In Paris, Plans for a Seine Reinvention (2015) | Hacker News Reader

In Paris, Plans for a Seine Reinvention (2015)

citylab.com

111 pointsrch34 comments

The article is from over a year ago in May 2015. This BBC article from a few months ago in May of 2016 confirmed that by the end of this summer they are still planning to reserve a portion of the Right Bank only for pedestrians and there is also a map to mark the area that will be blocked off from cars.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36169815

I don't see any more recent updates and this August 15th article with quotes from Mayor Anne Hidalgo is the most recent confirmation I've found that the work is ongoing:

http://pejnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article...

There have been some updates today: a commission has just finished to investigate the outcomes and given a negative assessment, but the mayor of Paris has stated that she will not follow the advice of the commission and carry on implementing the plan to reserve a portion for pedestrians.

Source (in French): http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2016/08/22/la-commissi...

The sections on Rive Gauche that they have turned into pedestrian areas are really quite pleasant - and traffic hasn't suffered so much.

Also slated is turning place de la bastille into pedestrian only square, and potentially opening the monument to public visit - amongst seven other pro-pedestrian plans: http://www.la-croix.com/France/Sept-places-parisiennes-parti...

There is some public criticism, after Place de la Republique was 'transformed' recently - the traffic was reduced, but the entire square is now a tree-less concrete block.

>the entire square is now a tree-less concrete block

There need to be reasons for people to come into an area--often cafes, etc.

In Boston, City Hall Plaza is notorious. It's a barren wind-swept brickyard for much of the year. At one point, there was a part-time farmers' market around the fringes in the summer but it's generally very underutilized space.

There is trees on the Republic place. Not much, but there is some.

~100 trees according to this awesome map http://opendata.paris.fr/explore/dataset/arbresalignementpar...

For those who are unfamiliar with the city of Paris' strategy on transport, what they are trying to achieve is to create the maximum amount of traffic jam so that people stop using cars out of frustration. Other means include multiplying bus lanes, bicycle lanes, etc. The outcome is an over-congested and polluted Paris.

Are you suggesting that reducing the number of cars in Paris will somehow increase pollution?

It's actually the outcome. The same car will take a lot more time to make the same distance, polluting a lot more than if it was flowing quickly.

No it's not. Study after study has shown that building more roads doesn't speed up cars it just increases the number of cards and reducing roads doesn't slow down cars it just decreases the total number.

hmm I could see it being the case that each individual car contributes more to the pollution, but if the total number of cars is reduced in a given area at any given time, it makes more sense to me that the aggregate pollution would decrease, no?

It doesn't turn out this way. People don't rigidly stick to their cars when road capacity reaches its physical limits. As driving becomes less desirable, people adjust their behaviour. They drive less and use alternatives.

it sounds more like s/he is a disgruntled car-owning Parisian. clearly the old paradigm wont go gently into the night. his isn't even a difficult position to empathize with, considering the inconveniences caused by measures like this. ultimately, these inconveniences will be addressed by the market (supply/demand) or by other government directives. until 'not owning a car' is MORE convenient than owning one, we will continue to see this kind of commenter.

most of the disgruntled car-owning Parisian are actually from the suburbs anyway...

I don't even live in France...

In that specific case, they plan to close the only road that allows to cross the centre of Paris smoothly (no red light, can be driven in 4th/5th gear all the way). Even if the number of cars decreases a lot, since the only alternative path is streets that are full of traffic lights and already quite jammed, the remaining cars will pollute much more. I'm not sure that this will help decrease pollution in the mid-term.

> since the only alternative path is streets that are full of traffic lights and already quite jammed

Well, you can't fit more car into an already jammed street, so maybe fewer people will cross the center if it is much harder to do so?

The pollution of cars is nothing compared to coal pollution comming from Germany: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/sue-landau/blog/170314/german-coa...

or maybe not http://reneweconomy.com.au/2015/nuclear-isnt-the-only-energy...

The outcome is an over-congested and polluted Paris.

