>The problem with bicycles is that they don't respect road signs or traffic lights
The problem with Paris would be more that it's full of parisians.
It's very cliche, but sadly true. People are smart and educated but undisciplined, behave unresponsibly, and think about rules as mere guidelines. Being "human" and super lenient is mostly a quality, even when it comes to street rules.
Drivers are really bad, bikes don't care about road rules nor surrounding trafic, and pedestrians can strike conversations in the middle of the street if they get to stop the cars around them. There is an intersection in front of a subway station in the town I live, there is a trafic light, mirrors and road marking, and still every two months someone runs through it and gets hit by a car.
I think the best system would be close the streets that already effectively dominated by pedestrians, reserve the most busy streets for professional vehicles (buses, taxi, delivery vans etc.). This would tip the balance to use private cars for very specific reasons only, and switch to public transport for the more casual trips.
Road mortality would be down, people currently wildly circulating on the street would have full areas reserved for them, public transport would have a boost in use justifying more investment in the infrastructure and modernisation, and pro drivers would also have dedicated lanes and streets.
It feels like a clear win for basically everybody.
> "Public transport would have a boost in use justifying more investment".
There are already overcrowded like crazy, what more people do you want? As a daily user, please do make more people inside my train. It's rare but it happened several times that I had to let go 4 trains before giving up and going home, because there were already too many people in it.
You want less cars on the road? Maybe start delivering quality transportation instead of this horrible stack of old trains, that make you late everytime and feel like being in a overcrowded animal farm you see in the documentaries.
I feel you. I am on a line (RER A) where morning trains get 10~15 min late by default. One of the train slot just gets cancelled every now and then for no reason, and the main cause of problems are "exploitation accidents" (= we screwed up).
And still there seem to be efforts to cut costs and all the money might be going to building new lines instead of making the existing stuff work correctly.
I the SNCF/ratp doesn't get it's back on the wall I feel they'll never do anything to make things better.
BTW commuting by car also seems to be an everyday mayhem with crazy long road works, incidents everyday and overall aggressiveness from the (motor)bikes, delivery vans and inraged drivers.
The problem with Paris would be more that it's full of parisians.
It's very cliche, but sadly true. People are smart and educated but undisciplined, behave unresponsibly, and think about rules as mere guidelines. Being "human" and super lenient is mostly a quality, even when it comes to street rules.
Drivers are really bad, bikes don't care about road rules nor surrounding trafic, and pedestrians can strike conversations in the middle of the street if they get to stop the cars around them. There is an intersection in front of a subway station in the town I live, there is a trafic light, mirrors and road marking, and still every two months someone runs through it and gets hit by a car.
I think the best system would be close the streets that already effectively dominated by pedestrians, reserve the most busy streets for professional vehicles (buses, taxi, delivery vans etc.). This would tip the balance to use private cars for very specific reasons only, and switch to public transport for the more casual trips.
Road mortality would be down, people currently wildly circulating on the street would have full areas reserved for them, public transport would have a boost in use justifying more investment in the infrastructure and modernisation, and pro drivers would also have dedicated lanes and streets.
It feels like a clear win for basically everybody.
reply