The movement

HOW TO TAKE BACK OUR STREETS AND TRANSFORM OUR LIVES
- THE ACTION LIST

Can’t wait and feel the urge to start taking matters into your own hands? Below you’ll find a list of ideas to start making a change yourself. These ideas are divided up into steps you can take individually, collectively and tips for engaging with politicians and other representatives.

Individually

Want to start making a change individually straight away? Below are some activities you can start on straight away.

Educate Yourself

Read up. Find interesting articles, social media accounts and inspiration to build and strengthen your thinking muscle. Change your mind and the rest will follow.

Reflect and Challenge

Be critical on your own thinking. Language shapes the way we think. Ask yourself how the implicit assumptions underpinning your words facilitate your thinking.

learn and change

Your personal choice can have an immediate positive effect. Take alternative routes. Stop owning a car start participating in a car scheme.

Inspire others

Tell us what you think and do. Your actions can be an inspiration. Let us and others around you know what you plan to do to make a change.

Collectively

Power through numbers. There is power in a group working towards a shared goal. What you can do together to make a difference.

Start a Conversation

Start a chat with the people in your street and talk about the vision you have on your street and collect some of their ideas. Maybe you're thinking the same thing.

digital power

Active streets are setup for change. Use a social platform or start an app group for your street and start debate and discussion to activatee change.

link up

Try to link up with like minded people and join local associations that work in the mobility field and make your voice heard.

collective power

Learn to identify various significant issues that relate to how we use our streets and tackle these problems collectively.

Multiple Approaches

In any discussion that affects your street, ask for the right expert (which might not be the traffic expert) and ask for multiple approaches and expertises to be represented.

Get to know them

Get to know your local representative and stress out that public space is a political issue and it's their job to represent your political views.

Contest the Model

Contest traffic models. They often fail to take in account human behavior or any other functions of public space.

multiple approaches

In any discussion that affects your street, ask for the right expert and ask for multiple approaches and expertises to be represented.

never compromise

If a local civil servant can’t improve the situation in your street, the task needs to go back to the political level. Don’t compromise, it avoids a political decision.

Resources

The lab of thought recommends

- Follow and engage with social media accounts that question the language we use to talk about streets, such as those of Tom Flood (who is also flipping the script on road violence), Strong Towns, Jan Kamensky. Follow Marco te Brömmelstroet as Cycling Professor on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit.
- Share information on the website roaddanger.org by adding news items on crashes and other traffic accidents that you come across in the media. By doing so, you can help raise awareness of how people write and talk about such events — often in a dehumanised way, despite the long-term, deep, and wide-ranging impact they have.
- More inspiring accounts: Playing Out, Modacity, Monkey Wrench Gang and The War on Cars.
- Read Marco te Brömmelstroet's free e-book, which forms the academic basis for The Movement.
- Take a look at the Groningen Guideline for Public Space, which refers to nine other dimensions in addition to that of mobility: accessibility, safety, human perception, health, social interaction, ecology, climate adaptation, economy, and cultural history. Learn to identify these various dimensions and to look at them as a whole.
- Read Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson), Thinking in Systems (Donella H. Meadows), Fighting Traffic: the dawn of the motor age in the American city and Autonorama: the illusory promise of high-tech driving (Peter Norton), and New Power: how power works in our hyper-connected world (Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms).
- Watch the Ted Talk How language shapes the way we think (Lera Boroditsky).
- Follow one or more of the MOOCs offered by the University of Amsterdam: Unravelling the Cycling City, Alternative Mobility Narratives, and Reclaiming the Street for Liveable Urban Spaces or Getting Smart about Cycling Futures.

BECOME A THINKER OF TOMORROW

There is an urgent need to rethink our thinking about mobility. The current expectations on mobility innovations are often rooted in the advances in digital technology and are generally greeted with eager optimism. Unfortunately what is often overlooked are the unmet needs of humans and our planet. The Lab of Thought attempts to explain mobility from this standpoint, so we as individuals and as societies lessen our impact on the planet, now and in the future.