paris: the street is ours!

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: paris: the street is ours! via
Human Transit by Jarrett at HumanTransit.org on 7/13/10

Next time you're involved in a debate about whether we should consider
taking one lane of traffic on a busy street and setting it aside for
buses, show them some pictures of Paris in 2010. Almost any boulevard,
in fact. Here's Boulevard Raspail:




Lots of traffic in two lanes, and a lane reserved for buses and
two-wheels conveyances. Yes, the bus lane is empty at the moment, but
this demonstrates the great and damnable paradox of bus lanes: If buses
are moving well, and carrying more people than the car lanes, the bus
lane looks empty most of the time. Only a failing or obstructed bus
lane looks like it's full of buses. That's why bus lanes such a hard
sell in cities run by motorists who want to do the green thing but
still form their impressions from behind the wheel -- like Los Angeles,
for example.

But in the last two decades, while a few American cities have had long
arguments about converting single lanes to bus-only, Paris just did it.
Not here and there. All over the city. Name your favorite Paris
boulevard, and it probably has bus lanes now.



And they´re really nice buses, where you can board and alight at all
doors.

One key to the Paris project is that these are not just for buses. They
can also be used by taxis and all two-wheeled vehicles. This is a
manageable range of vehicles that all serve urban mobility more
efficiently than the private car, and that don't usually generate
enough congestion to plug the lane for any length of time. Now and
then, something else shows up in a bus lane, such as here on Blvd. de
Clichy in front of the Moulin Rouge.


But still, the buses get through.

What about smaller streets? Surely when you just have two lanes of
traffic, you'd never take one of them -- half of the entire capacity of
the street -- for a bus lane, would you? Of course you would. Have a
look at Rue du Faubourg St. Denis, climbing the gentle grade from Les
Halles to Gare du Nord.




Without that barrier in the middle, you could have striped this one-way
street as two traffic lanes plus a parking/delivery lane on each side;
in fact, if I probe my dim memories of living in Paris in 1986, I think
that's what it was. But they not only carved out a wide bus lane but
also a solid median curb to protect it. (These curbs are sensible
because motorists know not to drive over them but emergency vehicles
still can.) The resulting wide bus lane is important because it's
shared with two-wheeled vehicles -- bicycles and motorbikes and
scooters, and these need the ability to pass the bus without
interacting with parallel traffic.

Here's Rue du Faubourg St. Martin, the southbound partner of the
northbound Rue du Faubourg St. Denis above. Here, the bus lane is on
the left, and stops are in median islands. Looking north:


The magnificent edifice in the distance, by the way, is Gare de l'Est,
the railway station for the east. Looking south from the same spot:


Another view of a median bus stop:


Remarkably, even though cyclists are welcome in the bus lane, they also
have a cycle lane, carved out of the sidewalk/footpath and isolated by
landscaping:


Note that the direction of the bicycle path matches that of the street,
the norm in Paris. Car traffic still has one through lane and an
intermittent delivery/parking/turning lane.

[Update Note also that the bus lane (technically a bus-taxi-2 wheel
lane) is quite a bit wider than the bus. There´s enough space or
cyclists to pass stopped buses. Note also that Paris stop spacing is
quite wide, I´m guessing around 400m, so you don´t see as much of the
leapfrogging problem -- where the same bus and bike have to pass each
other repeatedly. ]

(If any French readers have access to section drawings of this street
or similar ones, I'd love to publish a few just to show how the
available width has been apportioned.)

It's also increasingly common, on larger boulevards, to see separate
bicycle and pedestrian spaces in addition to the bus lane. Typically,
the large boulevards have always had small frontage roadways on each
side used for accessing on-street parking. These roadways now also
serve bicycles, and are connected by appropriate bike-only segments.
There is still a sidewalk/footpath for pedestrians as well, against the
building face, though nobody worries much about enforcing ped/bicycle
separations.


Further encouragement for both cycling and motorbikes comes from the
abundant supply of parking areas for "2 roues" -- two-wheels.


Finally, the pedestrian signals:




The truth will sound silly, but it's striking how green these signals
are. It's simple: the default setting for pedestrian signals is green,
and they turn red only when your safety requires it. (In Sydney, where
I currently live, the opposite rule applies. There, pedestrian signals
are always red, but if you push a button and wait patiently, often for
a nearly complete cycle of the signal, wondering if you've submitted an
application to some bureaucrat who will get to it after his lunch
break, you'll finally get green for a few seconds. But don't blink or
you'll miss it and have to start again.)

The scourge of two-step signals for crossing major boulevards remains:


The sign means that you'll have to wait for one signal to cross to the
median, and then another signal to cross to the far side. A pain, but
then again, signaling the two phases separately gives you more
opportunities for signals to be green. This is useful if, like me,
you're willing to cross on a red if it appears safe. That way, you
still get the assurance of the green for half of your crossing.

Last year when I passed through Paris, I encountered a funny bit of
sculpture in the Rue du Chat qui Peche ("street of the fishing cat").





"La rue est à nous" -- "The street is ours."

Those words are at least as old as the French Revolution, but they've
never been truer in Paris than they are today. We are a long way from
the Paris of the 1970s, when planners imagined freeways on both sides
of the Seine, and new extra-wide bridges for more car traffic. Today,
Paris is for human beings, but you don't become human in this city
until you get out of your car. As soon as you do, the street is yours.









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