No, the proposed changes aren't the "cause" of congestion and pollution. Rather, they're caused by too many people driving cars (when they don't really need to) in the first place.

Join the club.

San Francisco is already well on its way towards the same goal.

SF is easily the most car-hostile city in the US, by far.

Lately they've upped the ante with a set of absurd red transit-only lanes on Mission St.[1] that prevent other vehicles from more than a few blocks of passage, forcing the non-transit vehicular traffic to take side streets.[2][3]

This is in addition to the constant removal of street parking spaces, replacement of parking spots with parklets, the constant addition of bulbouts, medians and traffic islands and a variety of other traffic "calming" measures you didn't even knew could be legally deployed on American surface roads.[4]

You don't need to be an urban planner to see where this is headed.

Eventually, SF wants to be able to make the city mostly a public transit only city with whole neighborhoods that are pedestrian only. Bike lanes will be taking up the rest of the street acreage.

I bet these changes will be coming to your city sooner than later, depending on the amount of resistance they confront.

That much is a given.

[1]

http://i.imgur.com/ElD7ILi.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/jbu0fg4.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/tNHrkxa.jpg

[2]

https://www.sfmta.com/about-sfmta/blog/mission-street-rapid-...

[3]

http://sf.curbed.com/2016/8/18/12540620/mission-locals-grill...

[4]

http://sf.curbed.com/maps/mapping-all-43-awesome-san-francis...

http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-new-view-of-Twi...

http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/01/13/dismissing-sffds-irrati...

http://sf.streetsblog.org/2012/10/18/sfmta-reveals-strategy-...

65000 people take those buses every day, while those lanes carry a tiny fraction of that traffic in private cars. I think we should just close Mission to cars entirely. Yeah we'd lose, what, 60 parking spaces? That seems like a great trade to me.

> Eventually, SF wants to be able to make the city mostly a public transit only city with whole neighborhoods that are pedestrian only. Bike lanes will be taking up the rest of the street acreage.

And what's so bad about this? I much rather prefer living in a city with mostly public transit and no cars. Air is cleaner, there's less noise and it's healthier to walk than be stuck in traffic.

Paris main problem is population density and no high buildings. but you have to see this plan as a part of the "great paris" project aimed at making Paris merge better with its suburb. And hopefully have people not travel theough Paris if they don't need to stop inside.

Paris is a high-density city by Western standards. It's either the highest-density city in Europe or close, depending on how exactly you demarcate cities. We often have discussions here about how San Francisco needs to densify, but Paris has 3x the population density of SF, so is nowhere near in the same league of low-density cities. It's 50% denser than Brooklyn. Of American cities / sub-city regions, only Manhattan edges it out (Manhattan is 30% more dense).

The city of Paris ("intra-muros") is actually the densest capital in the Western world.

American cities have much higher towers, but then they waste the space around those towers on car parking.

Paris does it better.

They'll still be a prime location for action movie scenes I hope.

You can't have a Paris car chase and gun battles without zooming along the Seine sans traffic

This is partly in response to Paris briefly being one of the most polluted cities in the world[1] by some measures last year. But generally, it seems Paris fares slight better than Los Angeles & Amsterdam and slightly worse than London and NYC[2].

[1] http://www.france24.com/en/20150320-paris-city-smog-pollutio...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/dec/02/where-world-m...

Paris is built in a valley with Montmartre to the north and Montparnasse to the south. When the winds die down for more than a few days being in the city really sucks. All the diesel particulates just sit their. Like you can feel the smog and particulates accumulating on your skin.

You can't reasonably say that Paris is in a valley because of two small hills (altitude 130m, only 100m above the lowest point of Paris). When there is no wind pollution accumulate everywhere.

Paris is in a very good position for pollution: in a middle of a plain, not very far from sea with a regular wind from west.

A parisian enthousiast for every non-car policy !!!

You can expect measures like this to intensify around Europe, thanks to the software engineers at WV and Audi.

If cities can't trust carmakers to be honest about the emissions their products make, then they're going to work harder to kick cars out altogether.

FYI, this is from 2015.

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