8 ms·

Living in Paris here, I can’t agree more with this decision. The whole city is very walkable, everything is within a 30min bike ride if you’re sporty enough. A

by 0wis 6y ago

Living in Paris here, I can’t agree more with this decision. The whole city is very walkable, everything is within a 30min bike ride if you’re sporty enough. And the public transport is definitely world class if you can’t bike. However this is very polarizing in France because living space is very costly within the city. And it will not decrease as building any residential space may imply destroying an historical building and disfigure the skyline. Therefore, middle and lower class, needed to run a city like this are pushed to live in the suburbs. Where public transport is not as good as in the city center, so people need cars... I hope this decision will help find solutions to solve this inextricable problem, which might be the challenge of the decade for the city of love.

buybackoff 6y ago
The number of metro stations is too big, they are so close that taking 1 stop ride is meaningless, walking is as fast. This makes metro very slow. But the number of RER lines is very low. Both are not very reliable - I mean the number of nines in 99.[here]%. I'm not even sure it's above 99% in Paris. Other than the strikes, I've had more problems with metro/subways in a year here than over 17 years in Moscow. Random unannounced station closures, someone forgets things on a station and a line stops for an hour, etc. And the strikes are a bad joke, why are they legal!? With the strikes, average reliability is < 95%. I really like how NYC has local/express sharing the same infrastructure. Manhattan has near the same height as Paris (Peripherique), yet it's possible to travel all the distance with 5 or so stops.
- untog 6y ago
  As someone living in NYC I can attest that the local/express lines are great. But I'd kill for 95% reliability! The on-time performance in NYC is somewhere around 80% and likely to get worse with the huge budget issues NYC will have post-COVID.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    Keep in mind that the Paris metro has 0% reliability if you need to ride it between 2AM and 5:30AM. Or rather it is 100% reliably not running during those hours. NYC could probably boost those numbers if they could do track maintenance during guaranteed non-running hours.
    - buybackoff 6y ago
      I was talking about the scheduled time - when it must work, but it doesn't.
    - untog 6y ago
      NYC can already do that: it's not uncommon for express lines to be shut down overnight for work to be completed, for example. (the entire system is shut down overnight right now anyway)
  - buybackoff 6y ago
    What do you mean by "on-time performance"? I lived for 6 months in Manhattan on 112th and it worked fine. Probably one or two times my station was closed in the morning and I had to walk down to the next one. And as someone who lived in Moscow for a long time I can attest it is the gold standard. It's the second busiest (or top-3) and just always works as scheduled. One rare thing one could rely on that comes from the government.
    - untog 6y ago
      Info from the MTA here: https://www.mta.info/press-release/nyc-transit/new-full-year-data-shows-subway-hitting-6-year-annual-high-weekday-time-0 https://www.mta.info/press-release/nyc-transit/new-full-year... I regret to inform you that the NYC subway has many more problems than you experienced. Before the pandemic I traveled between Brooklyn and Manhattan and problems were common. Much more common was just random slowdowns, sitting between stations, etc. that makes it a lot more difficult to know when you'll arrive at your destination.
      - buybackoff 6y ago
        I'm not sure, but it looks that OTP is much stricter measure than what I meant. I was talking about: I want to change from line A to B on station X (or exit on the station X)... Station X is closed, and I learn about that on station (X-1), or even just by not stopping on the station X. It happened in Paris more than "extraordinary" number of times, so I have to put extra 15 mins to every important travel. OTP sounds like: the train is scheduled at 3:25, it arrives at 3.26. Correct me if I'm wrong here. But if the normal margin is 5 mins for total time of travel, making it 15 mins is not nice.
