Eric Britton shows off the Paris Mobilien – a BRT with style – on Boul’ Montparnasse here.
Mobilien doesn’t aim at producing top speeds but making steady progress through the traffic stream. It launched in Paris after three years of planning in 2004 with the goal of cutting down on car traffic. To make the project possible, Paris’ officials eliminated much on-street parking to create dedicated bus lanes that are shared with bicycles, taxis and emergency vehicles.
UPDATE: This just in: a pic of the proposed 50-storey glass pyramid by Herzog & de Meuron for the Porte de Versailles – now that Council has voted to drop a ban on highrise buildings.
Mon Dieu!
The Mobilien, and its safer cycling lanes, is one more reason why Velib is successful in Paris. Vancouver can do much more, without spending a lot of money, to make cycling safer. City Council just refuses to take away general purpose motor vehicle lanes and is very reluctant to remove on street parking.
Interesting that bikes share lanes with buses. Not sure if Vancouver cyclists would want to have a bus on their tail the whole time. Mind you, they probably often do in the curb lanes – just not at HOV/express lane/rapidbus speeds.
The Mobilien network is not high speed. It’s just faster than the congested regular traffic lanes.
Thanks – I was thinking of the speeds on the former 98 B-Line on No. 3 Rd.
If bikes share a lane with busses, I could see it actually being a comforting feeling for bike riders because:
1. Bus drivers are professional drivers (as opposed to the usual hordes of random maniacal drivers).
2. The bus drivers know that there’s always going to be bikes in that lane, so they constantly have to be aware of and on the lookout for bikes in the lane. Bikes wouldn’t simply be an occasional occurrence, they’d be a constant presence.
3. Busses generally don’t make sudden turns, and their behavior is fairly predictable.
I am all for re-allocation of lanes to give transit priority and Mobilien definitely does this.. and it’s hard to argue when one of the world’s most admired cities is implementing it. Lane allocation is one of the most powerful carrot + stick mechanims out there to support transit ridership.
However looking beyond that Mobilien is not really so impressive – it is on par with so-called BRT in North America, which pales compared to the really full BRT systems like Bogota’s TranMilenio.
imho no one should have to plan their trip around transit (that right there is a huge deterrent), service should be frequent enough that you show up and never wait more than 2-3 minutes no matter what. On the boarding, what is the point of nearly no-step loading when you can have totally level boarding and make it that much easier for people with childrenin strollers or those with grocery carts? The list goes on… do riders queu to get on? Why not have all-door boarding with the fares collected before?
Also, I disagree with the shared bike and bus lanes. They might be fine if either mode of traffic is light, but once frequency of the buses goes up or bike ridership goes up, then everything will be bogged down by the speed of the cyclists. Sharing the lanes also takes alot of the carrot out of the lane-reallocation if the buses can only travel at the speed of a bike they are behind. If long-term use is the goal, cycle lanes ought to be their own entity.
Mobilien is not supposed to be BRT; we just call it that because North Americans are somewhat familiar with the term.