cyclezealot

PARIS: What Paris has done right is to make it awful to get around by car, and awfully easy to get around by public transport or by bike.

Now that Michael Moore has broken a taboo by holding up France as a model for national health care, maybe it's safe to point out other things France seems to do right without incurring a barrage of France jokes. Like how Paris is trying to manage traffic and auto pollution.

What Paris has done right is to make it awful to get around by car, and awfully easy to get around by public transportation or by bike. Any tourist in a rent-a-car who's circumnavigated the Arc de Triomphe will most likely never, ever drive in Paris again. But there are plenty of mad Parisians who do it all the time - far too many, in fact.

So Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, a Socialist, vowed on coming to office in 2001 to reduce car traffic by 40 percent by 2020.

He's serious about it. I live near the Boulevard St. Michel, and two years ago the city laid down a granite divider strip between the bus-only lane and the cars, squeezing private cars from three lanes to two. Taxis and bicycles were allowed to use the bus lane
https://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/...on/edserge.php

acroy

Regression, not Progression

makeinu

Why do you say that?

People sing the praises of rail transport, but in my experience buses with exclusive lane use are just as good if not better for local transit. All you have to do is kick out the cars and your local bus system will be better than the NYC subway!

acroy

sorry i posted that without explaining or anything - it was just a sort of reflex action....

My wife and i spent 3 weeks in Paris last fall (walked it all!) and noticed what seemed an intentionally inneficient use of already-cramped transportation opportunities. the streets are quite crowded with peds/bikers/cyclists/cars, then they go throw barriers & such in strange places. Not to say that cities "should be made car-friendly" or anything, but existing infrastucture should at least be efficient.

However, there seems to be a universal law in France against efficiency "Hard Work: Illegal in Some Places"

the transportation was just one aspect of many gross inneficiency. It really bothered me while we were there, because it equates to paying more for somthing or spending more time doing something than necessary. Innefiecincy = lower standard of living. Gar.

donnamb 

Do you think the inefficiency could be less about a cultural problem and more about dealing with multiple needs in a place whose streets were not designed for motor vehicles to begin with? I'm assuming you're referring to the pre-automobile areas of Paris, of course. The other thing I wonder about is the barriers you refer to. Were they hindering all modes of transport, or just one or two?

acroy

It really seemed to be a cultural problem - everywhere we went, from the minute we landed, everything was inneficient. the airport security & customs: i think there might have been more officials walking around, chatting with each other, doing nothing, than travellers! the grocery stores, the hotel staff, the lady behind the ticket counters, the bus drivers, etc etc. slow & inneffectual. And even we, as peds, had some difficulty getting around due to odd placement of signs & footbridges, dissapearing sidewalks, etc

I sure appreciate the difficulty of making the infrastructure of an old city modern, but they could do a heckuva lot better. The Metro was good as far as availability & speed, but even on it, the cars seemed 30 years old and about to crumble, surrounded by stench. We only took it a few times, preferring to hike it aboveground & catch the sights.

To us, the city had a feel of rot, of slow decay, of slowly dissipating inertia. Like it's heyday was 200 years ago and it's been coasting, living on the memory of previous glory, ever since. It felt like the kind of city which has caused suburbs to grow.

At the risk of sounding stereotypical, the most efficient, friendly people we dealed with were immigrant Middle Easterners running sandwich stands & such. Man, they got you what you wanted, returned my Howdy with a smile & giggle, and went on to the next customer.

joelpalmer

as much as i support this idea in general, most us cities just aren't engineered for it. older cities like paris that existed pre-car are a lot more likely to have integrated neighborhoods, and the sooner we can get back to that style of development the better off we'll all be. (this was basically pounded into my head all last year studying public health, the single-use nature of most american neighborhoods: work, live, shop, not all in one place)

my.ark.4

Acroy, if you don't mind me asking, what language were you speaking? English or French? Or that funny English/French/Pointing and and grunting hybrid so loved by many tourists?

zoltani

Hmmmm, does sound like a cultural problem, but i think you need to rethink which culture has a problem. Maybe you are a bit egocentric, or maybe not, but i sounds like you had a problem with the city and the people "the minute you landed".
Sorry, but i had a wonderful experience with the border police/customs because as soon as i had my bag i was out the door, even though there were people "just standing around". When i land in the U.S. there is a maze of ropes to traverse, customs officials giving me hell even though i am a citizen, and people are still just standing around.
Maybe it is you who is used to a fast pace lifestyle, and the lifestyle of the french may seem slow to you.

Did you always greet the owner/worker of the shop you entered? Failing to do so will result in terrible service i will admit.

Can you please point to a city who replaces a metro car that is 30 years old? Are the streets paved with gold there? I know dallas has a great public transit system which never smells of piss or feces, but maybe that is because no one actually rides it. I am making a generalization because i have no idea what public transit is like in dallas.

