh where they do go inside and there’s speed and traffic volume of those roads are likely to determine the the design and i’ll talk about the design in a bit more detail shortly so um to put in a local context this is a particular section of root in utrecht which shows where in blue is the the car route and in red is the cycle route and you can see that at this point the two don’t go inside at this um for this section um and they’ve the two routes have been unravelled which which actually means that on the street and the cycle aspect of that route in this case is a feed star or a cycle street and that’s just to recap the the three types of road functionality here and just to give an idea of what they might look like so we talked about through roads as being the strategic road network um that distributes the roads uh roads along which uh there’s there could be a significant volume of car traffic and therefore cycle tracks have been used and then access roads which are uh smaller residential streets in the image show and that’s in delft and it shows an example of a boner for or living street or homestead so when we get down to the street level um i’m going to talk about different material choices um different aspects of the street that that enabled the creation of the the sorts of streets that are typical of the netherlands so one of the key features is when we’re talking about access roads and these are streets that should be available for people to use um of all different ages and abilities and a key consideration is to remove the through traffic and ensure that that is on the distribution distributor roads and through and through network so there are lots of ways to do this um the example shown is a simple modal filter using bollards and model filters can come in a variety of types of sizes in this case it’s it’s really simple simple just fall out placed along the sidewalk but it’s also possible to create real uh amazing spaces from them so this is similarly a modal filter that prevents through traffic um and in this case it’s been used to create a usable space with you know with playgrounds and outside seating um so lots of different tools in the in the designer’s toolbox for this so not just modal filters but in order to reduce speed you could use a variety of methods um diverters to reduce through traffic you can reduce the width and you can have horizontal and vertical deflection so you might be the humble speed bump um and just an example again of avon earth and delft which shows how the the entire design of the street is really um to reduce uh the speed of the traffic that is there bearing in mind that there shouldn’t be a lot of traffic in the first place uh and if all this fails put a tree in the middle of it so i’ve already touched upon width um slightly but width really is everything so a feature of dutch streets um that’s really noticeable is the fact that they can be quite narrow and and widths are often prescribed um and a key consideration is to make sure that the width ensures low speeds so lots of streets have significant volumes of traffic and car traffic volume is not a problem so it just determines a different couple of different street types so you can see that um this street design can handle up to 10 000 vehicles a day that’s too many for mixing and therefore uh cycle traffic and pedestrians are separated um width still is everything um you can see the carriage where there is under three beaters uh with a central strip to ensure that if people need to overtake them they do so slowly and the devil is in the detail so a feature of dutch streets is the clinkers or the street papers um which i believe uh portugal is quite familiar with i think that’s me eight years ago on the streets of possibly cache cache and cycling on the cobbles and i’m sorry let’s go back and here you can see that um small details like uh if uh people are expected to cycle on a certain side of the street and you can see that they’ve actually smoothed the cobbles there there we go so and that’s everything so just a quick um uh notice that mobicon has now got an online learning platform and i would love to be able to join us at mobicon academy academy.mobicon.com and i’d be happy to take questions at the end so thanks everyone thanks very much everyone thanks jason for that uh pretty comprehensive uh overview you crammed a lot in 10 minutes so well done uh and uh i am now going to hand the floor to our third and final speaker leor steinberg who is the co-founder of humankind they’re an urban planning agency in rotterdam thanks chris i’m going to [Music] try to share my presentation while speaking is it working you see me yeah so thanks everybody for the nice presentation i’m going to take it forward after we learn why we need to invest in cycling in portugal and what is needed to be done in a very impressive representation by json uh i’m going to share a little bit of how to do it and how to start tomorrow which is something we are doing many times with humankind i was last i took this picture last year when i was in this one i have to say that this morning when i looked for those pictures i realized how much i mislisted it was lovely lovely experience and it’s a shame that flights are not possible nowadays but well i will be back and i mean a lot of places in this bond are very vocal and especially when you take the cars out of the streets uh they’re just filled up with the pedestrians and cyclists especially this image is from january and the weather is beautiful compared to the netherlands i don’t think that’s an excuse uh but i was staying at rossio uh next to rossignol station next to the column of pedro iv i’m not sure what is the portuguese word for that uh and i will i thought it’s a wonderful square uh but every time i went out of my hotel trying to cross the road i saw that there are like three lanes of cars going very fast i don’t know if it’s already changed in the last one or two years but i thought okay that’s an example i mean uh we are one minute walking from a very walkable nice street and then we have a beautiful square that you cannot really cross to if you’re a child or you just want to run into and it reminded me a same example some example of a square in groningen the netherlands this is the fist market which is a square that used to be a parking lot uh again with a big road around it and this is how this square in this dutch city looks today it is car free uh is a bicycle heaven and it is attracting