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.
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
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...
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
