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> I understand Paris to have undertaken a serious revolution in purging cars within the past decade. The issue is that they have mainly increased the friction

> I understand Paris to have undertaken a serious revolution in purging cars within the past decade. The issue is that they have mainly increased the friction of using cars in the city (reducing lanes, restricting parking, converting avenues to one-way) all the while the public transit enhancements are running late, and whatever lines were already there saw a drop in service quality. So increasing density would require a major improvement in public transit. Note, however, that the city of Paris proper already has one of the highest densities in the world.

digging 3y ago
That is unfortunate but realistically there's never going to be a political overhaul of that scale where all moves are perfectly synced. As long as they're actually working on the transit enhancements it seems completely acceptable to me (in the abstract; I'm not a Parisian)
- testingParisGPE 3y ago
  Paris is building a lot of transit enhancements right now.
Aromasin 3y ago
The same is happening in the UK. They've made car travel harder without making public transport any better (outside of London), which has just lowered the average person's productivity rather than making any headway into tackling the core issue of people getting from A to B quicker, cheaper, with less pollution. They put in some heavy traffic restrictions in my local city of Oxford by closing off residential roads, forcing all traffic down "arterial" roads instead and putting parking restrictions all over the place. A year later, there are no fewer cars on the road or increased public transport usage; some local studies by the university confirmed that. People just spend more time stuck in traffic travelling longer distances. It's like having a person with an injured leg and a missing one. Instead of giving the person a prosthesis to remove the load, they've just lopped the other off altogether, leaving them to crawl from place to place instead of hobble.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  ‘ making public transport any better (outside of London)’ is not really under the government’s control until after the local electorate agrees to it. So it’s a moot point when only one decision pathway can actually be budged by more then a few inches.
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  I feel like the best way to make getting from A to B quicker is for A and B to be closer together. Which makes walking or biking more practical and you don’t have to spend as much money on public transit.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    A and B being closer works for cars, too. A 15 minute walk is 2 minutes by car, five by bike.
    - digging 3y ago
      > A and B being closer works for cars, too. Only when the distances are greater than short-walk distance. Cars take up (huge amounts of) space at their destination by parking. You can only push two destinations so close together before their parking lots merge.
    - mattkrause 3y ago
      Only to a point, because car trips have more “friction” especially in a city. For example, you might need to spend some time getting to/from the car or wending your way through a parking structure. You may need to drive a more circuitous route due to one-way streets—-and certainly can’t cut through a park or building. You don’t need fuel/charging or maintenance every trip but it amortizes out to a small delay. And there’s traffic! Anecdotally, a 15 minute walk (~1 mile) is probably about the break-even point. My spouse and I both went that far yesterday, one in a car and one walking, and yet we both got home at almost exactly the same time.
- mpweiher 3y ago
8note 3y ago
This doesn't sound right? If you increase density, you should be avoiding the need to improve public transit, as more people will be closer to their destination than it's worth driving to. For the same population increase, less density means people have to travel farther to get to their destination. More people travelling farther necessitates more public transit
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  Suppose that you have a grid-like road network across an area of 100 square miles, where intersecting roads go north-south and east-west and roads are half a mile apart. If you want to get from one corner of the square to the adjacent one, you have to travel 10 miles. If there are a million people doing this, you have ten million vehicle miles. Now suppose you compress this many people into an area of 25 square miles, where the roads are still half a mile apart. Now the distance along one of the edges is 5 miles and the same million people only have to travel 5 million miles. But now instead of having 400 miles of roads (10/0.5 * 10 on each axis), you have 100 miles of roads (5/0.5 * 5 * 2), so each road has twice as many cars, or each bus has to carry twice as many passengers or whatever. This is why mass transit works in cities and not in the suburbs. In a city you have enough passengers to fill the bus or subway car, in the suburbs you don't. But if you increase the density without putting in any mass transit, you just get more traffic. On the other hand, the people who say we can't increase density until we build mass transit are full of crap. You can add a bus route in a day, you just buy a bus and hire a driver. In urban areas subways are generally more efficient, and those take time to build, but you can run a bus until the subway is built. It's no excuse to hold up housing construction.
  - dublinben 3y ago
    You can't assume that the number of cars is a constant though. As point A and point B become farther apart, car usage goes up. When they become closer together, car usage scales down.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      But as point A and point B become closer together, it takes less time to get there by car and then people do it more often. Unless traffic congestion eats the time savings, implying that there is high traffic congestion.
mpweiher 3y ago
> [increase friction for cars...no improvement to public transport] Hmm...aren't you forgetting something? Last I checked, Paris had a veritable bicycling revolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_Paris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_Paris Le Plan vélo de Paris (2015-2020) doubled bicycle lanes to 1000km and increased ridership (apparently already high?) by 50% or more. The current plan is to add another 180km and make Paris 100% cyclable.
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  Sure, if you live in the city proper. But what that doesn't mention: the bike sharing schemes are hit-and-miss. I usually commute each way a good hour before rush-hour traffic, so I have a good probability of finding a usable bike. But during rush hour? Fat chance. Oh, you're going to point out that there's a scheme helping you purchase your own bike? Indeed. What are you going to do with it, though? At home, you may be able to find a spot to park in your flat (it's not my case). You wanna leave it outside? Sure, go ahead, if you don't care about finding it in one piece in the morning. Ditto for the other end of your commute. There's also the fact that bike sharing schemes only work in Paris proper and adjacent towns. If you want to commute in from further away [0], you better be ready to ride in traffic and have your own bike, assuming you don't live that far. If you're lucky enough to live in one of the places served by the new metro, it's still not ready (but should be real soon now - fingers crossed). So sure, having more dedicated bike lanes (and some of the new ones are actually physically separate from car lanes) is great. Although sometimes the layout is... puzzling? Bike lanes switching from the left to the right side of the roads, narrow two-way lanes (Bd Sébastopol), etc. But I wouldn't exactly call it a "revolution" in practice. My commute goes from the east to the northwest of the city, around 7 km. Of these, only around 1 km is a bike lane separate from the traffic. And it's ridiculously narrow. Bonus points for it being painted with a slippery paint for some reason (look up Boulevard Magenta). The rest is half on bike lanes shared with a bus, the other half on regular roads with no bike lane at all. --- [0] Don't forget that Paris proper is home to ~2M people, while the Paris Region has ~12M.
  - mrpopo 3y ago
    Safe (locked) bike parks are popping up everywhere in Paris

