Paris speed limit falls to 30km/h
bbc.com
bbc.com
The cityhall is led by incompetent and for a few years now they have started to do "media visible" demagogic actions without real thinking or discussion with the population.
For cars for example, they don't really try to be intelligent and have the most efficient and fast mix of transportation. They just try to annoy as much as possible the car drivers even when it was not justified.
And now Paris is dying, it becomes derelict and ugly, and it is losing inhabitants every year. And let's not speak about the abysmal debt that was created in a few years. So much debt, in fact, that the city hall is not anymore able to pay for maintaining the city, like fixing pot holes and city furniture.
It is easy to think that the car is bad, and people are angry because they don't want to lose their egoistic comfort. But here you should see the overall situation:
Except during the covid period, Metro and regional trains are most of the time in over capacity, late and unreliable. In addition to be dirty and sometimes dangerous.
With the stupid urban changes, the BUS are blocked by the car policies and not able to operate well, efficiently and safely anymore. (For example, having bus stop in the middle of a street in a middle of a busy bicycle lane).
Some commercial area are dying because no one away more than 15 minutes by feet could by anything there and be able to transport it back home.
And for bonus point of idiocracy, it is said that Taxi prices will raise a lot now, because the taxi fares are calculated like this: higher than 30km/h, price per distance. Lower than 30 km/h price per minute.
The metro is not unreliable - it can be very crowded, but it's ok. I understand the regional trains can be very unreliable.
As to the politics of the city, the current mayor is a very divisive person, so you will find people who really like her, just as you will find people who really dislike her (parent comment ).
She did make a number of mistakes, but Paris is not dying in any way because of her. Sure, the city is not very lively these days, but it's mostly because of the consequences of covid ('I want a garden', 'I need a health pass to go to a restaurant', etc), and people wondering whether it's worth paying so much money to live and moving out.
The regional trains are exactly the ones that need to be reliable in order to replace cars.
The regional trains need to be expanded first: the paris transit network is star-shaped, and it's very difficult to navigate around Paris without going through the center of the star. This immediately overcrowds the existing lines, and then trains are late/you wait a lot (people fainting when it's too hot, massive queues because too many people, etc) . There's currently a massive project going on ('le grand paris', aka 'greater paris') which is supposed to achieve this. I haven't followed it very closely though.
Then, I agree with you : the trains must be reliable. However, this can't be achieved unless some kind of rerouting happens first.
It's worth noting that the speed limits apply to Paris only, which is absolutely tiny (about 100 sq km). In many (most?) cases, it's already more efficient to go to Paris by train than by car, even if not very reliable, and within Paris you have the metro. Outside of Paris, the regional trains are not very good (not dense enough), but the speed limit point doesn't apply.
Out of peak hours and places, cars speed goes reasonably well. Especially if you have to come in or go out of Paris. But also the mayor administration created a lot of congestion with stupid rework projects like the "place de la Bastille"; closing direct ways across Paris and blocking big avenue to force all drivers to pass by small streets to zigzag.
The air pollution could have been a real reason, but sadly it looks like to not be real: during the worse lockdown, the traffic was reduce to almost zero, and still the air pollution was just reduced of a tiny fraction. Paris is located in a lower part of a big valley, so the pollution is in big part the result of the industries and other of the valley that concentrate there for the most part.
I will not be against a better mix that intelligently reduce the car, for example by having park and drive, big avenues crossing as straight as possible for cars and small streets and blocks dedicated to walk, bicycles, ... Sadly it is not something intelligent like that, that they are doing. A lot of well known urbanists complained about what is done.
The mayor pretends that the changes are to done to have a more vegetal and eco-friendly city, but in reality she is pouring concrete everywhere and doing ecologically bad projects.
For example, she said that she will plant 700 000 trees during her tenure, so far, the net result is at least -1000 trees in Paris.
Also, for example, in honor of the Olympics she built a big fan zone that no one asked, useless, costly, on top of a major landmark, despite the city council assembly voting against the project.
