I am in the Netherlands this week with other members of ITE Georgia Section to see first hand the Dutch way of building and maintaining safe roadway infrastructure. I expect to learn quite a bit, however, the most important lesson is easy. How did the Dutch do it?

They decided to do it.

Fundamentally, the role of the automobile in the United States is set by entrenched policy decisions, including the methods of zoning which leads to suburban sprawl and the resistance to reducing existing motor vehicle lanes to provide for other modes of travel such as pedestrians, bikes, dedicated bus lanes, etc.

The thing to remember is that the reason we have the transportation network we have is because of decisions that have been made in the past. But those decisions do not need to control our future. If we want a transit centered, bicycle friendly, walkable neighborhood, we can have it. We just have to decide to do it and acknowledge that it will take time and resources. It’s about choices. And right now all of the choices we are making say that the Car is King.

Over the course of this week, I’ll be throwing out several thoughts. A lot of these will be less well formed because I will be preparing them nightly after a day full of activities, but I hope to come back to them and add more detail. The way we treat our infrastructure in the United States is really important because it lasts for a long time. Decisions made today will echo for 20 to 50 years or longer. 

Jennifer, Griffin and I spent a week in the Netherlands, mostly Amsterdam, enjoying ourselves and doing all the touristy things. We’re here because next week I’m participating in a technical tour in Utrecht with a bunch of my Georgia ITE colleagues. You’ll see a bunch of posts about infrastructure and roads, but for now here’s some photos and commentary from our trip.

Unsurprising, I’m sure, but there are an awful lot of bicycles in Amsterdam. Moving around the city center is fast, convenient, and relatively safe because everyone yields to everyone else. I think I heard a car honk twice over the course of the week. 

Whenever we travel, we always dine at good restaurants. We don’t regard it as splurging so much as participating in the food economy. We dined one night at Rijks, a one star Michelin restaurant. We all had the tasting course and Jennifer and I had the wine pairing after which Griffin was irritated because we had had too much to drink.

If you go to Amsterdam, you have to visit the Rijksmuseum. It is the national art museum and well worth the trip. It’s like visiting the Met in New York; you can’t do it all, so pick a couple things to go see and don’t worry if you don’t see all the others.

We visited Amsterdam in the middle of tulip season so we had to visit Keukenhof, an easy 40 minute bus ride from Amsterdam. And it’s only 40 minutes because of the traffic jams due to all the people going to Keukenhof. It was packed with people, but it honestly wasn’t that big a deal. We got plenty of time to look at the flowers.

Rather than heading straight back to Amsterdam after our tulip visit at Keukenhof, we spent the night in Noordvijk to be at the beach, see the sunset, and go to the ESA Space Expo. We could’ve continue to participate in the wonderful transit system in the Netherlands and taken a bus but honestly, we decided to get a rideshare to save us some time.

We spent three more days in Amsterdam and did a lot more tourist things such as walking a lot, went shopping, had a high tea at the Duchess, went to the Van Loon museum, visited the KattenKabinet, and generally had a good time as a family.

Today I am in the Hague for solo touristing after sending Griffin and Jenn home. Tomorrow I will be in Utrecht where we will start our technical tour and I’ll have some commentary about what we see and what we learn. Throughout it all Baby Foxy will be learning with me. She’s been to more countries than I have!

I flew out to San Jose, CA last Sunday and was picked up by my sister and brother in law. They very generously provided me with a spare bedroom and a desk from which I could sleep and work during the day (mostly on an East Cost schedule) while hanging out with my Dad in the afternoons and evenings. We’ve lost several relatives this year and it is important that I got to spend this time with him (and of course my sister and brother in law to whom I am extremely grateful for feeding and hosting me this week).

My dad and I hung out in the evenings, working on a puzzle and watching football.

My sister took Dad and I to Fremont Peak, which is something I had not been to before. Great views from the top of Monterey Bay and all the land leading up to it.

While I was here we needed to do some standard Santa Cruz things such as visit the “frozen surfer” (reference to Han Solo frozen in carbonite) with the surfer memorial bench next to it.

I’l be heading home tomorrow, back to good ‘ol Georgia. It’s been a great visit but I’m ready to go home.

This is another post to see if ALT text is coming through correctly.

I’m new to using the iOS app for WordPress so here is a test image to see what the post spits out from the information I put on the image in the media library.

Our family has a long history of traveling with the critical stuffies from Griffin’s life. This particular stuffy is Baby Foxy. Baby Foxy’s name is a long story but suffice that there is a Foxy also.

Baby Foxy is traveling with me to Santa Cruz, California this week where I will work from my sister’s house on my own childhood furniture, and hang out with my sister and my dad in the evenings.

Baby Foxy (to date) has traveled to England, Netherlands, Thailand, many US States, and has been present for important meals and events over the last ten years. I foresee their travel experiences continuing.

There has been a mega-long hiatus on this site, as you can see if you peruse the posts below. But as of November 26, 2024, it’s back. The hiatus was caused by many things, primarily the increase in microblogging by me on Twitter and the reduction in long-form pieces I was writing. Plus, I had a child, and my job responsibilities were increasing, and, and, and.

But now with Twitter dead, and Bluesky growing, I was motivated to recover the Eyebrow so that I could point my Bluesky site at it (Bluesky’s version of “verification”) and so that I can place some thoughts here, where I own the site and no one can throttle me.

Welcome back, and I expect that I’ll have a few items to say over the next few weeks.

1. We have been lied to by all our health classes in High School. The Great Sperm Race is…a bit over-masculinized.

2. The new iOS update, or maybe my new phone, now forces the volume down when it detects that the headphone usage has been too high. I applaud apple for watching out for everyone’s hearing; that’s a good thing. I was going to be all upset about this because this message popping up is due to my bluetooth line-in plug for my car. And that needs to be volume 100%. Every time it popped yesterday on my longer drive it would turn down the volume. That was highly irritating.
3. Turns out the iOS volume monitoring for bluetooth can be adjusted by assigning different categories to the bluetooth devices that are connected. All I had to do was assign the car bluetooth as “car stereo” rather than headphones. Works like a charm.
4. “Bluetooth” should be capitalized, but I refuse. Bluetooth has become like xerox and kleenex and frisbee. It’s too ubiquitous for me to capitalize it.
5. Speaking of bluetooth, I also learned that good-quality noise-cancelling headphones are amazeballs.

Zoom school finally pushed me over the edge to spending this months discretionary money on some noise cancelling headphones.

— Bill Ruhsam (@bruhsam) March 5, 2021

1. When you have a cat who gets a perineal urethostomy he might just decide to pee on anything everything. Casualties so far: Bean bag. various piles of clothes.
2. How to backup your iPhone using iTunes to a place not on your local hard drive. Because if you have a 256 GB iPhone and only a 400 GB hard drive, that won’t work after a while. Make sure you follow ALL the instructions.
3. Moving over 100,000 images from various locations on various hard drives and external hard drives into a brand new, Lightroom-managed photo catalog, and creating all their thumbnails takes three full days of computer time on my computer. But hey, now everything is in one spot, thank god.
4. On the same theme, Lightroom is currently moving at a pace to do the auto face recognition thing on 100k photos in about 5 days of run time.
5. Lots of other things I didn’t write down.