uh people from all ages to come and visit and enjoy this beautiful space and this is a change that huronigan did 40 years ago basically deciding to remove cars from the city center and that’s the decision that needs to be made in many cities and especially in cities that are very old but such a great potential this is another example from throne again that used to be a road going through a park and 20 years ago uh 30 years ago actually a referendum decided to move uh to remove the road and make it yet again a road but only for bicycles which is one of the busiest bicycle roads in the netherlands and i would say one of the most beautiful bicycle route in the world but the change was difficult and even uh the referendum to change this road into this route uh was very difficult even in a city like groningen which as an ambassador at rosar mentioned the netherlands is a bicycle heaven and even there it was difficult to convince people to make the change and that’s why when we work with cities at humankind we’re trying to apply this idea of agile urbanism we cannot make the change uh in one day change everything we need to go in an agile way slowly uh assess design implement and then learn uh what happened from interventions or small changes and then go forward having all the time this uh vision of a bicycle friendly or people friendly streets we always think that it has to go together and i would like to give two quick examples of how we do it uh and that’s maybe just lessons one from the netherlands one from israel of how maybe portuguese cities can go about maybe learn from those ideas and of course apply it with your local knowledge so those are my examples the first one is in rotterdam we’ve been working on the bicycle vision of uh of the city uh on the left is how the city used to be before it was bombed during the second world war and on the right is our illustration of how the future of the city could look like when we work from the vision but part of this vision was not only thinking how the city can look in 20 years it was let’s start making the change now and those are projects that we’ve been doing all around the city together with the municipality and our partners and the idea was uh to try to change those streets already now and then discuss with neighbors and with stakeholders how we can make it permanent but doing so only when people already experience open streets streets that are closed for cars streets that are easier to cycle streets with less parking uh we’ve been doing quite a few colorful interventions but this setting relevant to this talk is an example of a very car dominated street in uh in the city center of rotterdam and what we basically proposed here and applied together with the municipality is the application of a tactical pi claim basically instead of trying to convince all shop owners to remove parking spaces forever uh we said let’s first try it for a few months see if it works and only if it works we can go forward this is an example of a project that was a success because later on uh shop owners that were against the bike lane uh were in february of it and currently there is a permanent bike lane installed in this street as a result of this experiment so that’s one example i like to give and then i will finish up so i don’t take so much time for questions another example of our project in tel aviv so another lovely city i’m not sure if more beautiful in this but that’s where i grew up so it is also a hot climate city it’s not as flat as in the netherlands and we’ve been working on with local partners and we were part of the group that developed a bicycle strategy we’re talking about 300 kilometers of bicycles in the city in the coming five years i believe if i remember correctly but you cannot start it tomorrow you cannot just apply 300 kilometers very difficult you need to remove a lot of parking close a lot of roads for cars and this is an image of how we believe many streets in the city should look like in the future so removing on the one side of the street a bicycle a parking lane and turn it into a bike lane so this is just an illustration but what you can see that’s part of the strategy strategy that looks five and ten years ahead the city is already starting to apply so taking this map looking at places where it is already possible to apply them tomorrow removing parking spaces i’m talking about projects that the city has been doing overnight so you can see that the pictures are dark the city has been building hundreds of hundred and hundred of meters of bicycle lanes overnight and neighbors just wake up to see those bicycle bicycles there i think those lanes of course are not perfect are bi-directional i think that in the city center they should be one directional but what you can see is that the city is committed to just try those things out with very cheap materials we’re not talking here about building for months and months and talking about very cheap materials and very quick applications and taking those lessons afterwards to turn them into a permanent uh permanent solution and this is another picture from this one i don’t know how it ended up here but i hope that maybe next time i will be in this one i will see more protected bicycle infrastructure and it will be easier to cycle there and that’s it thank you very much thanks lior um okay we don’t have uh a lot of time for questions about 10 minutes but uh let’s get into it there’s been a few comments and questions in the chat box the first is uh and this will always come up when you talk about cycling outside of the netherlands is the question of terrain and i know bernardo you have some fairly strong opinions about uh how perhaps hilliness is uh is uh overstated as a barrier to cycling particularly in lisbon and and so can you talk a little bit about that and maybe how e-bikes and other technologies uh and strategies could be used to overcome uh that argument against uh building cyclones because there are hills sure um well the comment comes from guadalajara which is portugal’s highest city in altitude it’s at an altitude i think that doesn’t exist in holland at a thousand odd meters and um that’s right it is a hilly city but i’ve been to guadalajara and there are ways that you can make in lisbon lisbon is different from guadalupe because lisbon is 75 flat even though people speak about hilliness the biggest barrier is in people’s heads because this idea of hilliness and guard i’m not so sure i don’t think