In the famous champs de Mars in front of the Eiffel tower, she built a huge "ephemeral" exposition building for the future Olympics. This took 1/3 of the surface of the champs de Mars Park, but in Additional destroyed the ground by injecting hundred of concrete pillars deep into the soil for this project.
There use to be a free floating shared electrical car service, because of bad contracting they had to kill it.
There was a very good, efficient public shared bicycle system that was well used (Vélib). She decided to renew the contract to go with another provider officially to get some new bullshit features. Now the service is a mess, it did not worked at all for a long time, now it is working badly, with less stations than before, and more costly to the city and to riders than the previous service. This is typical of the mayor administration. The provider even blackmailed the city hall to get more money and the city hall paid...
This is a good example of the real acts of the mayor that despite her speeches are against a good ecological design. Only at my level, I was used to use a lot the Vélib, and now I haven't used it for a few years because it never worked when I wanted to use it.
For the metro, imagine, having all your trips face to face, ass to ass with other persons. With a micrometer of space around you. Having to fight to enter the train or not sure that you will be able to go in.
Paris is really losing inhabitants, debt goes to the roof, and shop and services are closing. So you can't say that it is just a number of mistakes because it is a continuous work for multiple years.
If you want to laugh, just have a look at the hashtag #saccageparis on tweeter
However, the harshness of your comment does show that she is extremely divisive.
Furthermore, I've been living in central Paris as an adult for more than 20 years, would you mind being a bit more civil, and not describing me as 'repeating propaganda' (which I find offensive, If I am honest)?
Also, the election was in the middle of the worst part of the pandemic and people were not sure that it was safe to go out to gather in vote offices.
In addition, she started and announce a lot of the crazy stuffs just after being elected!
It is just a nightmare, because the country is big and hilly, cars tend to have gear ratios optimized to 100km/h, my car is a Peugeot 206 and it stalls often if I go slow as the speed limit on some roads, and it stalls hard, as in the engine stops so suddenly that the car was moving and suddenly it isn't, had people almost crashing on my rear multiple times, and I almost crashed on other people rears multiple times.
Also some roads with low speed limit NOBODY drives inside the limit, because the limit is impratical so people use it as license to actually go faster than average, and when you are on those roads you are forced to go faster, if you obey the limit people WILL crash on you, and I am not kidding, I saw flipped cars there from crashes like that.
And finally, to keep under the speed limit I must stay wiht my eyes glued on my speedometer and RPM meter, to make sure I can stay under the limit without stalling, multiple times I almost crashed because of that, and I believe the same applies to other drivers, because in the same places where this happened to me, I saw other drivers not seeing thigns and almost crashing or... actually crashing.
Cities should be pedestrians first, public transport and cyclists second, cars third. Certainly something we should aim at in Europe.
Bikes are impractical, terrain is stupidly hilly, some places even cars struggle.
As for buses... they are not useful for me because often the reason why I am taking out the car in first place (usually I just walk everywhere) is because I am going to supermarket (and our inflation-prone economy favors you making a huge purchase once per month, instead of many small purchases)
It is no wonder in a capital city nearby, there are so many cars that the area used by all cars is bigger than the area of all roads and streets combined.
Highways are for fast traffic (and in many cases, imo, should have higher speed limits here in the US); but cities should be way slower.
Americans seem to like high (and still violated) speeds in cities and slow (legal but always violated) speeds on highways.
I’ve definitely toyed with a “massive parking garage + transit hub at the edge of the city” more to improve walkability in cities.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2014/jul/2...
Every time I see an article about this, they always manage to quote someone in their "man on the street" copy that doesn't have a speedometer on their bike that still got a fine.
30 km/h is what residential streets in Germany are pretty much by default [0].
In busy pedestrian areas, we're getting down to 20 km/h [1] and <low, technically undefined, but around 4-10> km/h [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_km/h_zone#Europe [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begegnungszone [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrittgeschwindigkeit
We're just recently dropping speed limits in suburbs and more urban areas to 40 km/h and those school zones to 30 km/h.
