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Comment by 0wis | Hacker News Reader

Living in Paris here, I can’t agree more with this decision. The whole city is very walkable, everything is within a 30min bike ride if you’re sporty enough. And the public transport is definitely world class if you can’t bike.

However this is very polarizing in France because living space is very costly within the city. And it will not decrease as building any residential space may imply destroying an historical building and disfigure the skyline. Therefore, middle and lower class, needed to run a city like this are pushed to live in the suburbs. Where public transport is not as good as in the city center, so people need cars... I hope this decision will help find solutions to solve this inextricable problem, which might be the challenge of the decade for the city of love.

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The number of metro stations is too big, they are so close that taking 1 stop ride is meaningless, walking is as fast. This makes metro very slow. But the number of RER lines is very low. Both are not very reliable - I mean the number of nines in 99.[here]%. I'm not even sure it's above 99% in Paris. Other than the strikes, I've had more problems with metro/subways in a year here than over 17 years in Moscow. Random unannounced station closures, someone forgets things on a station and a line stops for an hour, etc. And the strikes are a bad joke, why are they legal!? With the strikes, average reliability is < 95%.

I really like how NYC has local/express sharing the same infrastructure. Manhattan has near the same height as Paris (Peripherique), yet it's possible to travel all the distance with 5 or so stops.

> why are they legal

Worker strikes arent something you can legislate away unless you're going to start forcing people to work, which is, uh, let's say widely frowned upon.

If you want to end strikes, you'll need to convince workers that showing up is in their interest.

In Denmark you're only allowed to strike under certain circumstances, and primarily strikes happen every three years when collective agreements between unions and employers needs to be renewed.

This makes strikes a rare happening, and usually very predictable.

See: https://tema.3f.dk/bjmfimmigrant/new-in-denmark/are-you-allo...

Banning striking need not involve forced labor. See the US government's response to federal employees striking: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Con...

Sure, but the original question was why is striking legal. Firing people for striking isn't the same as criminalizing it.

If you're responding to my statement of "can't legislate it away", then I suppose yes you're right that is an example of being able to do that and I should have worded that differently, but the key there is that it only works if your threat convinces the workers to return. Which, according to that Wikipedia article, it didn't entirely and their staffing levels didn't fully recover for a decade.

When your employer is the government and you can vote out your bosses, why do you need a union and strikes?

Your premise is wrong because there are many people in the voting population who do not work for the government, let alone as members of the same working group. E.g, a bus drivers union can't on their on their own dictate who the mayor is.

The metro in Paris had an objective of more than 96.5% of reliability in 2018 according to https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/paris_75056/du-rer-b-ligne-13-... (in French)

All lines fulfilled this objective except line 4, with 96.1%

AS for RER, there is an official governemental website that gives the numbers: http://www.qualitetransports.gouv.fr/les-chiffres-de-la-ponc... (in French) The most reliable one in 2020 is the A with about 94% of reliability and the worst one was RER B in March, with 78.9%.

All these numbers are very very low, when you consider that this is essentially how Parisian are supposed to go to and from work, get food, go to school, the dentist and so on.

The best RER gets you late around 1 every 20 trip. So once every 2 weeks on average if you count two trips per day. The worse one doesn't get you on time almost every other day !

You basically have to factor the unreliability of the transport system every single trip. This is very far from something you can count on. Even for the best lines.

> this is essentially how Parisian are supposed to go to and from work, get food, go to school, the dentist and so on

How so ? Except for work, all the other thing you describes are basically at a walkable distance. And you also have a lot of buses.

As someone living in NYC I can attest that the local/express lines are great. But I'd kill for 95% reliability! The on-time performance in NYC is somewhere around 80% and likely to get worse with the huge budget issues NYC will have post-COVID.

Keep in mind that the Paris metro has 0% reliability if you need to ride it between 2AM and 5:30AM. Or rather it is 100% reliably not running during those hours. NYC could probably boost those numbers if they could do track maintenance during guaranteed non-running hours.

NYC can already do that: it's not uncommon for express lines to be shut down overnight for work to be completed, for example.

(the entire system is shut down overnight right now anyway)

I was talking about the scheduled time - when it must work, but it doesn't.

What do you mean by "on-time performance"? I lived for 6 months in Manhattan on 112th and it worked fine. Probably one or two times my station was closed in the morning and I had to walk down to the next one.

And as someone who lived in Moscow for a long time I can attest it is the gold standard. It's the second busiest (or top-3) and just always works as scheduled. One rare thing one could rely on that comes from the government.

The NYC Subway has a timetable, except no one gives a shit because it has very little relation to real life.

That’s pretty strange though, I don’t think I’ve seen a subway with a time table before. It’s too frequent for it to matter in the first place, you just need to know when the next train towards your destination is coming!

It has a timetable primarily because

- due to all the merging in and out throughout the system, trains need to be in the right place at the right time or merging delays will cascade throughout the system

- for purposes of employee scheduling, you need to make sure that the right employees are in the right place at the right time; generally a train leaving a terminal is being driven by a crew that had to come in from somewhere else.

It's also still useful as a general approximation for "how long should I expect to wait for the next train". Same with the bus lines.

Isn't that a different idea than a timetable? "We're aiming for one train every 10min" and "there's a train at 12.10, 12.20, 12.30" are similar, but not quite the same. You can get your approximation without a timetable though.

Tracked vehicles require centralised traffic management and scheduling as they cannot casually overtake one another as street traffic can, and setting switching points and clearing control blocks is required for safety.

Passengers transferring to other lines or transit modes may also appreciate predictability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralized_traffic_control

Available at https://new.mta.info/schedules

If you dont have one, how do you measure performance of the system?