it’s 75 flat i think it’s much less but there are ways short cuts that can be made to make it easier for people who even use normal bicycles as for electric bicycles with bike shed it’s a great opportunity bike share systems with electric bikes could uh make it more universal and good paths connecting places streets with less traffic with contra flows i think are all great opportunities which uh streets without automobiles which the city could take advantage of and wireless connections outside of the city to some of the locations outside i know some of the areas where the uh warehouses are and where stores are much of that is relatively flat it actually becomes hilly when you come in close to the city okay and i think there’s a perhaps an irony that that uh here at least here in the netherlands e-bikes are so prevalent and and in fact the last two years electric bikes have outsold traditional bikes um so even despite the fact that the country is flat as a pancake uh e-bikes are used quite widely here as a range extender and and there’s a a tool to get more people into cycling um jason can you talk a little bit about the design considerations when we’re talking about more electric bikes on the streets um when it comes to perhaps uh vehicles that are uh going a little bit faster compared to a traditional bike and what are what are uh dutch engineers and planners having to do to take that uh extra traffic into consideration yeah i mean it’s it’s certainly still a very much a developing field um as e-bikes become uh more and more popular um but the the main considerations are uh the speed um you know the e-bikes go at a more consistent speed which is typically higher than uh or can be higher than most people traveling on a an electric bike um and and also that consistency of speed as well is a factor in the design you know you need to be aware of the fact that people are maintaining a speed rather than the usual um fluctuations and so cycle paths are getting wider which not only facilitates um great use of e-bikes but also uh different types of inclusive cycle as well so that’s another another thing to consider it a lot of a lot of e-bikes are also cargo bikes and then even within the netherlands there are as i said it’s an emerging field so there are engineers that are testing new designs new road markings new surface types um and and also uh faster routes so um as you said chris uh e-bikes are being used as range extenders and that has an implication on the types of journeys that people are making or the length of journeys that people are making as well and that has an influence on the type of fruit that the roots they’re being built thanks jason there was another uh question about uh freight deliveries uh leor is that a topic that you have to uh tackle when you’re developing these these uh master plans for various cities is the uh access and and timing of freight yeah i think that’s what’s so nice about concept like a sustainable urban mobility planning so you don’t look only on the on the bicycle but by itself but you you realize that if you start looking at the city as a place that needs to attract less motor traffic you can solve a lot of problems at once so for example as the city of throne again they showed in the beginning attracted more and more bicycles to the point that 65 of the travels uh trips in the city center are made with a bicycle they now need to solve the problem that there is no space for big tracks in the city and they are proposing uh different ways to attract to to bring packages to the city so they are using e-bike cargo bikes and they are having sort of spine slots for big tracks to come which are normally very early in the morning or very late in the evening thank you and there was another question about the shark’s teeth road markings um jason can you talk a little bit about how shark’s teeth are used in the netherlands and then uh there was a question about uh how to get them uh uh translated into a portuguese context so i’d also like to hear from bernardo about what you think are the uh the transferability of shark’s teeth and and the possibility of starting to use them in portuguese cities but first jason please yeah yeah um i don’t know if it’s just a sort of an immigrant thing when you’re when you arrive in the netherlands you fall in love with shark’s teeth or whether it’s just a sort of a geeky mobility planning thing um but yeah i love sharks teeth i love how versatile they are and this is coming from the fact that i’m from the uk uh and you know we have different markings that aren’t quite as useful um so if anyone isn’t familiar with shark sleeve markings they’re triangles um that indicate where you should give way and they can be used on cycle tracks or just as much as on on the carriageway um and they they’re able it enables you to indicate really clearly when people should and shouldn’t um stop um of course then they’re not used exclusively because they do provide quite clear priority and that’s something that you might not always want um so for example a junction of two minor residential streets and you wouldn’t expect to see shark’s teeth markings because uh in their others we have a system of uh traffic giving way to traffic from the right um but yeah they they’re used in so many different contexts um i i can’t speak to the exact um dimensions um that are required but i know that you you know different uh countries have very different regulations and they might be more or less rigid but i really like the flexibility of shark steve markings regarding portuguese legislation they’re not in the road signage but there are road signs many are similar to the rest of europe and including the uk we just ride on the right side of the road since 1927 and uh the signs the signs do there are giveaways for cycleways which aren’t even respected by many of the municipalities they don’t introduce them but it’s foreseen and there are there was an attempt once i think a local got in for a local government placed shark’s teeth but they did it the other way around instead of being for the cars to yield it seemed to be for the pedestrians um but the um if the road signage was followed the national road signage the recent edition but even since 1998 for bicycle crossings for example that would already be great that would be possible we do use in lisbon what we did working in the pilot project there were issues with the national road safety authority so basically i did a responsibility