    - NikolaeVarius 6y ago
      The NYC Subway has a timetable, except no one gives a shit because it has very little relation to real life.
      - toxik 6y ago
        That’s pretty strange though, I don’t think I’ve seen a subway with a time table before. It’s too frequent for it to matter in the first place, you just need to know when the next train towards your destination is coming!
- programLyrique 6y ago
  The metro in Paris had an objective of more than 96.5% of reliability in 2018 according to https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/paris_75056/du-rer-b-ligne-13-transports-paris-sont-calvaire-usagers_29172511.html https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/paris_75056/du-rer-b-ligne-13-... (in French) All lines fulfilled this objective except line 4, with 96.1% AS for RER, there is an official governemental website that gives the numbers: http://www.qualitetransports.gouv.fr/les-chiffres-de-la-ponctualite-r2.html#results http://www.qualitetransports.gouv.fr/les-chiffres-de-la-ponc... (in French) The most reliable one in 2020 is the A with about 94% of reliability and the worst one was RER B in March, with 78.9%.
  - IMTDb 6y ago
    All these numbers are very very low, when you consider that this is essentially how Parisian are supposed to go to and from work, get food, go to school, the dentist and so on. The best RER gets you late around 1 every 20 trip. So once every 2 weeks on average if you count two trips per day. The worse one doesn't get you on time almost every other day ! You basically have to factor the unreliability of the transport system every single trip. This is very far from something you can count on. Even for the best lines.
    - wiether 6y ago
      > this is essentially how Parisian are supposed to go to and from work, get food, go to school, the dentist and so on How so ? Except for work, all the other thing you describes are basically at a walkable distance. And you also have a lot of buses.
- patothon 6y ago
  Paris and surroundings is a really dense region [1], which tbh makes the actual functioning of public transit quite impressive in this city. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul...
- mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
  > why are they legal Worker strikes arent something you can legislate away unless you're going to start forcing people to work, which is, uh, let's say widely frowned upon. If you want to end strikes, you'll need to convince workers that showing up is in their interest.
  - ericpauley 6y ago
    Banning striking need not involve forced labor. See the US government's response to federal employees striking: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Organization_(1968)#August_1981_strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Con...
    - mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
      Sure, but the original question was why is striking legal. Firing people for striking isn't the same as criminalizing it. If you're responding to my statement of "can't legislate it away", then I suppose yes you're right that is an example of being able to do that and I should have worded that differently, but the key there is that it only works if your threat convinces the workers to return. Which, according to that Wikipedia article, it didn't entirely and their staffing levels didn't fully recover for a decade.
  - dybber 6y ago
    In Denmark you're only allowed to strike under certain circumstances, and primarily strikes happen every three years when collective agreements between unions and employers needs to be renewed. This makes strikes a rare happening, and usually very predictable. See: https://tema.3f.dk/bjmfimmigrant/new-in-denmark/are-you-allowed-to-strike https://tema.3f.dk/bjmfimmigrant/new-in-denmark/are-you-allo...
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briefcomment 6y ago