digging 3y ago

That is unfortunate but realistically there's never going to be a political overhaul of that scale where all moves are perfectly synced. As long as they're actually working on the transit enhancements it seems completely acceptable to me (in the abstract; I'm not a Parisian)

testingParisGPE 3y ago
Paris is building a lot of transit enhancements right now.

Aromasin 3y ago

The same is happening in the UK. They've made car travel harder without making public transport any better (outside of London), which has just lowered the average person's productivity rather than making any headway into tackling the core issue of people getting from A to B quicker, cheaper, with less pollution. They put in some heavy traffic restrictions in my local city of Oxford by closing off residential roads, forcing all traffic down "arterial" roads instead and putting parking restrictions all over the place. A year later, there are no fewer cars on the road or increased public transport usage; some local studies by the university confirmed that. People just spend more time stuck in traffic travelling longer distances. It's like having a person with an injured leg and a missing one. Instead of giving the person a prosthesis to remove the load, they've just lopped the other off altogether, leaving them to crawl from place to place instead of hobble.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
‘ making public transport any better (outside of London)’ is not really under the government’s control until after the local electorate agrees to it. So it’s a moot point when only one decision pathway can actually be budged by more then a few inches.
amanaplanacanal 3y ago
I feel like the best way to make getting from A to B quicker is for A and B to be closer together. Which makes walking or biking more practical and you don’t have to spend as much money on public transit.
- bombcar 3y ago
  A and B being closer works for cars, too. A 15 minute walk is 2 minutes by car, five by bike.
  - digging 3y ago
    > A and B being closer works for cars, too. Only when the distances are greater than short-walk distance. Cars take up (huge amounts of) space at their destination by parking. You can only push two destinations so close together before their parking lots merge.
  - mattkrause 3y ago
    Only to a point, because car trips have more “friction” especially in a city. For example, you might need to spend some time getting to/from the car or wending your way through a parking structure. You may need to drive a more circuitous route due to one-way streets—-and certainly can’t cut through a park or building. You don’t need fuel/charging or maintenance every trip but it amortizes out to a small delay. And there’s traffic! Anecdotally, a 15 minute walk (~1 mile) is probably about the break-even point. My spouse and I both went that far yesterday, one in a car and one walking, and yet we both got home at almost exactly the same time.
mpweiher 3y ago