declaration and we proved that it was used in various places it was fundamental so someone who wanted to take them out would have to assume responsibility not for sharks teeth but to place advanced bike zones that were they were already foreseen in the national in the municipal manual so the municipality engaged with the national road authority and things were discussed with them and there was a pilot project implemented so if there’s political will all of these technical solutions we’re talking about details regarding painting there they could be implemented but someone has to accompany that technically uh we did it with the project in lisbon and lisbon has has managed to introduce some new elements but there’s lots to do and there’s regulation national regulations quite clear it’s not much of an issue i think it’s the political will is the issue yes definitely and someone’s pointed out in the chat box that sharks teeth have been used in porto’s pop-up cycle paths more recently so uh i guess the cities are going to have to take a lead before they perhaps get embraced yeah uh we’ve got time for one last question and that’s around um emergency vehicles and and the width of streets jason you emphasize that with matters uh but i always get this question myself in in uh streets and lanes that are only 2.6 meters wide uh how do dutch cities manage uh fire trucks and and uh and police cars and and the like and uh so how is that uh taken into consideration yeah i mean it’s narrow streets isn’t something unique to the netherlands so um i think a way that the dutch deal with it is first of all having quite clear emergency service routes mapped out um so you know emerging service vehicles aren’t necessarily expected to be able to use all streets equally um because they don’t need to and secondly um the majority the the majority of the journey made by emergency service vehicles will be on distributor roads um that allow them to um to travel at greater speeds um and it’s only a small proportion and that final um part of their journey that they would need to access residential streets and that and and narrow the streets um so once they do arrive you know they’re already close to the destination um and of course you need to take into consideration the the available space um in design but it just doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean that all resident or residential streets have to have enormous uh turning radii um and huge widths because at that point they’re already close to the destination um and they can you still use the available space but slowly and carefully because they’re already pretty much there great okay i know i said one last question but i’m going to have one one last question because it’s such a good one and uh it’s uh directed towards leor so someone has asked that uh well express their frustration that they’re uh still political roadblocks to to making change in in portuguese cities and uh and someone has asked besides riding a bike what can they do to change this on a personal level on a local level uh to make change in their city oh that’s a difficult question and we are over time so i will try to keep it uh short it doesn’t seem that there is a i mean clearly there is political problem but it seems like there is also a lot of uh demand uh if i understood the portuguese of bernardo and a lot of activism toward it i think that the best way is to push politicians one way and the other way is that i did see the rise of e-scooters used in at least in this ball and this something that also happened in tel aviv so we don’t only need to speak about the bicycle uh we can also show that a lot of uh scooters are being used on uh on the sidewalks which creates a very un unsafe situations and maybe if we will invest in infrastructure and safer routes for those it will also help bicycles it will also have pedestrians so we need to show how it’s not something that we do only for a cyclist but also for all role users thanks leor so i’m just going to wrap up our session with a couple of announcements um just so everyone is aware we’ve we’ve been asked about uh e-certificates for the participation in this session which we’re happy to uh provide if you want to email me personally at christopher touch cycling dot nl we will do that create one for you i also want to make you aware of a promotion we have coming up starting november 6th and that is we’ll be offering the crow manual the design manual for bicycle traffic which is widely regarded as the the bible for bicycle facility design is going to be on sale for 99 euros starting on the 16th of november running until the end of the year until december 31st so watch our social media channels and the crowplatform.com website for more information in regards to that our experts have kindly offered their time for some complimentary hour-long one-on-one coaching sessions uh as a follow-up to some of the topics we discussed in this webinar um so they will happily sit down with you in your municipality uh and discuss a specific challenge that you’re facing um and provide their expertise and knowledge uh uh in regards to that we only have a limited number of these sessions available and uh there is one condition that you must bring along uh an elected official from from your city uh in the hopes that we can get them on board with with the change that you’re trying to make to your streets uh last but not least we’re working on uh as uh the ambassador suggested uh a series of webinars in the build up to velocity in june uh the next one is tentatively scheduled to take place on the 4th of february and will be on the theme of bikonomics one of our participants decisio their research agency based in amsterdam uh are doing a lot of groundbreaking work in the field of social cost benefit analyses and showing that investing in cycling provides a return on investment that’s significant and the the the netherlands embassy in lisbon is kindly offered to potentially co-finance one of these cost-benefit analysis stories or studies or a series of them if your municipality is interested uh please do reach out to us and we can make an introduction and start a conversation in regards to that but thank you so much for your attention it’s been a really uh informative session a really great discussion as i said this will be uh archived on youtube in the future please do share it within your networks and we do look forward to seeing you in february of 2021 thank you thank you you