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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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