How Paris swapped cars for bikes – and transformed its streets | Hacker News Reader

How Paris swapped cars for bikes – and transformed its streets

theguardian.com

53 pointsvrganj10 comments

As time goes by, people will feel like these changes are more and more what makes Paris great. It will be similar to how progress happened for Amsterdam and other cities. A slow conscious fight against car centric infrastructure, it’s not magic, it’s slow steady progress.

Locals already know and vote accordingly.

Unfortunately it is considered "woke" and left-brained to use alternatives to cars, therefore billionaire-owned media (i.e. most of French TV and press) tries to hammer that this is somehow bad, making policy progress needlessly slow and difficult.

I’m all for this. The more cars removed, the more pleasant a city becomes. While i don’t live in a car free city, i don’t own or need a car, when i do, i’m a member of a car share and can just pickup a car from my local supermarket, that i can walk to. I live in a very hilly city, while i walk a lot, i know every lift, escalator and sneaky bus or metro to get me up a hill, it’s no joke here, i used to walk 20min to my job, that had a 200m height difference, but there are paths everywhere.

And the city is working more on greenspaces, little urban oasis’s with a fountain or some trees to provide places to cool down as every year gets hotter

Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47466697

I just wish somebody would teach the damn cyclists to stop at red lights. As of now, they seem absolutely incapable of doing this, and charge ahead at full speed regardless. It's a miracle there's not more injuries.

When you wait for green you start at the same time as cars. Cars seem incapable of staying behind a cyclist and feel the need to overtake them at all costs. It feel much safer as a cyclist to start at red light when there is noone, you then have a head start with cars

This is an infrastructure engineering problem, not a moral one.

The Netherlands solves this with Dutch Roundabouts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhqTc_wx5EU

Easily my least favourite piece of infrastructure. The one on the video is alright because you have a full car's length between the road and the cycle path, so you are at a full perpendicular with good visibility over the bikes.

In plenty of other places, the space is much smaller, which puts the bike traffic almost directly in your blind spot as you cross.

For example, here: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.3911559,4.6253401,3a,75y,110...

It's really hard to anticipate as you may not have full unobstructed visibility as you drive around, especially since cyclists can come quite fast.

https://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2014/05/the-best-round...

Yes, the full car length is a key design feature. It wouldn't work without it and I understand why you would dislike ones without that.

In many locations it is legal for cyclists to treat red lights like a 2 way stop sign.

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

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