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Comment by awjr | Hacker News Reader

What I think this demonstrates is something that a lot of cities are waking up to. The car is not a friend of the urban landscape.

A lot of cities are now prioritising walking/cycling/public transport over the ability to drive anywhere and everywhere and this is having a profound effect on health and well being of their residents. It is hard though.

Events like this show what is possible.

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I think it's possible, but one time events are misleading, in my opinion. People use exceptional measures that are not sustainable in the long term - out here, some people even took a vacation day when our cities did the "day without cars".

The issue is one of persuasion. By having these days it gives local authorities the ability to demonstrate what is possible and makes actual implementation of smaller leaps (e.g. segregated cycle tracks) easier to swallow.

If no cars is the goal, how are segregated cycle tracks a leap in the right direction?

Cars are local optima. In a 100% car city you need a lot of car infrastructure and there is pressure to keep building more. In a 25% car city the pressure switches to maximizing other modes of transit, but as long as 98% car city is worse it's really hard for cities to make that jump.

PS: It's really a lot like social networks, dropping G+ vs Facebook is really more a question of which your friends spend time on not which one has better software.

Because it is not about "removing" the car, but making it the most difficult thing to use vs any other type of transport. For example, you can make the most direct route to a place via bike or walking, but if you use a car you have to use the ring road to get from one side of the city to the other. You enable cars to go into a city, but not through a city.

The other issue is that people equate the idea that people can walk and cycle together. This is really uncomfortable for walkers. You need to segregate space for each type of transport.

The mayor or Paris and her council are thinking of doing more of days like this one, and to extend the perimeter to include the entirety of Paris.

https://twitter.com/Anne_Hidalgo/status/648850877189627904 - very roughly "The day without cars is going to happen again in 2016 and we'd like it to be applied to the entirety of Paris"

https://twitter.com/Anne_Hidalgo/status/648851305612640256 - very roughly "We could consider days without cars happening more often. We're thinking of a monthly occurrence maybe"

An event like this is important as an eye opener, to show the citizens that there are alternatives to the current car focused city. If enough people like the alternative version, it will be easier to make reforms to reduce traffic in the future.

Yeah thats the thing. It takes me 3 times as long to get to work without a car as with one. I can live with that, because I can read on the bus and don't have to pick up kids.

If I had to be home with somebody though? Fuck that shit. Plus I hate spending time with strangers, so I much prefer being in my car rather than on public transport.

Cycle.

Takes as long as the bus, because I have to change and shower when I get there and I have to have spare clothing if/when it rains.

Besides I didn't spend a ton of money on a drivers license (they are really expensive in Denmark) to Cycle.

Try an e-bike. It should let you coast into work at 15-20mph without working a sweat. Rent one if you can to try it out.

Exactly, we used to have those every year in Montreal. Downtown would be completely closed for motor vehicles.

The first year, it was so refreshing, people were smiling and relaxing. Then the next year people started to get pissed as they realised blocking cars from going somewhere would not magically spawn buses and metro stations. The year after they reduced the perimeter, then the schedule, then the perimeter again, to a point where it is now rather pointless.

It is now this day of the year when you might be late at work because they closed a few blocks and put some grass and electric car demonstrations on that street that is almost always pedestrian anyways.

Totally agree. Helps to point out how much we've been subsidizing personal auto use - mainly by not charging user fees enough to cover all costs of driving.

That's the thing. In the UK the cost to the NHS (UK Free Healthcare) is not costed into the price people pay at the fuel pump. I believe revenue from Car Tax/Fuel/VAT is about £48 billion, however the cost to the country is calculated at about £70 billion.

+ 28 billion quid spent on roads.

The calculation isn't so simple. The use of cars may enable additional business. If that leads to an additional £50 billion in tax revenue, then it would be worthwhile, from a bookkeeping perspective.

On the other hand, more pedestrian traffic also may enable additional business, as people are more likely to wander in and out of shops, and they aren't competing for limited parking availability.

Cycle Lanes have a similar impact. Cars go from A to B. Walking/Cycling goes via A to B via CDEF. Some studies have shown significant (150%) increases in business when they have been introduced.

What about the pollution, road maintenance, time spent commuting, and accidents? I think you are making a similar argument to taxpayers footing the bill for stadiums.

I wasn't being complete, only saying that it's not a simple calculation.

Only on the basis that if cars were banned that commerce would not take place, which is unlikely.

