TED Talk Pitches a Shift in Street Design

Dylan Love from Business Insider discusses a TEDxZurich talk by Mikael Colville-Andersen on Bicycle Culture by Design. Colville-Andersen is an urban designer, the founder of Copenhagenize Design Company, and a noted speaker who travels the world to preach the merits of good design for bicycle infrastructure.

His TEDxZurich talk is highly engaging, as he illustrates the changing nature of our streets since the dawn of cities and civilization. Once places of public domain for people to transport, gather, or sell commerce, streets today are largely reserved for automobiles. Colville-Andersen blames this shift in usage largely on campaigns by car companies and traffic engineers.

Indeed, with cars rampant in the streets, new problems emerged, like deaths, congestion, and air pollution. However, many of the solutions to these automobile-induced problems are left at the drawing table because they do not fit into "the mathematical equation on the computer down at the engineering department. So many ideas die on their doorstep." Colville-Andersen pushes for a shift in urban planning, from engineering our streets to designing them on a human scale.