I'm almost certain 4-10km/h is slower than idle in first gear in my manual diesel. That sounds painful, to be honest.
And of course it's painful, that's the point. You're supposed to avoid those 4-10km/h areas if at all possible. They're basically an admittance of "we couldn't technically forbid cars from entering". You'll never encounter them when shopping, going to church, or driving to the park.
https://www.fremont.gov/3274/Walnut-Ave-Bikeway-Improvements
Feels like you could reduce speed yet increase throughput.
If it was as easy as slapping up signs with low numbers and then reaping the political brownie points from reduced deaths every local politician would do it.
If somebody was driving a digger on a public street in a dangerous and unlawful manner, you'd expect them to end up in court, and you'd certainly expect more than just a fine and business-as-usual. A car is far faster and more dangerous than a digger.
I have the opposite attitude.
People who cannot use their own judgement as to what speed to drive or when a stop sign can be safely disregarded should not drive.
A heck of a lot of stop signs would become yields. A heck of a lot red arrows would become blinking yellow arrows.
We could probably do automatic speed limits on limited access highways by measuring the current traffic speed, hitting it with some sort of weighted algorithm to prevent swings in speed or comically high/low speeds.
Frankly I'm surprised there's no such thing as a "yield, unless you're turning left or going straight" type stop sign since there are a lot of intersections where that's what the prevailing traffic flow is in practice.
A ton of intersections could be redesigned to facilitate easier and safer jaywalking with carefully placed islands.
If I had to change the law I'd have stiff fines for stopping at a cloverleaf and I'd make failing to go the minimum speed (which is usually the speed limit minus some constant) subject to the same fine schedule as speeding.
however, there are measures like narrowing car lanes, adding street trees, and installing bike lanes that have positive effect on attention by making collision dangers more obvious (without making them more likely). these measures tend to also lower speed, but lowering speed shouldn’t be the primary goal, lest we implement more ineffective measures like speed limits and speed humps rather than the effective ones.
Yes there are interventions you can do to cut collision likelyhood by more than 75% but "poor proxy is unjustified".
I'm not sure how you got the wrong idea that this is "[c]hanging a bunch of signs," especially since HN guidelines suggest I assume you read the linked article.
If they were breaking out the heavy equipment and actually changing the infrastructure they would be trumpeting it as an infrastructure initiative, urban makeover/revitalization or something like that.
To assume that this is more than a simple regulatory change is to assume that the Paris government is wholly staffed with people too stupid to capitalize politically on a major infrastructure change.
They are messaging this as a regulatory change and talking about how they're adding bike lanes (already rolling out steadily for a long time as roads get repainted and resurfaced) and continued phase out of cars from the city center.
Nothing will change, because nothing is changing. All the stuff they're talking about is stuff they're already doing. They're just changing some signs in other parts of the city as well as though that's expected to change anything (which it's not).
You seem to be confusing a BBC News article based in large part on tweets with a prime messaging push by the government.
As the article points out, many cycling lanes have been introduced. The infrastructure has been changing, is changing, and will continue to be changed, as both supporters and critics alike attest.
Your original tweet suggested that putting up new signs would have no effect because people drive whatever speed they feel is safe. This is true, which means it's notable that critics point out the average speed in Paris is already below this new lower limit. So either the infrastructure changes have had a positive effect and now it's time for the limit to catch up, or the traffic is bad and it's time for the limit to catch up.
Either way, your pessimism seems to be unsupported by any of the supplied evidence.
Of course this comment is even worse: too many people die when walking when not looking.
What standard of responsibility for safety and well being are we putting on the person who goes outside their house?
I’m for low speeds and all but it has to come with a sense of rationale. And this argument can be argued for irrational limits.
Making Paris ped first and car second is great for peds. And it sort of does not acknowledge the benefits of cars. And that’s the problem.