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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 ma
by hshdhdhj4444 7mo ago
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 traffic jams is minuscule when compared to other large cities across the world (outside of maybe NYC, since it implemented congestion pricing over that period). Paris has not escaped the wrath of the SUV, and a large part of the congestion cities across the world are seeing is solely down to cars becoming bigger.
- lefrenchy 7mo ago[flagged]
- Schiendelman 7mo agoHave you ever tried to park an SUV versus parking a sedan?
- obsidianbases1 7mo agoGreat point. Additionally, driving a small sedan myself, if there is a parking spot (not parallel, normal lot spot) in between two SUVs, there is a good chance that spot is useless, even in my small car. Just last night, I was parked perfectly (I had to stop and admire my work because what follows), but still had to squeeze out with my door undoubtedly touching the SUV, and it wasn't even a large size SUV. I really hope waymo takes of and makes it economical to stop owning a car, and reduce the necessity of parking lots
- consp 7mo ago> there is a good chance that spot is useless, even in my small car. Totally off topic but I've seen two smarts side-by-side in one parking spot, on a right angle to the parking spot making exiting the spot easy. Now that's efficient. And they still were less parked on the road than any big SUV or worse.
- calvinmorrison 7mo agofewer cars per foot, less visibility, etc? If there's a sedan in front of me I can see whats going on, if there's a UPS box truck, i cannot even see the light 150 feet away.
- troupo 7mo agoHere's a helpful comparison https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/opel-astra-1998-coupe-vs-volvo-xc90-2024-suv/ https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/opel-astra-1998-cou...
- InsideOutSanta 7mo agoThat's an amazing website; thanks for linking it. Apparently, lengthwise, my car easily fits between the wheels of a Ford F-150 without even touching them. My car's full height is substantially below where the F-150's windows begin. That car could probably drive over my car and barely even notice it.
- curtisblaine 7mo agoNot so helpful; the cars are from two different generations at two different price points. Try https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/bentley-flying-spur-2019-sedan-vs-volvo-xc90-2024-suv/ https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/bentley-flying-spur...
- airstrike 7mo agoAlso why are front and rear not overlays
- vel0city 7mo agoYou're calling out different price points while then choosing a $200k car. Which, you picked that car because it's an exceptionally long sedan. How about we choose a different SUV? https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/bentley-flying-spur-2019-sedan-vs-chevrolet-suburban-2020-suv/ https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/bentley-flying-spur... I see far more suburbans on the road than all models of Bentley. People aren't choosing SUVs because they're smaller than sedans. They're choosing them because they're bigger.
- Macha 7mo agoBecause old and new cars never have to interact on the road?
- 7mo ago
- kibwen 7mo agoOne of the major problems with cars is the terrible lack of density. Per-occupant, a car occupies more space on the roadway than any other form of passenger transport. And as cars get larger, that lack of density gets even worse. There's only so much space on the road, so something has to give.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- efavdb 7mo agoWhen I look at traffic in my city, I rarely see it caused by full packing. Rather throughout seems to be the issue.
- lukeschlather 7mo agoThroughput 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.
- marcosdumay 7mo agoThroughput in congestion is determined mostly by how quickly drivers react to the opportunity to move and how many points of attrition are in a path. Both of what are impacted by the number of cars and how well they break or accelerate, not by their size. There's space to claim large car cause attrition, but that's completely dependent of the local properties of the streets.
- kibwen 7mo agoThe footprint of the car matters. When cars get 5% longer, the same number of people in cars takes 5% more roadway, which adds up quickly, because the difference between smoothly-flowing traffic and jammed traffic is a fragile equilibrium dominated by breakpoints. Furthermore, heavier cars accelerate and decelerate slower than lighter cars, which has a compounding effect on decreasing overall throughput.
- vel0city 7mo agoYou have a fixed amount of space to put stuff. If the stuff gets larger, can you put more or less stuff in that space? So now we have at least the same number of people trying to put their stuff in that fixed size space, but their stuff got bigger, does that make it easier or harder for them to put their stuff in that space? Will they have to compete more or less for that space? Seems like a pretty obvious one to me.