Sorry to blast you like this, but when you sais "the minute we landed" i knew that here is another american tourist who has formed an opinion about a place and its people without experiencing it first. Of course nothing works out when you already have those notions in your head.

Do us all a favor and just stay in Texas, because we all know that it is the model of efficiency and politeness.

zoltani

Oh, and for your information a lot of european cities are banning cars from their city centers, but i guess you call this regression while widening the roads so we can get more cars on the roads would be progression?

"Widening roads to cure traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity."
can't remember ho to give credit for this quote.

TimJ

I was in Paris in the 90s when they had some big terrorist bomb scares. We went to bed the night before the threats and everything was normal. Next morning when we were up about... 7 or 8am I'd guess, after the bomb threats, every single public trash bin had a lid screwed onto it and every single public locker was locked and inaccessable. There were police patrolling everywhere and cops with submachine guns at every train station and major public gathering place. I say "every" because we covered about half the city that day and weren't just in the swank areas or anything. I think it's safe to assume the whole city was clamped down.

There was nothing inefficient about it. I doubt any US city could accomplish the same thing, even now.

Every morning the streets were cleaned, those public crapper things were clean no matter what neighborhood they were in, there were recycling bins all over, the trains ran on time... hell, I found most of the people quite nice as long as I tried to speak french to them. I held up a very busy boulangerie for maybe a minute (a lifetime, this place was cookin') trying to remember "half" (demi) and no one got upset, in fact they all got a kick out of it (in a nice way). I got sick our last couple days there and the old couple running our hotel were super sweet. When a couple of j.a.princesses were yelling at them "where's the eiffel tower honey?" they weren't so sweet, why would they be? Just as the conductor of the TGV was real helpful to us but wasn't interested in the dude who thought talking in english louder and slower would help.

Paris was awesome and I was absolutely amazed at how well the city worked. It's bizarre to me that it would strike you as inordinately inefficient.

Dahon.Steve

Rapid bus transit works very well when you have no intersection traffic. Otherwise, the bus will have to stop at each corner to observe traffic lights and grid lock! Rapid bus transit would work very well in a "Highway" type structure but you would have to create an exclusive lane for this to happen.

In cities like New York or Paris, Rapid bus transit will work better than what they have today but it will not match the Metro because the intersection traffic.

unkchunk

Hmmm. Maybe Paris should make the locals circumnavigate the Arc de Triomphe in a rent-a-car.

I don't understand this need to always manipulate people. If PR campaigns, higher taxes, driver fees, and fuel costs didn't work, then this obstruction technique won't work either. Face it, nothing seems to stop people who think cars are the problem from driving their cars.

That's why I favor the Dutch system. I read an article (sorry, don't have the link handy) where local Dutch politicians commuted by bike, even when they had to carry extreme work loads that warranted driving a car. They couldn't afford to be seen driving ever... and had a car following them with all the paper work when they rode their bikes. When the advocates in the media are expected to do the very thing they are advocating then things will change. Politicians, eco-scientists and celebrities who go on TV and tell us to drive less, and then continue to drive themselves... it's called wanking.

I mean that's all they gotta do.

makeinu

Not if the lights are triggered by the bus traffic. In other words, the light turns green as a bus approaches the intersection (let's say, as soon as the bus hits the prior corner the signal for the intersecting traffic turns yellow). Conflicting demands from intersecting buses could be handled with conventional traffic signaling, just as the NYC subway does for merging rail lines (or, in a more sophisticated implementation, the traffic light could give priority to the bus that is more lagging its schedule).

Of course it wouldn't guarantee that buses would never have to stop, but the places where bus lines intersect are usually the same places where people want to get on/off (either for transfers or just by virtue of the fact that popular destinations are well serviced). If they added a button at the bus shelter (kinda like those pedestrian crossing buttons, but one that actually works), then the traffic system could be smart enough to know to give the bus a red light if the bus is going to be stopping to pick-up/drop-off a passenger anyway.

In fact, even without exclusive lane use just allowing buses to trigger green lights would probably put bus transit on par with rail in the door to door sense since the users wouldn't have to travel 20-30 feet in/out of the ground as they do with underground rail systems. Moreover, it would provide tremendous flexibility. For example, either the traffic light system and/or the exclusive lane use could be in effect during peak hours, but not in effect during offpeak hours (or whatever the city's traffic engineers deem most appropriate).

Granted, it would take a little bit of technological infrastructure to put something like this in place, but dollar for dollar it should easily surpass any rail system (in fact, I'm pretty confident I could personally put together such a system reliably and securely using electronics at least as simple and cheap as those traffic cameras they're putting up everywhere to catch red light runners). It would even be extremely amenable to staggered development: traffic lights and buses could be equipped as funding allows. Buses/traffic lights which aren't equipped would simply operate as normal, but equipped buses approaching equipped traffic lights would simply appear to get lucky greens. The more equipped buses/traffic lights out there the more lucky they would get, until finally reaching full implementation where red lights would be a rare occurrence.

