An extremely long thread on visiting Paris by me: someone interested in cycle infrastructure and making public spaces better.
The last decade’s change is so positive and has been huge: what have they done and how have they done it?
Things they’ve done: 1. Reallocated space to people. Classic Paris boulevard now: generous two way cycle lane, one way lane for private cars, one way lane for buses & taxis.
2. Really greened it up: urban forests! SUDS! New trees! Beautiful pedestrianisation.
3. Tackled the really big flagship emblematic projects. Rue de Rivoli! The Seine! Place de La Concorde! All now hugely skewed for pedestrians and cyclists. Contraflow cyling on ALL 30kph roads. (!).
4. Got a lot of the smaller things right: great bike parking everywhere. Hire / Lime bikes, but none littering the pavement cos of great bike parking. Lots of car sharing. Bike size traffic lights at all intersections. Car-free days.
And what’s it like? Well I used to live there and the transformation is epic. It is so quiet! So peaceful. You can hear the birds as you cycle along - listen! No one is hooting any longer. Streets are one way. Things are calm.
There’s huge variation across Paris. And it’s really complicated politically, the police have veto powers on certain main roads. And what’s done locally depends on the political will of the 20 mayors, one for each arrondissement. The main roads are Anne Hidalgo and they’re great
Fascinatingly, the 16th arrondissement, Paris’ most wealthy - like Kensington & Chelsea - now feels poor and rubbish. They’ve not got on board as want to protect their right to drive everywhere and as a consequence it’s noisy, dirty, and ugly public space. And drivers hooted!
They like a bollard in Paris - chonky ones to stop cars entering the banks of the Siene, skinny elegant ones elsewhere, and plastic ones which can only be temporary otherwise the prefects in charge of keeping Paris nice can veto them. Stuff is therefore well built and beautiful
Lots of bike traffic lights and tons of pedestrian crossings. Which are largely adhered to, but there’s definitely an anarchic element among both car drivers and cyclists.
These are good! Fully pedestrianised smaller roads. The one below carried 6,000 cars until a couple of months ago (!£ and was used as a rat run to the ring road.
This is Paris’ newest cycle lane. @christianwolmar went to bed on Thu night with roadworks outside and woke up to this on Fri morning. It is being heavily used already. As I say, pace of change is immense.
There’s loads of water around to fill your water bottle. As this one says “water. It’s a public service”
The U shaped roundabout is a classic. Acres of tarmac converted into a forested pedestrian area and a u shape for cars and bikes to drive in. Below a complete, in progess, and not yet addressed one (in the 16th, obvs).
I was v. impressed with the Ecology (Green) politicians I met too. They’re in coalition leadership and in charge of transport in Paris as a whole and often in the forward-looking arrondissements: we met @VincentGOULIN (20th) and @Guill_Durand (12th)
It was a truly epic trip. Massive thanks to @eilidhmurray3 and @London_Cycling for letting me come along and @ParisEnSelle for an insightful & incredible tour.
Only problem was I couldn’t bring any of my unexploded WW2 weaponry on the Eurostar. Oh well, next time. 🇫🇷💖
Here’s some literature from one of the Arondissements on planned changes. Clear benefits listed. Then a high level plan of what’s happening and when. Then detail of two of the initiatives: school streets and pedestrianising one side of a roundabout and making it into a park.
If you go to Paris you can hire a bike for a couple of days from many hostels or Holland Bikes. Or sign up for Velib, or Lime Bikes which are pay by hour. This is the 25km route that Paris en Selle cycled us today: all the sights AND the infra sights.
Also, banks of the river Seine. I drove it when it was a motorway. It is now a glorious public space. These pics show 1. The slip road entrance, 2. Where it joins the carriageway, 3. The carriageway itself.
It needs more trees etc on this bit (has elsewhere) but is amazing.
Two interesting stats: we heard that emergency service response times are now below 7min for the first time in decades, due to traffic changes.
And Rue de Rivoli has seen increased revenue post removal of motor traffic. @rivovasta I don’t suppose you can easily give source?
Outside central Paris and moving into the suburbs is really a core focus now. The road pictured has decent infra but dumps cyclists into a 4 lane highway beyond the Paris borders. The solution is coming tho! A network of cycle tracks following a public transport map philosophy…
… each “line” will be different types of cycling infra but will have clear and easy signs to read and will be safe. Connecting up the towns outside Paris with the City itself. We are looking at this in Oxfordshire but I absolutely love the way Paris has designed the map
Paris is incredible. But there’s still a way to go before I’d let my 7 year old hire a bike and go out as a tourist in the city. We did this in Utrecht cos I KNEW that everything would be safe and connected. It isn’t in Paris. But it’s getting there, in just 5-10 years. WOW.
