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.