8note 3y ago

This doesn't sound right? If you increase density, you should be avoiding the need to improve public transit, as more people will be closer to their destination than it's worth driving to. For the same population increase, less density means people have to travel farther to get to their destination. More people travelling farther necessitates more public transit

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
Suppose that you have a grid-like road network across an area of 100 square miles, where intersecting roads go north-south and east-west and roads are half a mile apart. If you want to get from one corner of the square to the adjacent one, you have to travel 10 miles. If there are a million people doing this, you have ten million vehicle miles. Now suppose you compress this many people into an area of 25 square miles, where the roads are still half a mile apart. Now the distance along one of the edges is 5 miles and the same million people only have to travel 5 million miles. But now instead of having 400 miles of roads (10/0.5 * 10 on each axis), you have 100 miles of roads (5/0.5 * 5 * 2), so each road has twice as many cars, or each bus has to carry twice as many passengers or whatever. This is why mass transit works in cities and not in the suburbs. In a city you have enough passengers to fill the bus or subway car, in the suburbs you don't. But if you increase the density without putting in any mass transit, you just get more traffic. On the other hand, the people who say we can't increase density until we build mass transit are full of crap. You can add a bus route in a day, you just buy a bus and hire a driver. In urban areas subways are generally more efficient, and those take time to build, but you can run a bus until the subway is built. It's no excuse to hold up housing construction.
- dublinben 3y ago
  You can't assume that the number of cars is a constant though. As point A and point B become farther apart, car usage goes up. When they become closer together, car usage scales down.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    But as point A and point B become closer together, it takes less time to get there by car and then people do it more often. Unless traffic congestion eats the time savings, implying that there is high traffic congestion.

mpweiher 3y ago

> [increase friction for cars...no improvement to public transport] Hmm...aren't you forgetting something? Last I checked, Paris had a veritable bicycling revolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_Paris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_Paris Le Plan vélo de Paris (2015-2020) doubled bicycle lanes to 1000km and increased ridership (apparently already high?) by 50% or more. The current plan is to add another 180km and make Paris 100% cyclable.

vladvasiliu 3y ago
Sure, if you live in the city proper. But what that doesn't mention: the bike sharing schemes are hit-and-miss. I usually commute each way a good hour before rush-hour traffic, so I have a good probability of finding a usable bike. But during rush hour? Fat chance. Oh, you're going to point out that there's a scheme helping you purchase your own bike? Indeed. What are you going to do with it, though? At home, you may be able to find a spot to park in your flat (it's not my case). You wanna leave it outside? Sure, go ahead, if you don't care about finding it in one piece in the morning. Ditto for the other end of your commute. There's also the fact that bike sharing schemes only work in Paris proper and adjacent towns. If you want to commute in from further away [0], you better be ready to ride in traffic and have your own bike, assuming you don't live that far. If you're lucky enough to live in one of the places served by the new metro, it's still not ready (but should be real soon now - fingers crossed). So sure, having more dedicated bike lanes (and some of the new ones are actually physically separate from car lanes) is great. Although sometimes the layout is... puzzling? Bike lanes switching from the left to the right side of the roads, narrow two-way lanes (Bd Sébastopol), etc. But I wouldn't exactly call it a "revolution" in practice. My commute goes from the east to the northwest of the city, around 7 km. Of these, only around 1 km is a bike lane separate from the traffic. And it's ridiculously narrow. Bonus points for it being painted with a slippery paint for some reason (look up Boulevard Magenta). The rest is half on bike lanes shared with a bus, the other half on regular roads with no bike lane at all. --- [0] Don't forget that Paris proper is home to ~2M people, while the Paris Region has ~12M.
- mrpopo 3y ago
  Safe (locked) bike parks are popping up everywhere in Paris