- magicalhippo 7mo agoHere the large SUVs make everyone else drive slower in the city, because they're so big the driver has poor visibility and thinks they need several feet more than they do in clearance, and so drive almost in the middle of the road. Others then have to go real slow to not get dinged up on either side.
- frnx 7mo agoThe new large cycling strips that appeared in the last 5-6 years are so good. At commute time there are frequently jammed with /cyclists/, but let's face it it's miles better than being stuck in a car. I shudder to think about the alternative where each cyclist was instead alone in a small car, this wouldn't even fit on the roads.
- suddenlybananas 7mo agoI do wonder how many cyclists in Paris are really replacing cars versus replacing metro usage. Obviously, it's still good for people to cycle as well since the metro can be insanely crowded at times, but living in Paris, my impression is that the people who cycle are the kinds who would have been unlikely to own a car in any case.
- saltysalt 7mo agoExactly.
- nchagnet 7mo agoThat's a really good point, I hope at the very least it enables a "car -> public transport -> bikes" flow. So even if these people were taking the metro, all that extra metro space can accomodate car-owners who wish to switch.
- martinald 7mo agoIt depends though. At least in London a lot of cycleways were made by removing bus lanes and replacing them with high quality segregated cycle lanes. This has led to a big increase in %age terms of cyclists in London, but a fairly significant decline in bus passengers. I think roughly 300m/yr cycle journeys were added, but bus has lost 500m pax/yr (mainly because of increased congestion making them less and less attractive). Note this isn't all down to bus lane removal, but it's a significant part of it.
- kergonath 7mo ago> I do wonder how many cyclists in Paris are really replacing cars versus replacing metro usage. That’s not necessarily a problem, particularly for saturated lines like the 13.
- iamkonstantin 7mo agoI 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 when all this started.
- skeletal88 7mo agoBut then public transport has to improve also. You cant make owning a car impossible without offering alternatives.
- tikhonj 7mo agoNone of the changes in the comment make owning a car impossible, they just make driving marginally less privileged over walking and biking.
- the_biot 7mo agoNo, it's worse than that. The city council very much implemented an anti-car (harassment) policy, to the point that car owners felt hounded by their own council's policies. It seriously wasn't a matter of "marginally less privileged".
- stingraycharles 7mo ago> But tourists visiting Paris for a week don’t get the majority of the benefit from cleaner air. You’re missing the point: tourists are good for the city. If Paris gets a reputation of being polluted, tourism will decline.
- zamadatix 7mo agoParis is consistently somewhere in the top 10 cities worldwide by number of tourists per year and this is an extremely important factor to the city. Even if if Le Monde was writing this in French the impacts to/from tourism would be relevant to the article.
- goldenarm 7mo agoTravelers are more sensitive to sudden changes. I got sick in Sicily on day one of my vacation because of how bad the air was.
- dismalaf 7mo ago> Paris has not escaped the wrath of the SUV, and a large part of the congestion cities across the world are seeing is solely down to cars becoming bigger. Europeans don't drive Suburbans. They drive crossovers that are, if anything, shorter than the equivalent sedan or wagon.
- seanmcdirmid 7mo agoSo do Americans in many cites like Seattle.
- dismalaf 7mo agoFair. When I'm in Canada I do see enough big trucks and SUVs though, versus Paris or Prague (the two places in Europe where I regularly visit/live) where the number is basically zero.
- bluesounddirect 7mo agoI agree, CNN has always had a weird angle to its bias. I am by no means a FOX news nut . I really think a lot of american "news" now is similar to How The WWF ( World Wide Wrestling Federation/ World Wrestling Entertainment) isn't a Sport. CNN , FOX, MSNBC/MSNOW , Newsmax etc aren't news but unfunny entertainment.
