From The Guardian:
It is 8.30am on a weekday rush hour and the Voie Georges-Pompidou along the right bank of the Seine, normally one of the busiest highways in Paris, is eerily quiet.
Around 43,000 vehicles a day used this expressway, built in 1967, to cross central Paris from west to east, but they are nowhere to be seen. Instead, teams of workers are there, planning playgrounds, wooden terraces, waterside gardens restaurants and rectangular terrains for playing boules.
The drone from traffic on the parallel Quai des Celestins, higher up the river bank, suggests traffic there is moving along at a respectable pace – confounding those doomsayers who suggested the controversial scheme to pedestrianise two miles of city centre highway would bring neighbouring roads to a standstill.
While this section of the Seine closes every summer to host the Paris Plages – in which temporary artificial beaches are created along the right bank of the river – this time the expressway has not been reopened.
Instead Paris’s prefect of police – the state representative – this week approved the closure of the riverside route for a six-month trial. Socialist-run city hall says it intends to keep the highway closed to vehicles for good. …
Few issues have so bitterly divided Parisians than the closure of Voie Georges-Pompidou. The move, one of the pillars of Hidalgo’s 2014 election campaign, has pitted city hall against the regional council, right against left, motorists against pedestrians, in increasingly bad tempered exchanges. …
Christophe Najdovski, Paris deputy mayor responsible for transport and public spaces, and a member of the Ecology Green party, said the new project is all about changing attitudes. “The first few weeks will be difficult and then it will become normal. As we have seen with this type of project across the whole world, including places like New York and Rio, is that when an urban highway is transformed or closed, there is an evaporation of traffic. Either people modify their route, or they use their car less and take other forms of transport.
The drone from traffic on the parallel Quai des Celestins, higher up the river bank, suggests traffic there is moving along at a respectable pace – confounding those doomsayers who suggested the controversial scheme to pedestrianise two miles of city centre highway would bring neighbouring roads to a standstill.
While this section of the Seine closes every summer to host the Paris Plages – in which temporary artificial beaches are created along the right bank of the river – this time the expressway has not been reopened.
Instead Paris’s prefect of police – the state representative – this week approved the closure of the riverside route for a six-month trial. Socialist-run city hall says it intends to keep the highway closed to vehicles for good. …
Few issues have so bitterly divided Parisians than the closure of Voie Georges-Pompidou. The move, one of the pillars of Hidalgo’s 2014 election campaign, has pitted city hall against the regional council, right against left, motorists against pedestrians, in increasingly bad tempered exchanges. …
Christophe Najdovski, Paris deputy mayor responsible for transport and public spaces, and a member of the Ecology Green party, said the new project is all about changing attitudes. “The first few weeks will be difficult and then it will become normal. As we have seen with this type of project across the whole world, including places like New York and Rio, is that when an urban highway is transformed or closed, there is an evaporation of traffic. Either people modify their route, or they use their car less and take other forms of transport.
“Behaviour will change. Habits will change. And our objective, to reduce traffic and thus pollution, will be achieved.”
Najdovski added: “We have done all studies necessary for this project and we’re convinced that after six months, a year, everything will be fine and nobody will be talking about this any more. That’s what happened with the right bank three years ago.
Najdovski added: “We have done all studies necessary for this project and we’re convinced that after six months, a year, everything will be fine and nobody will be talking about this any more. That’s what happened with the right bank three years ago.
But Pierre Chasseray of the organisation 40 Millions d’automobilistes (40 Million Motorists), which has 320,000 members, said Najdovski’s arguments are “utter rubbish”.
“If Anne Hidalgo wants to ride a bicycle then that’s up to her, but why should motorists suffer? Let’s make no mistake, her goal is purely electoral and this stupid idea will please two or three bobos (bourgeois-bohemians) and upset 10 million others. She doesn’t care about the people in the banlieues [suburbs] because they don’t vote for her.”
“If you close a major road, it’s obvious the cars aren’t just going to disappear. Anne Hidalgo isn’t David Copperfield. They’re going to turn up elsewhere and there will be traffic jams elsewhere,” Chasseray told the Guardian.
He added: “City hall wants to change people’s habits by force, but we’re not a dictatorship. Instead of closing the highways, they should find a way for cars and pedestrians to coexist.”
The Ile-de-France regional president Valérie Pécresse, of the opposition centre-right Les Republicains (LR) party, said the trial should last a year to take account of “spikes in pollution” in summer months. She said the pedestrianisation project was “seductive” but added: “It all comes down to how it’s done.”
“Paris cannot take brutal decision without real consultation and without taking into account the impact on the banlieue,” Pecresse told Le Monde.
Full article here.
The Ile-de-France regional president Valérie Pécresse, of the opposition centre-right Les Republicains (LR) party, said the trial should last a year to take account of “spikes in pollution” in summer months. She said the pedestrianisation project was “seductive” but added: “It all comes down to how it’s done.”
