Learning by doing - by Ádám Kobrizsa

The Mobility Week Budapest Workshop project ended one mounth ago. I needed this period of time to be able to give an objective evaluation as one of the organizers and teamleaders. Szabi's and my role as groupleaders were a bit different compared to the others due to our organizer status. We were the "groupleader's coordinators" during the 10 days.

When I decided to take part in this Mobility Workshop in Budapest, I thought that it would be a meeting of very technical young brains playing to solve the problems of the traffic of Budapest using complicated formulas that we learn in our degrees. Definitely I couldn't be wronger...

At first I would like to thank the organizers of the workshop. You did an amazing job making this possible for us and I’m very pleased you chose us to be a part of this. The city and the problem spots were introduced effectively and every location we visited seemed to have a purpose on a bigger scale. I enjoyed the fact that our time was almost fully planned because the extra programs outside the workshop were often very interesting and gave us a glance to the city we never would have seen.

I'd like to begin my report with a story. A real-life story, something that happened to me after coming back from Budapest.
It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon, I was biking home from the grocery store with two big bags, when I was "forced" to turn in a one way street, as my usual path was blocked by a traffic jam of cars and bus.

First of all, let me just start by saying that I was totally impressed by this workshop and all of the organizing surrounding it. And then - classic evaluation style - I will just point out some small things which could have been done even better... ;) But overall I was very satisfied and impressed with the organizers behind this workshop, especially considering it was the first one they did! (And also, I don't feel the need to summarize everything we did since the presentations as well as other parts of this web site already do that.)

The initially attractive proposal to participate in a workshop around mobility problems and the role of bikes in the city, turned out an extraordinary opportunity to look at the city in a different way while allowing most of us to explore Budapest for the first time.