Replace the parking lots with housing? Would drop costs, and allow more people to live within the city, decreasing the need for cars.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  This assumes a significant number of those spaces are contiguous such that they're eligible for being replaced by housing. Moreover, Paris doesn't build tall buildings, so the housing isn't very dense (compared to a typical US city). I'm very skeptical this would create enough housing to lower property values. EDIT: Oof, that's quite an error on my part. I was absent-mindedly conflating "downtown areas" with the whole city. My bad. Never the less, I'm skeptical that this change will amount to much in terms of lower property values, but I'd be happy for someone to articulate why my skepticism is misplaced.
  - mperham 6y ago
    > housing isn't very dense (compared to a typical US city) Maybe we are thinking of different things but I see the average US city as suburban with 4 people per quarter acre lot. Paris is 10-100x more dense than that. That's why public transit is far more effective there.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      Yeah, that parenthetical was an absent-minded mistake on my part. I added an 'EDIT' to my original post.
  - redisman 6y ago
    No. > The French capital has 56,000 people per square mile while NYC, the most densely settled U.S. metropolis, has only 27,000 people per square mile Manhattan and a few select sections are denser but US cities are sprawling.
    - minkeymaniac 6y ago
avani 6y ago
The metro stations are not accessible, though. Getting around Paris without a bike or metro is tricky without a car.
cm2187 6y ago
The Metro is world class? Dark corridors stinking piss, covered with graffitis, overcrowded cars when it is not on strike.
- petre 6y ago
  Line automation a la line 1 and more recentry 4 may be the solution to strikes. Of course, employees will shut down the automation as well during a strike, no strikebreaking robots allowed to work. I liked the London Tube better though. Couldn't get lost in it, even if supposedly drunk and it seemed more reliable. Mind the gap!
  - cm2187 6y ago
    Agree on the tube in London. And it has many more challenges than Paris, narrower, deeper and older tunnels. But somehow it feels like a more civilised crowd, people are queuing, not pushing (the narrow crowded platforms would be lethally unforgiving) letting people out first, the cars and tunnels aren't filthy (with the notable exception of Saturday night).
- multjoy 6y ago
  Piss soaked underpasses are the lingua Franca of public transport
- contingencies 6y ago
  Oui, l'Metro-ghetto.
aoeuoaeuoaeuaoe 6y ago
Take your kids for a 2 hours bus + RER + metro ride and have some fun. Oh wait, I forgot, you're "sporty enough", right, you mean, you're "rich enough" to live inside the city, you have that nice, well paid job in an office that's always magically clean, and everything is always magically ready for you in Paris. The city of love really IS magic for little privileged people like you. Go ahead and keep it up telling how other should live, and if they can't it's their fault: they just had to have your little privileged lifestyle, of a "nanti" as we say in France. First hit on the poor, who live far away from paris and come down to clean your office, and "hope this will help finding a solution". I guess it's their fault, they should just have been ... privileged like you. Have you any idea of the pain it has become to use a car in Paris ? Does it really strike you as if people really had a better choice ?
- mpfundstein 6y ago
  tell them. its the same problem everywhere. rich kids fillING the cities with daddy money and then demanding all the original folks to change. same in Amsterdam. We call them 'juppen'.. they destroy the city. luckily due to corona, a lot of them are moving back to their parents home.
contingencies 6y ago
middle and lower class, needed to run a city like this are pushed to live in the suburbs You could always take the Singaporean solution and make replacing them with automation a national priority? I am not being serious, I am pointing out there are actually national programs for this sort of social adjustment. It's more than a little scary.

