In the summer of 2016, between my sophomore and junior years, I participated in a study abroad trip through Europe that would set the stage for my ever-growing passion for urban transportation.
For two months, forty other UW students and I traveled between England, The Netherlands, and Denmark, experiencing first-hand some of the most impressive transportation networks in the world. From city to city, we met with professors, government officials, and experts in the fields urban studies and mobility who shared their insights on effective urban planning. Every day we walked, biked, rode public transit, boats, and trains, becoming immersed in foreign urban environments to gain a new perspective on the culture of mobility. In addition to several assignments and transit tours, students formed small research groups to put together a project of their choosing to be presented at the end of the trip. The freedom to pursue any research question challenged me to think critically about what I hoped to gain from the experience and how I wanted to engage with the communities we visited. My groupmates and I decided to look at the connection between children’s mobility experiences and increasing cycle ridership.
This project gave me an opportunity to delve into histories, contexts, and plans of several European cities to learn about the role that children and families played in those stories. I quickly became fascinated by how education and transportation behavior had been overlapped to fuel a broader movement around sustainable and safe mobility in the city as a whole. I was inspired by the far-reaching effects that the Safe Routes to School campaigns in Denmark and The Netherlands had toward leading the countries to become some of the most bike friendly places in the world. Since returning from the study abroad, I have maintained a motivation to learn more about a child’s experience in the city and effective strategies to achieve behavior change in transportation.