East-West Cyclist Connection
Tjerk van Impelen
Now I will explain the east side of the Utrecht. This is the growing site of the city where are situated universities, high schools, research centers and medical hospital. These facilities attract a large amount of students every year. The students after the studies stay in the city, find a jobs within these research institutes and find a new living within the city. So this is a growing university area.
The small scale old town area is on the east side of the city. There is also the old city canal and the church tower that we are proud of. On the west is a new part of the city. You find there a very important bundle of railway tracks running through the city with the Central Station of Utrecht on top of these train tracks. It is alsmost like a natural bareer between the east and the west side. To the west we see the new part of city where we have the young population of people finding new homes and this is another growing part of the city. So we have a growing part on an east side with university, medical hospital, high school, research centers. And we have a west side where is a new housing for young people who start living there.
They all commute between these two growing parts of the city mainly by bicycle and by public transport because every distance within 7 kilometers is bridged by bicycle. Bike cycling is very popular in the city, in this country. All these cycling people get through this area and need to cross the infrastructure that was implemented in 70‘ for car drivers. So we decided that we want to reduce the automobility by removing pieces of lanes for cars and transform them into water ways instead. And these water ways can function as a guideline for the driving lanes for the cyclists throughout the city.
We are totally changing the focus from driving by car through the city to driving by bicycle through the city. And this is what is happening on the border between the new part of town and the old part of town with the old church tower and nationally important train station of Utrecht Central. This is the entire work through of a city between east and west which is also of influence of how we treat the projects in our area. So far so good.
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