“Paris cannot take brutal decision without real consultation and without taking into account the impact on the banlieue,” Pecresse told Le Monde.
Full article here.
Very nice and a valuable addition to a clogged traffic choked city.
Very similar to the promenade along the Rhine in Düsseldorf that used to feature a four lane highway until the mid 90’s. Now this highway is in a tunnel and a wide 2km+ promenade with trees, bike lanes and dozens of restaurants or cafes is on top with SW exposure and thousands of visitors and locals almost every non-rainy day with pedestrian access to the Altstadt ( old town ) behind it. Arno can likely comment further as it is a popular weekend trip for the Dutch which is a 2h train ride from Amsterdam or a two day cycle trip.
More here https://www.duesseldorf-tourismus.de/en/sights/rhine-embankment-promenade/
Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway could benefit from this approach or Vancouver’s S-Granville from 6th to 16th Ave in a tunnel and a pedestrian zone on top. Or Beach Ave closed.
I was there once when they were trucking in snow in the winter to have a cross country ski race within the city – using part of that promenade … very cool! (and kinda cold too … but then it was winter)
Similar to the Rhonda Litoral that runs along the coast through Barcelona. Covered in sections, with parks and occasionally retail kiosks among the above promenade, that also has smaller roads for the local traffic.
You would think with 16 Metro lines (including two secondary runs) and 5 regional express RER lines placing a rapid transit station within 500m of almost every building, and with a total ridership of 1.54 billion people a year (4.2 million a day) and a $30 billion budget to expand the system, Paris could afford to let go of one road that moves at best 70,000 people a day (43,000 cars) without the slightest intention to provide road replacement space, least of all tunnels for cars with an extraordinarily expensive per user cost compared to the Metro.
A little closer to home, transportation prof Jeff Kenworthy wrote a 2015 op-ed in the Globe and Mail recommending the removal of Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway and cites several international examples of the phenomenon of disappearing traffic (Carmageddon was predicted, but it never appeared) as well as the environmental, economic and political benefits.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/dear-toronto-ditching-the-gardiner-would-be-world-class/article24514204/
It would be interesting to see if carmageddon has ever occured after one of these road diets? … can’t think of any (beyond the first few days potentially before everyone got the memo)
There’s actually a decent example of a car diet in Vancouver happening right now – Burrard Street South of 4th … no cars can get through because of water main work, and I haven’t heard of any massive car-makatastrophe on the alternative routes.
Patullo Bridge road closures seem to cause a lot of problems (yes, that bridge is a road).
That’s probably because there are few close-by alternative options (i.e. redundancy).
In the case of Burrard St., it doesn’t lead anywhere anyways, since it effectively dead-ends at 16th Ave., so closing the end of the road really just moves the diversion point upstream. Motorists just need to turn off somewhere else (i.e. Broadway) instead of at 12th Ave. or 16th Ave. I hear it’s a bit of a hassle for resident access in those immediate blocks though (dead end to the block at Burrard, coupled with turn restrictions at Cypress due to the bike lane).
In the case of the Burrard Bridge narrowing, traffic runs fairly smoothly (slowly, but smoothly), but there’s also the nearby Granville Bridge.
I did see an ambulance with lights and sirens going stuck in the 2-lane northbound line-up one day around 6:00pm.
Note that the removal of the viaducts eliminates some redundancy on that side of town (i.e. viaducts closed – cars go to Pacific/Expo Blvds, Pender St. & Hastings St. / future super-road closed, cars go to Pender St. & Hastings St. (and maybe Cordova/Water St.).
Cities will continue to accommodate the automobile, but when cities are built around them, the quality of human and natural life declines. Current trends show great promise for future urban mobility systems that enable freedom and connection, but not dependence. We are experiencing the phenomenon of peak car use in many global cities at the same time that urban rail is thriving, central cities are revitalizing, and suburban sprawl is reversing. Walking and cycling are growing in many cities, along with ubiquitous bike sharing schemes, which have contributed to new investment and vitality in central cities including Melbourne, Seattle, Chicago, and New York.
We are thus in a new era that has come much faster than global transportation experts Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy had predicted: the end of automobile dependence. In The End of Automobile Dependence, Newman and Kenworthy look at how we can accelerate a planning approach to designing urban environments that can function reliably and conveniently on alternative modes, with a refined and more civilized automobile playing a very much reduced and manageable role in urban transportation. The authors examine the rise and fall of automobile dependence using updated data on 44 global cities to better understand how to facilitate and guide cities to the most productive and sustainable outcomes.
This is the final volume in a trilogy by Newman and Kenworthy on automobile dependence (Cities and Automobile Dependence in 1989 and Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence in 1999). Like all good trilogies this one shows the rise of an empire, in this case that of the automobile, the peak of its power, and the decline of that empire.
https://www.amazon.com/End-Automobile-Dependence-Car-Based-Planning/dp/1610914635