Ghent Kicked Out the Cars So You Can Walk, Bike, Live & Thrive in the City (Velo-City 2024)

I was urged to visit Ghent in 2019 by Canadian Urban Planner, Brent Toderian and was so glad for his idea. That lead to a very successful Streetfilm I published 5 years ago from Ghent looking at how the unique traffic circulation plan they implemented had dramatically shifted the city to a bettr place. It's over 300,000 plays and like my films from The Netherlands it gets lots of plaudits from viewers and fans.

I always wanted to return and when it was announced Ghent would be the host city for Velo-City 2024, I knew that was the perfect time to re-visit the first film and see how well things were going and see updates and new wrinkles. The first film didn't focus as much on bicycling as this new mega opus (running 15 minutes!) does. The film was a labor of love over the past 6 months, I did upload 5 shorter videos (two of them while Velo-City) so I took my time to craft this.

It features a dozen interviews and soundbites from many of the tour leaders and smartest folks working in transportation and urbanism. That includes Vice Mayor Filip Watteeuw, author Melissa Bruntlett, Doug Gordon from the "War on Cars", Sam Balto who has made the Bike Bus so famous and my video-production-brother-contemporary Bicycle Dutch's Mark Wagenbuur - and that is just for starters. So sit back and enjoy! (Also: this is my 1,111th film of all time, a sort of fun numerical milestone.)