Strictly speaking, that is not true, as Venice and Mackinaw Island demonstrate.

That was my point. If there are no cars people find other ways to do business.

Ahh, I read 'which is unlikely' as referring to 'cars were banned' not 'commerce would not take place'. My apologies.

If you're interested in more discussion on this, Robin Chase, founder of ZipCar, often comments on the actual/total cost of operating a car

AAA puts it around $10k/yr for USA

Well, to be fair Paris has an excellent subway/suburban train network

So it makes it feasible to go to Paris intramuros from anywhere pretty much

But is it easy enough to park your car outside of the city ?

I think the whole point is precisely to make it impractical to own or rely on a car.

Or more precisely that you do not need to own a car to live in the city. That does not mean you should not have access to one through a car share programme or cheap car rental.

Roll on self-drive cars!

Its Paris, cars there get burned pretty often. It already can't be cheap or easy to have a car in Paris, people probably have them because they are worth it, which means the alternatives suck. Make them not suck.

> It already can't be cheap or easy to have a car in Paris, people probably have them because they are worth it, which means the alternatives suck.

The public transportation system in Paris is excellent, maybe the best in Europe. Using a car in Paris, in the city center, has a lot more to do with status. It's harder to fix that.

Depends, looks like some RER stations have parking available, from a quick googling

But lots of people live in a walkable/bikeable distance from a station

Paris is definitively livable without a car. The RER, trolley, metro and bus network is so dense that it absolutely makes no sense to use a car (this is far more longer, dangerous and stressful to use a car), even when you live in suburb. I do live in Paris suburb. People just got very bad habits, but they could manage to change it through education and state promotion like this day. This day was not enough though, and it should be a reccurent event, I mean not yearly but monthly or something.

> But lots of people live in a walkable/bikeable distance from a station

In paris itself yes, but if you live in the suburbs last time I was in paris there weren't really large and convenient parking options on the outskirt of the city itself, so you couldn't trivially leave your car and hop in the underground or a bus.

More than this, even if you live quite far from Paris, there is this very dense network of buses and RER (suburb trains) that always makes possible to join the center of Paris easily. It sometimes costs a bit of walking, but it is not that hard.

Yeah you should try it when you're 70 years old, disabled, or it's 3am.

Oh man, you are the first person to bring up the elderly and disabled. I bet we can't figure that out at all so we better not try.

Or, municipalities continue to provide on demand transit using small vans to the elderly and disabled, since no one said there can't be exemptions to the car free rules.

Perfect so now you still need perfectly functioning roads and traffic infrastructure, but only use it at 1% capacity while the public transports are completely over-capacity.

Come on, can't you imagine that people would CHANGE their habits if their environment changed? We wouldn't make the same kind of choices about where to go, where to put businesses, how to move around, etc.

And besides, it's not like Paris doesn't have a precedent of the state forcefully changing the physical landscape of the city, although it may not be too popular with some: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...

Incentives matter, but the effect is never what you want.

Put more bicycle lanes up and people will buy mopeds (which polutes like crazy), or take jobs elsewhere, or something else crazy.

A good example is probably Australia where they made helmets mandatory for adults on bicycles. So many more people choose to take their car that the number of saved lives were offset by the amount of exercise lost.

I know that there are unintended consequences of everything. You have to have the courage to reevaluate your choices, not just make a change once and then be done forever.

A sizeable fraction of people who were biking regularly chose to switch to cars rather than wear a helmet?

That's extraordinary, I'm not saying it didn't happen but it astonishes me.

Cycling in Australia dropped by about 2% between 2011 and 2013. [1] The biggest issue with helmet laws though is that they significantly neuter bike share programs because people don't want to cary a helmet or use a shared helmet.

[1] page 26 http://www.cycle-helmets.com/cps-2013.pdf

So, helmet laws are actually a terrible example of "effects aren't what you want", at least, it's a terrible example if the implication is that we are getting an effect that we don't expect. Now, it's possible that the legislators didn't understand this, but cycling advocates were and are well aware that helmet laws cause reduced bicycle use. Here's an article with sources which claims to be from 2006, the website copyright notice is 2013, so at the very least, it's from right around when Australia implemented it's helmet law. http://bicycleaustin.info/laws/helmet-laws-bad.html

If the only vehicles using the road are public transit vans, we can clearly reduce the size of roads and the infrastructure. The vastly reduced wear and tear on the roads would free up government money for investment in public transit.

