Paris to Create 650 Kilometers of Post-Lockdown Cycleways
forbes.com
forbes.com
I'm from the Netherlands and I see there's a serious effort in France, but before they build anymore they really need to get some experience into the design. Much of the infra barely helps having a safe and comfortable commute like we have back home.
Totally a political promise made by the kind of people who think subway tickets cost 5€ and only use official cars that comes with driver and parking.
I hate cars in Paris as much as anyone, but they are required in a number of cases and this measure will hugely impact negatively the mid-class and poors that needs to commute to Paris for work, while not impacting the (very) richs that can live in the center.
It's also critical to have a strong urban planning policy that allows people to live near to where jobs and transport hubs are. Suburbs inherently advantage car owners (and, consequently, the richer people that can afford to own a car).
[1] See, for example, data from the UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
Also subway cost 35€ a month (well, 70 if you're not working), or ~20 a week if you're a tourist (unless you take one-use ticket, but don't do that, especially if you arrive by the airport). One-use ticket if you stay within Paris last 2 hours and cost ~2€, but it is more expensive if you're not actually in Paris (i think its 15€ from CDG to the center).
Indeed.
It's a similar experience in the UK where a lot of the bike paths seemed designed to meet council goals rather than be usable.
Near me we have several stretches of dedicated bike paths, sadly unconnected between them and one leads into a fence (I wish I were making it up, though to be charitable maybe the project run out of money before they could complete it)
No doubt the council congratulated themselves on building ~ 1.5 miles of bike paths that year.
Cars, of course, pull up to wait in the cycleway, without looking.
So not only is it pointless because it's not a busy road, it's also extremely dangerous.
When motorists are beeping at me, I take it as a beautiful fanfare to celebrate 'safety achieved' hurray hurray you can see me!
Seeing them, I usually can't help but imagine that every one is the chalk outline of another cyclist fallen victim to such a pathetic excuse for infrastructure.
Other countries never seem to take the shortcut to a proven, optimal design. Not Invented Here syndrome.
So yeah, there's a lot of improvement to be made with simple changes like this. I hope they seize the opportunity.
I cannot wait for internal combustion engines in cities to die out.
Maybe to stop from swallowing flying insects?
I don't understand how this happens. I haven't lived in other countries, but don't they bump into pedestrians or other cars if they open the door without looking?
I've had accidents, and many more near-accidents because of this. Indeed, I'd never even considered that people actually just swinging open their doors onto bike lanes was a thing to watch out for until I moved to France.
Must say Paris is better (less pressed) than Lyon (where I lived), and therefore a calmer ride.
The dutch reach is just opening your door with the opposite hand you normally would, which forces you to rotate your body and look back where a cyclist would be coming from.
In the US getting hit with a car door from someone not paying attention is appropriately called "getting doored" and is pretty far up there in things to look out for when biking!
Some good examples of new bike infrastructure are Boulevard Sébastopol from Gare de l'Est to Chatelet, and rue Rivoli. Both of those streets are a delight to bike on, as they are straight, the path is wide, and it is clearly separated from both motorists and pedestrians.
Let's hope they follow that kind of design for new infrastructure. Since it's a plan already on-going, I'm not too worried. We'll just have to live with existing bad infrastructure for a while.
Most people seem fine with this arrangement, we're pretty used to tight spaces, for people, cars, motorcycles and bicycles. Maybe this lane is only fine because we don't have as much bicycle traffic as Amsterdam or Copenhagen, but seems to work well right now.
I think that's pretty reasonable. Most lanes in the UK are just the paint, without the plastic armadillos, and usually without the extra 30cm width.
Here is Berlin, but also just temporary for now: https://www.cdu-friedrichshain-kreuzberg.de/image/news/238.j... (in other areas parking cars in between road and cycle way)
We even invented "cyclist suggestion paths" ("fietssuggestiestroken" colloquially referred to as "paths of shame" (schaamstroken) [1]), which are not cycling lanes as they explicitly allow cars to ride on them, but just a color painted onto the right hand side of the car lane to advice cyclists not to ride side-by-side (which is their right within inner-city limits) but ride on the narrow painted strip behind each other, So this is an anti-cycling measure, and it still is counted as "cycling infrastructure".
[1] https://fietsbult.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/moscou7c.jpg
Over here cars honk, even if 2 cyclists take only 1/2 a lane of 2 same-direction lanes and <5 cars pass in a minute. OTOH, if you ride the same, except the sheltered cyclist isn't there, they don't make a fuss even in moderate traffic - they just don't like you talking.
The French city where I live (Lyon) also has some ambitious cycle way plans, though these have been in development since well before COVID-19.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
https://news.yahoo.com/sunlight-destroys-coronavirus-very-qu...
That seems to suggest we'll have more crowded roads with reduced capacity (due to the added cycleways); maybe I'm being too pessimistic though, and we'll see a big switch to WFH.
Cars were in surge too at that time mostly for people not living inside Paris but needing to go inside, since the distance plus less bike lanes in the cities around makes bikes impractical for that use case. That's likely to happen again, sadly there is no good way to solve both inside-inside and inside-outside street sharing at the same time...
The goal of course is to have people actually use the cycleways, which should increase capacity: you can fit multiple cyclists in the space used by a single car driver.
As to a move to cars: if cycling becomes faster than public transport, adding bicycle lanes could speed up car commutes because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs–Thomson_paradox (“the equilibrium speed of car traffic on a road network is determined by the average door-to-door speed of equivalent journeys taken by public transport“)
Having a fantastic cycling infrastructure didn't help us here in the Netherlands. We have one of the highest death rates in Europe.
This is tending to the needs of the rich.
There's slightly higher car and public transport use in the winter, but most people don't stop cycling.
> as a cyclist myself,
Also, people here don't identify themselves like that. Just like people don't say "I'm a driver" unless it's their job to drive a bus, taxi or truck.
I cycle to work, but it's not part of my identity.
(disclaimer: am Dutch)
Granted, I am chiefly getting this impression from what was sold in the sports sections of clothing shops in downtown Helsinki when I was a student there, and perhaps most of the native Finnish population finds that clothing just as unaffordable as I did as a poor foreigner.
The problem with the American South is not just heat but humidity, but again, the challenges that they and people in similar climatic regions face are not universal.
In many places, just cyclying for 5 km can get you out of your breath and sweating. I can think of many of such scenarios in the south of Spain.
My commute has been a short bicycle ride to work for most of the previous decade, and I still sweat to the point where I feel uncomfortable if I don't shower afterwards.
Why would you need to carry a backpack? A bike can carry panniers on a back rack.
You don't have to be sporty at all, but once you cycle at least once per week > 10 miles, your perception of bike paths changes quite considerably.
The main reason bike paths in the Netherlands are so great is because they work well for untrained people, using it as a means of transport.
The majority of risky cycling here comes riding during rush hour in heavy traffic. Cycle lanes are a great investment IMHO.
”snowfall is somewhat of a rarity in Paris. Although there is at least a dusting of snow about 15 days a year, most accumulation generally disappears within 24 hours. The highest snowfall ever recorded in one day was 40 cm (15.75 in) on 2 March 1946“
Also, if there’s a meter of snow and ice on the bike lanes, there’s a meter of snow and ice on the car lanes, too.
Are those unusable in winter, too? Probably not, as they get cleared. That can be done with bike lanes, too (https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/tag/snow/)
Plus, rainy weather can be predicted pretty accurately with some investment. NL/BE have realtime notifications for incoming rainfall. And at least in NL the weather is extremely volatile (no mountains). Countries with more stable weather can surely do the same.