On the Eurostar I met these 4 young women who had gone to Paris for the day and hired @limebike for the day. Made me so happy that this is now possible - it wasn’t before! They said it was so fun but priority v. confusing.
Lime, could you have a pop up for foreigners like this?
Here’s the 16th attempt at a pop up bike lane for the Olympics btw. Dangerous, potentially lethal, granite block blocking entire bike lane.
To be clear, a key part of the public space reallocation is removing parking. Aim is to remove half of on-street parking, ie around 70k of the 140k spaces. Car ownership is dropping in Paris (!) even private underground parking now being rented for other business use as no cars!
And car ownership decline is crucial to freeing up public space. In 1990 half of Parisians owned a car, now less than 30% do. They have great car-sharing options, via Getaround & others - my guides showed me on the app and there were c.50 cars to borrow within a 5 min walk.
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Exciting news for me! We FINALLY launched "School Streets" at the school in my ward this week after 2+ years of trying.
Read on to find out more about what it is, the benefits, & how we did it. Oh, and here's a selection of the bike racks at the school from today. 💖🚲 (1/14)
#SchoolStreets is an initiative which means motor traffic can't come down roads outside a school at pick up and drop off time. It makes school gates WAY safer. They're in a number of countries, in the UK Local Authorities are responsible for them. (2/14) schoolstreets.org.uk
At my school, the main entrance is at the end of a cul de sac, which intersects with a major walking route. Until this week, a certain number of parents would drive to the bottom of the cul de sac and maneuver. We've had kids hit by cars, fights, police called. (3/14)
Coventry is developing a new light tram, the CVLR.
Read on to see a photo of me driving one of them (my kids are v jealous) and hear about my visit to their innovation centre and why I think it’s so cool.
(1/12)
Trams are great, people love them, they’re predictable and a useful form of public transport. But they require rails, and putting conventional rails in requires digging deep & moving utilities: expensive.
The CVLR tram has a v. shallow rail bed & is c£10m/km not c£50m/km (2/12)
Here’s the rail bed. It’s modular, made of concrete 10x normal strength, and only goes 30cm deep.
You can put bendy rails and straight rails on same bed, so cheap to produce (IRL, you’d put tarmac on top of these rail beds so it would look like normal tram lines)
Another piece of evidence that Oxford’s private schools are the main cause of school run traffic. Huge thanks to @DrEliseUK for the analysis. A thread.
What you’re seeing here is the speed of cars, each line is a day. The orange lines are the first week in Jan this year (1/9)
This was an interesting week cos unusually the private schools were back on Mon 8th Jan - but many state schools didn’t go back until Tue 9th Jan. Looking here at the 4 roads which approach The Plain, ie where MCS is key issue.
Traffic already bad on the Mon am.
(2/9)
If congestion significantly caused by state schools you’d expect to see a different pattern on the Monday. But actually, all days show same congestion pattern.
Is this definitive? No, just one day. Does it add to the weight of evidence and anecdote? Yes! (3/9)
A tale of 3 streets: I'm obsessed with Oxford's new telraam traffic counters so I looked at the weekday traffic for first week of operation, and even I was surprised by just how much more cycling in LTNs vs in non-LTNs - it's double (see chart)
Reason these streets are interesting to compare is they're v. similar: Howard & Hurst are residential streets between 2 main roads, and they were LTN'd in May 2022. Latimer is also, and was originally on the cards for being an LTN but it didn't happen.
There's a huge diff in percent car traffic (as you'd expect, cos so much of traffic on residential roads is cut-through / rat-running). But the astonishing difference for me is just how, despite overall more traffic on Latimer, it's half the amount of peds / cyclists vs in LTN
In conversations with Oxford residents, we kept hearing people didn't know where they could cycle safely outside of their local areas. So inspired by this (and by @OxfordCity's awesome playground Google Map, linked) a few of us got together (2/10)
And started a shared @googlemaps, where we marked low-traffic routes that got people places (we originally overlaid all Oxford schools onto it, had to remove for final version as map too big). We started with the 'LCWIP', but that was a plan, not current state (3/10)
We've done a crowdsourced map of where the issues with walking and cycling are in East Oxford. It was easy to do and has involved hundreds of contributions. @Charlie_Hicks_ & I put together the project, and loads of other East Oxford councillors (tagged) contributed. (1/6)
It uses Google Maps which is a really flexible tool. The map is arranged in layers so you can just see e.g. the 'signs and barriers' issues we've identified. All councillors have edit access to the map. (2/6)
We've also reached out to relevant groups (tagged in the first photo), and visited schools (see below), and messaged local parents, friends, and groups. We got a lot of feedback. It's not fully comprehensive yet, but it's identified a lot of issues. (3/6)