How long do you think people would follow behind buses in their cars to catch all the greens before they realize that they might as well just be riding on the bus?

You know, the more I think about this the better it sounds. I'm so pumped I might just write a proposal to the city.

Dahon.Steve

I like your idea of Rapid Bus Transit but with lightrail instead with a prepaid fare system. One of the things that slows bus transit down is the time it takes for everyone to put their change into the fare box. If everyone paid their fare before entering the bus, there would be very little wait time as people would just "walk" into the bus instead of trying to force crumpled dollars into an aging fare box.

I know Lightrail has very high startup costs but the trains don't have to be replaced as often as todays articulated bus which has an 18 year life span in general. In fact, Europe has lightrial cars still running since the 1940's! New York City doesn't have a single bus line running that's over 20 years old!

TimJ

So people who are on TV are responsible for everyone else's behaviour? If a celebrity is a hypocrite that... justifies? allows? regular people to not care about important things?

How is blaming public figures for the habits of regular people a system?

This has got to be one of the most ridiculous posts I've ever read.

bragi

I don't actually have first-hand experience with this, but I've been told by German relatives that in Switzerland, the buses have transmitters that make the lights turn green as they approach, so they don't have to stop at intersections. I'm sure it's sort of annoying for motorists, but if you're a bus rider it's probably very nice.

makeinu

Well, durability issues aside, there's no reason why buses can't be on a prepaid fare system. I'm sure you're aware that NYC and Long Island buses take NYC metrocards.....no reason why people can't be encouraged to use them by increasing the cost of a single trip fare.

You're right about rail being cheaper in the end, but cheaper isn't necessarily a good thing if it means you're going to have a smaller budget. The nice thing about a dual automobile/transit use system that mimicks the efficiency of a restricted use system is that you can get automobile drivers to pay for maintaining the roads. It may be devious, but the public is probably much more willing to accept higher taxes due to "road maintainence", even if most of the maintainence is due to public transit than they are to accept higher taxes that can be directly traced to a public transit project. You end up spending more, but you also end up having more to spend.

makeinu

BTW, the Federal Transit Administration seems to call this concept "signal priority":
https://www.fta.dot.gov/assistance/te...arch_4359.html

They even go one better by suggesting adding an extra lane at the intersection called a "queue jumper" to allow buses to get ahead of whatever cars might be waiting at a red light before switching the light green. In practice I would imagine that cars would end up blocking the queue jumper lane (some cars try to create their own queue jumper lanes out of road shoulders).

Looks like it's actually being implement in some "BRT" systems (so far I see Los Angeles....I'm looking at where else it has been implemented).

Roody

Better (for us) is the "green wave" of Copenhagen and a few other cities. The lights are timed to turn green for traffic going 22 kph --bicycle speed!

makeinu

The nice thing about that is that they apparently post signs advertising when you are in the green wave and speedometers to help you "ride the wave" (so to speak).

Here in the US speedometers are only used to tell people that they're being bad. Why can't we have more positive reinforcement like this? I know it's common for motorists to race to the next red light, but what if they knew for a fact that if they maintained their current speed that they wouldn't have to stop?

1ply

IIRC they've been doing that in Calgary for the past 20 years. There are signs overhead that show the speed you should be traveling to make the next green.

And wouldn't 22kph also work at 44kph? Or 66?

TRaffic Jammer

There is indeed an electronic system that can be added to buses to trip lights. Toronto was looking at it for their streetcars and buses in the city centre. This way the public transit can flow easily.

makeinu

Yeah, but that's Canada. You guys are "progressive"

People were saying this in the advocacy forum, but I don't see why this would be the case.

acroy

To defend myself, I am not "another american tourist who has formed an opinion about a place and its people without experiencing it first", my wife and I both learned some basic French before we went and did our best to get by on French only, gretting every person we met both in shops & on the street. We of course did our best not to be the stereotypical "ugly american", it's only common courtesy. Plus we had a secret weapon: a cute 1yr old baby in a backpack. We did get soem special treatment from that

Don't assume that because i criticised the city & some of it's people that I think Dallas is great, where'd that come from? The majority of the folks here are insane, willingly committing themselves to several hours a day in traffic. Nuts! I live & work in a burb & cycle on most of my trips.

Our experience went to show that stereotypes often have their roots in fact..... just as you assigned me & dallas a stereotype some truth exists in both.

btw, aside from all the above, I do recommend going there if any of you have a chance. I highly recommend staying in a hostel & walking the city! it's a small city, and by-and-large quite walkable. We have some awesome pictures and memories of the place.

cheers