- dwg465 7mo agoI mean it’s a “CNN Travel” article…of course it’s going to focus on Paris as a travel destination.
- dfxm12 7mo agoCleaner air is still good for tourists & the article is part of the Travel section of this publication.
- zahlman 7mo agoWhen did the fad for compact cars end? Where did all these SUVs come from? Why do drivers want to lug all this extra weight and space around with them all the time?
- pas 7mo agoin the US it has a few factors, one is that trucks are exempted from some mileage requirements, so suddenly manufacturers started making "legally truck" cars
- yulker 7mo agothe default car should have been a one person car. we split a normal one lane into two narrow lanes.
- kube-system 7mo agoIn some places it is https://adventure.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Hero-Getting-round-SE-Asia-on-a-scooter-Taiwan-Photo-credit-Unsplash-andrew-haimerl-476824.jpg https://adventure.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Hero-Gettin...
- gostsamo 7mo agoThe 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.
- mitthrowaway2 7mo agoThat'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 which changes the payoff structure.
- II2II 7mo agoThings I noticed right off the bat: framing it as a tourist verses locals issue, a complete lack of numbers backing that claim, and the few numbers presented in the article have any context. I realize this is a travel article, but it seems to be more of a propaganda piece. Take the claim that the locals hate the changes. Well, the mayor was reelected. So they claim the voter turnout was low and people were complaining, so people obviously don't support it. Sorry, you can't make that conclusion. Under ordinary circumstances, 100% turnout would only tell you the overall support for a particular candidate or party, not a particular policy. A low turnout may reflect an electorate who is not particularly passionate in any of the issues presented in the election, or it may mean something else. It was probably something else in the 2020 elections because those were anything but ordinary: they fell during the peak of pandemic uncertainty (i.e. March to June). So a flimsy assertion based upon flimsy evidence. Then there are the scanty numbers without context. A 4% increase in traffic jams since 2015 and 31% decline in bus use between 2018 and 2024. First of all, the words "bus use" sounds highly selective. It looks like the Paris metro has been expanding and modernizing rapidly in recent years, which would both take load off of busses and be disruptive to transit users. Oh, and that pandemic thing raises its head again. I don't know about Paris, but a lot of cities took a hit to transit ridership during the pandemic and some are claiming to reach pre-pandemic levels only now. Also, cyclists tend to be the whipping boy for traffic congestion. I can't speak for Paris, but the reality in my parts are that population growth and a surge in construction have been far more disruptive than cycling infrastructure. Sorry about the rant, but I'm sick and tired of the views of one segment of the population completely overriding the views of another segment of the population ... especially when there are assertions based upon assumptions and flimsy evidence.
- stackghost 7mo ago>But tourists visiting Paris for a week don’t get the majority of the benefit from cleaner air. First impressions matter, though. When you fly into e.g. New York and they pop the door open you get that whiff of exhaust fumes. The city reeks. Vancouver on the other hand it smells like the ocean. Any improvement of air quality does matter for tourists and residents.
- 0xf8 7mo agoAgreed the tourist POV center focus is bizarre AF. it’s almost like they were afraid to ask Parisians or even other French natives regularly frequenting Paris what they thought and so they just went with tourists are happy…
- bluGill 7mo agoTourists get the majority of the benefit because residents of paris are smoking which is makes clear air not really a benifiet for them. I thought the above needed a /s, but a check shows 30% of the people in France smoke. (I can't find city stastics)
- stefs 7mo agoi kinda seem to remember that this is a bit misleading and the rates are surprisingly different than expected. i'm too lazy to check the sources right now, but gemini gives me a 15% daily smoker rate for paris, while it's ~30% for detroit, 21% for philadelphia, 10% for new york, 5% for L.A.
- fsckboy 7mo ago>This article has such a weird framing. It keeps repeating how the cleaner air is so good for tourists. it's not a weird framing, it's a clearly marked travel piece on "CNN Travel" the French don't read that, they read French newspapers etc.