Multi-modal transport is the goal. Car-free isn't the goal. It's a push to get people to consider alternatives where possible.

The stable state in the future may simply be less roads (reclamation into parks/walk/cycling usage)

Making one mode artificially suck is not the right way to go about it. City bikes (Velib) were an awesome initiative and I use them every day, not because I don't want to use a car, simply because it's the best mode for most of my movements. The goal should be to have a wide array of choices and let people choose the best mode for their needs and their means, not to choose for them.

When you're sufficiently old, disabled, or sleepy, driving isn't such a good idea either.

They're not necessarily the one driving. Have you never driven for your old parent/grandparent ?

It also works at 3am, lots of buses.

It's also easy to use the River Seine as an artery to walk anywhere in the core of Paris. You can quite easily move between the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th arrondissements by walking the Seine and taking one of the many bridges to get where you want to go. The Seine is the real car free (well, not entirely but it's geared for walking and cycling) highway for pedestrians.

I was in Paris last week. On Monday, trying to head to the airport from Porte de Clichy (on the 13 line), I failed to board two subway trains in succession. They were so jam-packed with people I could not physically get on the cars. It was not for lack of effort: I have ridden the Tokyo subway during rush hour, so I am not shy.

After two failed attempts, I left the station and caught a taxi.

I am not saying Paris does not have a very good train system compared to many places, but it seems to me it would not be so easy to expect it to handle all of the people who currently drive.

Atlanta has started doing something similar on Peachtree called Atlanta Streets Alive [1]. There is also a BeltLine project to connect the city for pedestrians and bikes plus they have festivals along it from time to time. Its built from an old railroad line [2]. Even though our public transportation isn't robust if you live close like I do its easy to get downtown on the train.

[1] http://www.atlantastreetsalive.com [2] http://beltline.org/about/the-atlanta-beltline-project/atlan...

Streets alive moves around the city, not just on peachtree. Really cool project in my opinion.

I sure many cities (European) have realized this for quite some time. London has had a congestion charge for over a decade, for example.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge

In Europe gas has been made expensive and mass transit has always been recommended. In the US only one major city has sufficient mass transit so you don't need a car.

I suspect there are more cities than just Boston where you can get around without a car. What about NYC?

I meant NYC.

Dane here. We have the most expensive gas in the world and the most expensive cars in the world. We still mostly drive (we do bicycle a lot compared to the US, yes, but we still drive a ton), just in older or smaller cars.

Why? Because cars are awesome. They go exactly from where you want to where you want to go, when you want, 24h a day and you can always get a seat, if music is being played, it is your choice of music.

That is basically everything public transportation is not. Given how little time people think they have, they will always prefer cars.

> We have the most expensive gas in the world

No you don't. It's currently more expensive in Germany, Britain, Ireland, Norway, ...

Car tax is very high, but I think it's even higher in Vietnam -- around 150%.

http://benzinpreis.de/international.phtml?kontinent=EU&s=2

Houston does this every year in the Fall; we close a street or two off to cars for a few hours one Sunday a month. There are food trucks and vendors and from personal experience I'd say attendance is moderate at one or two thousand, not tens of thousands a street festival will enjoy.

If a car-crazy town like Houston can do it surely Paris with their amazing metro could do so much better. Considering the effect a single day of no cars has on their air quality and the allegation that diesel cars are much more polluting and fuel consuming than previously thought, perhaps Paris will moot electric only cars in the core?

Houston's Streets.

    October 4 -- Washington Avenue, 12 to 4 p.m., Washington Ave between Heights Blvd. and Westcott Street
    November 1 -- Museum Park, 12 to 4 p.m., Caroline between Binz and Wentworth and Binz between Caroline and Chenevert
    December 13 -- Midtown, 12 to 4 p.m., Smith between Elgin and West Gray and West Gray between Smith and Valentine

There is an unfortunate difference between theory and practice, however.

My local council keeps promoting healthy commuting and walking for leisure.

At the same time the roads service, which operates at a national level, just 'upgraded' a local intersection and replaced one single pedestrian crossing across the road with three, each independent and spanning a short gap between islands.

Until all agencies are coordinated in promoting pedestrianism, walkers will continue to feel third-class.

Also you'll note that when you push the button as a pedestrian it can take up to 3 minutes for it to change. I find this exceptionally inefficient. You get pedestrians chancing to cross and then the lights change.

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