Originally Posted by
unterhausen
Traffic in Paris was scary, hopefully it's better now. Seems to me that there are still plenty of cars, but they have reallocated the space to fit the number of users for each mode of traffic. I don't know why they haven't done the same in NYC before now, there is far too much space allocated to suburban New Jerseyites who treat the place like an amusement park.
My wife is Parisian, her family is still there, and she has a split position between a university here and a research center there, so we spend part of the year there. There's still a lot of car/truck/bus traffic but since the speed limit was reduced and the expansion of bike lanes, there's been a tremendous increase in ordinary utilitarian everyday cycling. When we first moved there a couple of decades ago, all of my wife's friends and coworkers thought I was nuts for riding in the city. I avoided the few bike lanes that existed at the time and just rode in the street with the cars. It used to be that the only people who rode in Paris were either very poor or else very crazy (e.g., Americans). Especially since Hidalgo (starting before but noticeably accelerating under Hidalgo) bike infrastructure has vastly improved and now not only many of my wife's colleagues ride to work, but so does my wife: she has commuted by bike to campus for years here in the US, but started commuting to her campus in Paris by bike only since the expansion of the bike lanes. Before, she'd never ride in Paris; since Hidalgo, she's been riding across to the other side of the city to visit her parents and friends.