by 0wis 6y ago

buybackoff 6y ago

The number of metro stations is too big, they are so close that taking 1 stop ride is meaningless, walking is as fast. This makes metro very slow. But the number of RER lines is very low. Both are not very reliable - I mean the number of nines in 99.[here]%. I'm not even sure it's above 99% in Paris. Other than the strikes, I've had more problems with metro/subways in a year here than over 17 years in Moscow. Random unannounced station closures, someone forgets things on a station and a line stops for an hour, etc. And the strikes are a bad joke, why are they legal!? With the strikes, average reliability is < 95%. I really like how NYC has local/express sharing the same infrastructure. Manhattan has near the same height as Paris (Peripherique), yet it's possible to travel all the distance with 5 or so stops.

untog 6y ago
As someone living in NYC I can attest that the local/express lines are great. But I'd kill for 95% reliability! The on-time performance in NYC is somewhere around 80% and likely to get worse with the huge budget issues NYC will have post-COVID.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Keep in mind that the Paris metro has 0% reliability if you need to ride it between 2AM and 5:30AM. Or rather it is 100% reliably not running during those hours. NYC could probably boost those numbers if they could do track maintenance during guaranteed non-running hours.
  - buybackoff 6y ago
    I was talking about the scheduled time - when it must work, but it doesn't.
  - untog 6y ago
    NYC can already do that: it's not uncommon for express lines to be shut down overnight for work to be completed, for example. (the entire system is shut down overnight right now anyway)
- buybackoff 6y ago
  What do you mean by "on-time performance"? I lived for 6 months in Manhattan on 112th and it worked fine. Probably one or two times my station was closed in the morning and I had to walk down to the next one. And as someone who lived in Moscow for a long time I can attest it is the gold standard. It's the second busiest (or top-3) and just always works as scheduled. One rare thing one could rely on that comes from the government.
  - untog 6y ago
    Info from the MTA here: https://www.mta.info/press-release/nyc-transit/new-full-year-data-shows-subway-hitting-6-year-annual-high-weekday-time-0 https://www.mta.info/press-release/nyc-transit/new-full-year... I regret to inform you that the NYC subway has many more problems than you experienced. Before the pandemic I traveled between Brooklyn and Manhattan and problems were common. Much more common was just random slowdowns, sitting between stations, etc. that makes it a lot more difficult to know when you'll arrive at your destination.
    - buybackoff 6y ago
      I'm not sure, but it looks that OTP is much stricter measure than what I meant. I was talking about: I want to change from line A to B on station X (or exit on the station X)... Station X is closed, and I learn about that on station (X-1), or even just by not stopping on the station X. It happened in Paris more than "extraordinary" number of times, so I have to put extra 15 mins to every important travel. OTP sounds like: the train is scheduled at 3:25, it arrives at 3.26. Correct me if I'm wrong here. But if the normal margin is 5 mins for total time of travel, making it 15 mins is not nice.
  - NikolaeVarius 6y ago
    The NYC Subway has a timetable, except no one gives a shit because it has very little relation to real life.
    - toxik 6y ago
      That’s pretty strange though, I don’t think I’ve seen a subway with a time table before. It’s too frequent for it to matter in the first place, you just need to know when the next train towards your destination is coming!
programLyrique 6y ago
The metro in Paris had an objective of more than 96.5% of reliability in 2018 according to https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/paris_75056/du-rer-b-ligne-13-transports-paris-sont-calvaire-usagers_29172511.html https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/paris_75056/du-rer-b-ligne-13-... (in French) All lines fulfilled this objective except line 4, with 96.1% AS for RER, there is an official governemental website that gives the numbers: http://www.qualitetransports.gouv.fr/les-chiffres-de-la-ponctualite-r2.html#results http://www.qualitetransports.gouv.fr/les-chiffres-de-la-ponc... (in French) The most reliable one in 2020 is the A with about 94% of reliability and the worst one was RER B in March, with 78.9%.
- IMTDb 6y ago
  All these numbers are very very low, when you consider that this is essentially how Parisian are supposed to go to and from work, get food, go to school, the dentist and so on. The best RER gets you late around 1 every 20 trip. So once every 2 weeks on average if you count two trips per day. The worse one doesn't get you on time almost every other day ! You basically have to factor the unreliability of the transport system every single trip. This is very far from something you can count on. Even for the best lines.
  - wiether 6y ago
    > this is essentially how Parisian are supposed to go to and from work, get food, go to school, the dentist and so on How so ? Except for work, all the other thing you describes are basically at a walkable distance. And you also have a lot of buses.
patothon 6y ago
Paris and surroundings is a really dense region [1], which tbh makes the actual functioning of public transit quite impressive in this city. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul...
mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
> why are they legal Worker strikes arent something you can legislate away unless you're going to start forcing people to work, which is, uh, let's say widely frowned upon. If you want to end strikes, you'll need to convince workers that showing up is in their interest.
- ericpauley 6y ago
  Banning striking need not involve forced labor. See the US government's response to federal employees striking: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Organization_(1968)#August_1981_strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Con...
  - mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
    Sure, but the original question was why is striking legal. Firing people for striking isn't the same as criminalizing it. If you're responding to my statement of "can't legislate it away", then I suppose yes you're right that is an example of being able to do that and I should have worded that differently, but the key there is that it only works if your threat convinces the workers to return. Which, according to that Wikipedia article, it didn't entirely and their staffing levels didn't fully recover for a decade.
- dybber 6y ago
  In Denmark you're only allowed to strike under certain circumstances, and primarily strikes happen every three years when collective agreements between unions and employers needs to be renewed. This makes strikes a rare happening, and usually very predictable. See: https://tema.3f.dk/bjmfimmigrant/new-in-denmark/are-you-allowed-to-strike https://tema.3f.dk/bjmfimmigrant/new-in-denmark/are-you-allo...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

briefcomment 6y ago

Replace the parking lots with housing? Would drop costs, and allow more people to live within the city, decreasing the need for cars.

