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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

Except a boost in ridership is absolutely not what you’d want in an overpopulated city like Paris. Subway is so bad i’ve already witnessed people waiting for trains from outside the station itself.

in the peak hours you often have to skip two or three trains because they’re packed.

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Please don't take this as a general rule for the subway in Paris. While it is true that some lines (13 is infamous) at some hours are really packed, most of the time it is fine.

I was born in Paris and have lived there for 30+ years, and the vast majority of the time I can take the subway just fine.

if you work in IT chances are you’re going to the office a bit after peak hours and coming back home late.

13 is a mess indeed but 4 is also bad , 7 has a lot of trouble, 12 has crack addicts on the dock menacing passengers, etc..

i’m also born and raised in Paris, and lived there for 40 years, but once you take the subway in other crowded cities ( honk kong, tokyo, shanghai, sf , london, etc) you realize having a subway that smells urine and shit , has technical issues every single days, and simply can’t handle the population flow at all, isn’t « normal ».

We can live with it, the whole society has adapted to it, but i wouldn’t call the situation «fine».

Again, I disagree here.

I take the 4 all the time as it is right next to my place, without any issue. In fact I cannot even remember the last time it was packed.

I also traveled and did not find other subways to be considerably better in every aspect. Subway in Japan is horribly complicated for example, with different companies operating the various lines of some major cities! London's tube is known to be overcrowded as well, and I feel like technical issues happens everywhere but in Paris the driver actually tells you what's going on.

People like to romance what happens in Paris, don't be fooled, in reality it's just safe and fun in my opinion.

The alternative to a boost in ridership is a boost in car commutes. You want that even less in a city like Paris.

Only 30% of people have cars within Paris and public transport is cheap.

There is little point in making public transport free there. This is still money to be paid one way or another.

at this point, Paris needs to either massively transform itself ( higher buildings, larger roads, etc), which means destroying buildings in the center, like haussman did in the 19th century, or motivate people to just go live elsewhere.

Anne Hidalgo is actively working on the second point.

Paris is losing people because the lodging costs are too high anyway

> The alternative to a boost in ridership is a boost in car commutes.

Or walking... Do you walk a quarter mile or do you ride the bus? If the bus is free the number of able bodied people using the bus for trivial distances could increase.

The metro is full because people commute to their workplace. I don't think a significant fraction lives within walking distance of their job.

You might be inclined to move home to be within walking distance of your office, or to work from home sometimes, or to use the (very good) Velib bike hire scheme, or buy a bicycle or a motor scooter.

Metro rail is sexy, but it's only one part of the transport mix.

I move about almost exclusively by bike, but I realize that for many people it's not possible to live close enough to their workplace to do that comfortably. Also, Paris is a terrible city for cyclists (at least that's what it looks like in the videos I've seen) and it takes decades for infrastructure to be built up sufficiently for people to feel safe on a bike.

I think that making public transport free in an easy step on the way to a city that relies a lot less on cars. Of course making it more attractive to walk or cycle and more expensive to drive is very important too, but that requires a lot more work.

biking in Paris is worse than you think :

it’s dangerous because roads are very narrow ( so protected bike lanes are rare) and there’s a lot of traffic.

the bike city service got changed recently to include electric bikes and as a result nothing worked for months ( not sure it’s back to normal yet).

Even if you manage to get a bike there’s a very high chance your bike will have defects because people like to do stupid things with them, like getting down stairs, or hitting the curbs.

and finally, if you think about buying yourself a bike, expect to have it stolen on average once a year ( depending on its price).

"You might be inclined to move home to be within walking distance of your office"

Very few people would have this luxury in city like Paris, where housing is prohibitely expensive in the city center, where many offices are traditionally located.

And, before you say "You might be inclined to find a job where more affordable housing is available", many people do not have so much choice in terms of where to work (same as working from home).

You walk. Riding a bus means you have to wait for one first. A 5 minute walk isn't worth the wait unless there are extra conditions (no walkways, ice on the walkways, heat wave...).

No, but a fifteen or twenty minute walk or bike ride can lose out to a free bus. At least some walkers will be enticed onto the bus, which will require more capacity, which will then improve frequency, which will then attract some more walkers, rinse and repeat.

Above a certain frequency buses become extremely unreliable and dwell times start impacting travel time because bus stops only have so much room. With trains you have more room to work with, but once you run out the marginal cost of building new lines runs in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.

Not sure how the fee works in Paris to this demographic, but elder people will usually rather use the bus probably.

Alright, what if it's a mile or two? When I was a student I used to walk a few miles a day around town because I didn't want to pay for a transit pass. I was young, broke, healthy (and the walking helped me stay that way); I didn't particularly enjoy walking but liked walking more than I liked spending a dollar on a bus fair.

I don't think you can write off the decrease in foot traffic free public transit would cause.

That's exactly what paying for services is designed to avoid.

When services are made free, people have to wait longer, paying with their time instead of with money.

People who don't want to wait and are not given the choice of paying for faster service end up having to buy cars instead, making traffic worse for everyone.

I pine for the day when a viable arternative is just _working from home_. The technology has been available for at least a decade now. The resistance to remote work is social at this point, and it's stupid.

> in the peak hours you often have to skip two or three trains because they’re packed

What's the interval between trains at peak hours?

A few minutes.

I used to take the metro line 3 from station saint-lazare. At peak hours there was a train practically every minute. As soon as one train leaves another one enters the station a few seconds after. So I often did what parent said. skipping two or three trains isn't that bad when there that many trains.

try line 13

That is a line that I always try to avoid :). I was forced to use it for a short period of time, but I was lucky, I traveled only on the section from Montparnasse to Chatillion which, I think, is not as busy as the rest of the line because most passengers transfer to other lines at montparnasse.

i used to do place de clichy / st ouen at 7pm a long time ago, and i sometimes had to stay on the dock for 20 minutes letting train pass.

Then at least make it free for off-peak hours.

Paris had 2.9 million people in 1921 and 2.2 million today. Is it really overpopulated?

Your numbers are from the city of Paris. Most people riding in the metro during working rush hours are not from the city of Paris, but from the suburb. The suburb population in 1921 was 4.8 M in 1921 and 12.2 M in 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris#Historic...

The RER was created in the 60s for this purpose and continually expanded since, no?

The RER brings riders from the suburbs into the city, but doesn't add to the infrastructure for transporting them once they're in Paris.

There are RER stations within Paris: everything within zone 1 is in the city of Paris:

https://parismap360.com/carte/image/en/paris-rer-map.jpg

But even if cutting prices is within Paris only it will probably affect suburb-Paris traffic, because it changes the cost of a trip to Paris, possibly now cheaper than driving. The article is light on details, but it looks like these measures are taken by the city of Paris with the aim to reduce the traffic within the city.

The RER contains the western world’s busiest train line with over a million passengers a day. It’s become a victim of its own success. In fact moving block signalling was invented to boost capacity on the RER.

The government is currently investing $25B in building more relief capacity, but who knows how much investment you’d need to handle the unlimited travel demand caused by a free fare.

Just like Tokyo's density is actually lower than Paris, the elephant in the room is the number of people who commute to the city center every single day. That is the only metric that matters for transports.

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