“Here it is, you can experience it, you can ride around” : Bicycle study tours as experiential education

Abstract: In a time of growing awareness of the climate change crisis, cities are revisiting their policies and practices to align with sustainability aspirations.   Transportation and cycling policies offer a way forward. On visits to best practice cities, policymakers, practitioners and decision-makers learn from local experts in an effort to take ideas home and implement them. The activity of finding out about policies, known as policy transfer, can be explored as a type of experiential learning when it takes place as a bicycle study tour. The policy transfer framework provided by Dolowitz & Marsh (1996, 2000, 2012) and the experiential learning theory of Kolb (2015) can serve as starting points in exploring how policies are transferred during learning activities and interpersonal interactions that involve hosts and visitors during bicycle study tours. The case study of Amsterdam, which has over 500km of separate cycle lanes and 53% of all daily trips made by bicycle (van der Horst, 2014), offers a working, observable example of an alternative future for cities wanting to change their transportation situation. More than 150 groups visit the city annually to find out about its bicycle culture and underlying policies (Sargentini, 2017).  While policy transfer and learning in Amsterdam may be initiated by visitors that take steps to travel to the city, the local hosting situation is made up of different institutions and actors that interact in various ways. Some attention to the governance of urban cycling in Amsterdam to understand the role of the private sector and the responsibilities of different organizations and actors can partially respond to Oldenziel’s (2016) call for research on this topic throughout Europe. Interviews and document research about the hosting situation in Amsterdam reveal several players with varied backgrounds, a rich variety of learning activities, and a loosely governed hosting landscape. Recommendations are made for Amsterdam institutions, hosts, visitors and future research.