shared space

Shared Space

My buddy rpsnino is writing about shared space in Dutch streetscapes

for cars, bikes, and peds. The above image is a sketch (click it for a

larger version) that I made in Amsterdam this summer (the scan is

blurry because the sketchbook was literally dropped into the Grand

Canal in Venice). Since a few of my classmates in the Will Bruder

studio will be visiting Amsterdam and Rotterdam in a few weeks I'm

posting it.

It tries to show that the typical street section in the center of

Amsterdam layers traffic into a rough gradient from the most deadly

(trams) to the least (people on foot). The striations are formed by

semi-permeable membranes that allow the users to sneak out into the

next deadliest layer if it's necessary to get around something. Cars

can pass on the tram tracks, but they had better watch their back!

Ditto for peds wandering through the bollards into the bike lanes. The

whole thing works pretty smoothly partly because the membranes work

only in one direction: trams can't jump off their tracks and wreak

havoc in the car lanes, and bikers can't take a hard turn through the

bollards without slowing down to ped speed first. The real winners

here are, I think, the people on bikes. They move through the city in