171–180 of 392 posts
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> I think Paris has bigger problems to worry about. Say what you mean to say.
Just did, it's the worse city in France. A few cycle lanes won't fix it.
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The way I've heard it from drivers, suvs gives you elevation to observe the traffic and the mass to make your bad behavior problem of the other side while you gain real numbers safety.
That's a pure negative sum game though. The elevation gives you only a relative improvement in visibility if other vehicles don't increase in elevation in response, at the cost of sightlines for other road users and especially pedestrians, unless they wear platform shoes. The same of course goes with mass. Usually this kind of negative-sum-prisoner's-dilemma incentive matrix is resolved by government intervention whi…
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Pedestrianization of neighborhoods like Rivoli did decrease shopping at first, but ended up exploding again once people got used to it.
I have to say, I look forward to visiting Paris again as soon as I can find an excuse. I know there are things people could say negatively, as one could say about any large city, but the energy and diversity really drew me in. I also really like French food, especially when mixed with the crazy chefs in that area that we stayed. Edit: just so everyone knows, this is what an airport terminal could be, according to Air…
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I used to cosplay as a bike messenger in Seattle. I did not follow the rules at all on my ride to work. There were few bike lanes, and a lot of morons rode on the sidewalks. I have only been to Paris once, but the cyclists were much more sane in my experience. The bike lanes were clear, and for the most part they stopped at a red light.
If car usage is going down but pedestrian injuries are going up? The pedestrians are not crashing into one another with greater frequency...
What I would like to see is mortality rates of pedestrians in Paris in general. That might be the actually interesting trend.
I moved from LA to Paris, my mental and physical health improved dramatically. I don't even take the subway, walking and biking are enough where I live. Hopefully we can reach the comfort of dutch cities within a decade.
What do you think about all those videos on how dangerous Paris is? Having made the move, would you say that those stem from real experiences and are organic or would you say that it was an organized campaign for some political reason? Or maybe something else? Trump keeps saying that they want to prevent USA becoming a dangerous place like Europe, even said that recently and the Irish president disagreed with him. As…
If anything, the US degraded far more over the time I spent there than Europe did while I was away.
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>Yes it is ideological: cars kill cities, kill communities and are bad for everyone involved. They are dangerous to drivers and non drivers alike and are deeply anti social. We need less cars everywhere period. You lost me at"We need less cars everywhere period." Not everywhere is a dense city.
Why should rural areas be punished with having to use cars?
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> and for the ones that have to use a car, there's less traffic and less people stealing dedicated parking spots. The article mentions there's now constant traffic jams for city buses in Paris. It seems best for people who can cycle, walk, or people who already live in the city and don't need to travel much.
> constant traffic jams Well, no, the article says that > traffic jams in Paris have risen 4% [in 11 years]
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When I look at traffic in my city, I rarely see it caused by full packing. Rather throughout seems to be the issue.
Throughput is directly proportional to the volume of cars, and SUVs have larger volume. Technically perhaps surface area, but there is a psychological effect to height. I believe people also give taller vehicles more space as a rule.
There's space to claim large car cause attrition, but that's completely dependent of the local properties of the streets.
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I think it’s no easy task to reform a city away from being car-centric. In my home town of Ghent (in Belgium), we’ve had several iterations of a traffic plan that gradually reduces the number of parking spaces, rises taxes and car related costs, makes streets one way or deprioritises cars (e.g. a car doesn’t have priority over a bike anymore) etc. It’s not easy but the city today is a lot more liveable than it was wh…
Honest question: What is the hard part? If you took all of that stuff and did it as quickly as you could somewhere else, what's would be the biggest issue? People + resistance to change of any kind? The outcome seems so obviously good. I have never heard of anyone complaining about a city becoming less car centric, but maybe somehow it's an under-represented story?
In contexts like this, using a car is perceived as a right - restricting usage doesn't make people think "I'll take the chance to use the bike", rather "How the f*ck do I get there now?".
This article has such a weird framing. It keeps repeating how the cleaner air is so good for tourists. But tourists visiting Paris for a week don’t get the majority of the benefit from cleaner air. The Parisian residents living there throughout the year do. Maybe because it’s CNN, an American outlet, they’re focused on the “tourist”, but these benefits have mostly accrued to Parisians. Also, the 4% increase in traffi…
I think it’s no easy task to reform a city away from being car-centric. In my home town of Ghent (in Belgium), we’ve had several iterations of a traffic plan that gradually reduces the number of parking spaces, rises taxes and car related costs, makes streets one way or deprioritises cars (e.g. a car doesn’t have priority over a bike anymore) etc. It’s not easy but the city today is a lot more liveable than it was wh…
All it takes is an understanding how fucked up it is to operate a 2 tonne personal vehicle everywhere you go(if you are able, which most people aren't, legally or mentally), spread the general knowledge and make a long term commitment to public transport, walking and bicycling.
:-)