Various approaches.

One could make the argument that a train showing up ten minutes late vs one on time doesn't really matter to a person so long as it shows up within a reasonable time of them getting to the station and it still takes them to their destination on time. If the headways are five minutes and every single train is running at the same speed just five minutes late, this is a distinction that doesn't matter to the passenger.

> too frequent

Depends on the line and destination.

Info from the MTA here:

https://www.mta.info/press-release/nyc-transit/new-full-year...

I regret to inform you that the NYC subway has many more problems than you experienced. Before the pandemic I traveled between Brooklyn and Manhattan and problems were common. Much more common was just random slowdowns, sitting between stations, etc. that makes it a lot more difficult to know when you'll arrive at your destination.

I'm not sure, but it looks that OTP is much stricter measure than what I meant. I was talking about: I want to change from line A to B on station X (or exit on the station X)... Station X is closed, and I learn about that on station (X-1), or even just by not stopping on the station X.

It happened in Paris more than "extraordinary" number of times, so I have to put extra 15 mins to every important travel.

OTP sounds like: the train is scheduled at 3:25, it arrives at 3.26. Correct me if I'm wrong here. But if the normal margin is 5 mins for total time of travel, making it 15 mins is not nice.

Paris and surroundings is a really dense region [1], which tbh makes the actual functioning of public transit quite impressive in this city.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul...

The Metro is world class? Dark corridors stinking piss, covered with graffitis, overcrowded cars when it is not on strike.

Piss soaked underpasses are the lingua Franca of public transport

Line automation a la line 1 and more recentry 4 may be the solution to strikes. Of course, employees will shut down the automation as well during a strike, no strikebreaking robots allowed to work. I liked the London Tube better though. Couldn't get lost in it, even if supposedly drunk and it seemed more reliable. Mind the gap!

Agree on the tube in London. And it has many more challenges than Paris, narrower, deeper and older tunnels. But somehow it feels like a more civilised crowd, people are queuing, not pushing (the narrow crowded platforms would be lethally unforgiving) letting people out first, the cars and tunnels aren't filthy (with the notable exception of Saturday night).

Oui, l'Metro-ghetto.

Replace the parking lots with housing? Would drop costs, and allow more people to live within the city, decreasing the need for cars.

This assumes a significant number of those spaces are contiguous such that they're eligible for being replaced by housing. Moreover, Paris doesn't build tall buildings, so the housing isn't very dense (compared to a typical US city). I'm very skeptical this would create enough housing to lower property values.

EDIT: Oof, that's quite an error on my part. I was absent-mindedly conflating "downtown areas" with the whole city. My bad. Never the less, I'm skeptical that this change will amount to much in terms of lower property values, but I'd be happy for someone to articulate why my skepticism is misplaced.

Paris is denser than virtually every American city, and it's not even close. I honestly can't tell if the comment is supposed to be taken seriously. Density does not equal high rises.

Barcelona's 'superblock' structure boasts the highest density in the world (exceeding the world's densest city overall, Manila, and looks like this:

https://www.eltis.org/sites/default/files/news/shutterstock_...

A good chunk of Parisian suburbs is already among the most densely populated areas in the world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul...

Yeah, I was mistakenly comparing US downtown areas with Paris downtown areas. Mea culpa.

I do imagine that a high rise is going to be more dense than a Parisian 5-story. I understand that Parisian apartments are smaller and they aren't going to have parking or on-site greenspace like a US high rise, but I would be surprised if they are still less dense. Of course, that doesn't validate my original claim that Paris is sparser than US cities.

No.

> The French capital has 56,000 people per square mile while NYC, the most densely settled U.S. metropolis, has only 27,000 people per square mile

Manhattan and a few select sections are denser but US cities are sprawling.

  NYC, the most densely settled U.S. metropolis, has only 27,000 people per square mile

Manhattan is the relevant comparison, and it has almost 71,000 per square mile counting Central Park.

I wonder if central park and the other parks brings that down compared to Paris

Paris has parks too.

edit: the Bois de Vincenne is roughly three times the size of Central Park (10km^2 vs. 3.4km^2).

> housing isn't very dense (compared to a typical US city)

Maybe we are thinking of different things but I see the average US city as suburban with 4 people per quarter acre lot. Paris is 10-100x more dense than that. That's why public transit is far more effective there.

Yeah, that parenthetical was an absent-minded mistake on my part. I added an 'EDIT' to my original post.

The metro stations are not accessible, though. Getting around Paris without a bike or metro is tricky without a car.

middle and lower class, needed to run a city like this are pushed to live in the suburbs

You could always take the Singaporean solution and make replacing them with automation a national priority? I am not being serious, I am pointing out there are actually national programs for this sort of social adjustment. It's more than a little scary.

Take your kids for a 2 hours bus + RER + metro ride and have some fun. Oh wait, I forgot, you're "sporty enough", right, you mean, you're "rich enough" to live inside the city, you have that nice, well paid job in an office that's always magically clean, and everything is always magically ready for you in Paris.

The city of love really IS magic for little privileged people like you. Go ahead and keep it up telling how other should live, and if they can't it's their fault: they just had to have your little privileged lifestyle, of a "nanti" as we say in France. First hit on the poor, who live far away from paris and come down to clean your office, and "hope this will help finding a solution". I guess it's their fault, they should just have been ... privileged like you.

Have you any idea of the pain it has become to use a car in Paris ? Does it really strike you as if people really had a better choice ?

tell them. its the same problem everywhere. rich kids fillING the cities with daddy money and then demanding all the original folks to change. same in Amsterdam. We call them 'juppen'.. they destroy the city. luckily due to corona, a lot of them are moving back to their parents home.

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