throwaway894345 6y ago
This assumes a significant number of those spaces are contiguous such that they're eligible for being replaced by housing. Moreover, Paris doesn't build tall buildings, so the housing isn't very dense (compared to a typical US city). I'm very skeptical this would create enough housing to lower property values. EDIT: Oof, that's quite an error on my part. I was absent-mindedly conflating "downtown areas" with the whole city. My bad. Never the less, I'm skeptical that this change will amount to much in terms of lower property values, but I'd be happy for someone to articulate why my skepticism is misplaced.
- mperham 6y ago
  > housing isn't very dense (compared to a typical US city) Maybe we are thinking of different things but I see the average US city as suburban with 4 people per quarter acre lot. Paris is 10-100x more dense than that. That's why public transit is far more effective there.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Yeah, that parenthetical was an absent-minded mistake on my part. I added an 'EDIT' to my original post.
- redisman 6y ago
  No. > The French capital has 56,000 people per square mile while NYC, the most densely settled U.S. metropolis, has only 27,000 people per square mile Manhattan and a few select sections are denser but US cities are sprawling.
  - minkeymaniac 6y ago

avani 6y ago

The metro stations are not accessible, though. Getting around Paris without a bike or metro is tricky without a car.

cm2187 6y ago

The Metro is world class? Dark corridors stinking piss, covered with graffitis, overcrowded cars when it is not on strike.

petre 6y ago
Line automation a la line 1 and more recentry 4 may be the solution to strikes. Of course, employees will shut down the automation as well during a strike, no strikebreaking robots allowed to work. I liked the London Tube better though. Couldn't get lost in it, even if supposedly drunk and it seemed more reliable. Mind the gap!
- cm2187 6y ago
  Agree on the tube in London. And it has many more challenges than Paris, narrower, deeper and older tunnels. But somehow it feels like a more civilised crowd, people are queuing, not pushing (the narrow crowded platforms would be lethally unforgiving) letting people out first, the cars and tunnels aren't filthy (with the notable exception of Saturday night).
multjoy 6y ago
Piss soaked underpasses are the lingua Franca of public transport
contingencies 6y ago
Oui, l'Metro-ghetto.

aoeuoaeuoaeuaoe 6y ago

Take your kids for a 2 hours bus + RER + metro ride and have some fun. Oh wait, I forgot, you're "sporty enough", right, you mean, you're "rich enough" to live inside the city, you have that nice, well paid job in an office that's always magically clean, and everything is always magically ready for you in Paris. The city of love really IS magic for little privileged people like you. Go ahead and keep it up telling how other should live, and if they can't it's their fault: they just had to have your little privileged lifestyle, of a "nanti" as we say in France. First hit on the poor, who live far away from paris and come down to clean your office, and "hope this will help finding a solution". I guess it's their fault, they should just have been ... privileged like you. Have you any idea of the pain it has become to use a car in Paris ? Does it really strike you as if people really had a better choice ?

mpfundstein 6y ago
tell them. its the same problem everywhere. rich kids fillING the cities with daddy money and then demanding all the original folks to change. same in Amsterdam. We call them 'juppen'.. they destroy the city. luckily due to corona, a lot of them are moving back to their parents home.

contingencies 6y ago

middle and lower class, needed to run a city like this are pushed to live in the suburbs You could always take the Singaporean solution and make replacing them with automation a national priority? I am not being serious, I am pointing out there are actually national programs for this sort of social adjustment. It's more than a little scary.