News of the Week

Making Cities More Livable (in Europe, Anyway)

PARIS ON TWO WHEELS

by Richard Conniff

Parisians are now traveling by bike more than by car from the suburbs to the city center, especially during peak periods, according to a new study by the Paris Region Institute. This reversal of conditions just a few years ago is due largely to Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s determined efforts to take the city back from domination by motor vehicle traffic. That program has included banning cars from the banks of the Seine, reconfiguring other streets to make pedestrians safer, and construction of many new bike routes to separate them from vehicle traffic.

Forbes magazine reports:

Between October 2022 and April 2023, 3,337 Parisians aged 16 to 80 years old were equipped with GPS trackers to record their journeys for seven consecutive days. In the suburbs, where public transit is less dense, transport by car was found to be the main form of mobility. But for journeys from the outskirts of Paris to the center, the number of cyclists now far exceeds the number of motorists, a huge change from just five years ago. Most of the journeys recorded were commuter trips.

All good news. But a small quibble: The Forbes story ran under the headline “French Revolution: Cyclists Now Outnumber Motorists In Paris.” The article itself included zero evidence of a “revolution,” or even a “huge change,” just a lame second-hand quote from a French TV station that the “capital’s cycle paths are always full.”

So I wrote to L’Institut Paris Region, which conducted the study …. Wait, I should say that I wrote to them last Sunday morning, and a few hours later received a more helpful reply than anything in the Forbes article, from Dany Nguyen-Luong, director of transportation. Nguyen-Luong volunteered that, “Those who accepted to participate in our survey are maybe more ‘virtuous’ than the average person.”

He also supplied the numbers: The study divided the Paris region into an inner ring for the city center, a second, surrounding ring for the outer districts, and a third ring for the farther suburbs. For traffic in the city center only, this is how Parisians now travel:

Cars : 13%

Public Transport : 66 %

Motorbikes : 2%

Bikes : 14%

Walk : 5%

So maybe NOT a revolution, but bicycles definitely edged out cars. And public transit ridership was almost double bikes, motorbikes, cars, and walkers combined.

From Twitter, via @swyftcities, came comparable news from London’s City Streets traffic study:

The most recent traffic survey was conducted on 23 November 2022. In summary, traffic count data suggests all-day motor vehicle volumes are at approximately 80% of pre-pandemic levels (2019), all-day cycling volumes are at 102% of pre-pandemic levels and all-day pedestrian levels are at 63% of pre-pandemic levels. These figures include both local and through traffic.

And from CNN:

By the middle of this year, private cars will be gone entirely from the center of Milan, Italy’s second largest city and its financial capital. “We’ll start with the center, but then we will expand,” Mayor Giuseppe Sala said late last year.

Likewise, in the Swedish capital Stockholm, gas and diesel cars will be banned from 20 blocks of its most desirable inner city shopping and office area from next year. And already in Austria’s capital in October, our taxi couldn’t get closer than a block from our hotel on the Stephansplatz square in central Vienna.

Other European cities have been banning cars for decades. In Pontevedra, northwestern Spain, there hasn’t been a single private car in most of the city since 1999. The last road fatality came 13 years ago when a delivery van ran over an 81-year-old pedestrian.

The rest of the CNN report, written by David A. Andelman, is a whiny, media-star post about losing the old sense that Paris was made for him to race along the Seine “at 60 miles an hour from the Maison de Radio far out in the 16th arrondissement… virtually to the Bastille in the 4th in minutes even at the height of rush hour.” Or this: “Try getting to one of my favorite restaurants, Bofinger, off the Bastille from my apartment around the corner from the Musée d’Orsay at lunch time. Forever.”

Ooof! Poor man! Perhaps he should try a bike?

HOW GREEN IS YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD?

Baltimore’s North Carrolton Avenue (Photo by Richard Conniff)

The Washington Post published results from a nation study that allows people to determine access to nature in a given neighborhood. If you can’t get past the paywall at the Post, no worries. You can find the NatureScore of any neighborhood in the U.S. from NatureQuant, the Oregon nonprofit that developed the study: just type in the address. Why bother? Because there’s a strong correlation between the street trees, parks, and other green spaces in a neighborhood, and the health of the people who live there.

The Post goes on to say:

Quantifying nature reveals unsettling truths — about how the densest neighborhoods are often bereft of nature, and about how the poorest city dwellers have the least access to the nature’s health benefits.

Trigger warning here for the willfully ignornant: It’s systemic racism.

The Census tracts with the lowest share of White people have an average NatureScore of 45, compared with 73 in the tracts with highest share of Whites.

But some organizations are now using NatureScore to steer donors toward neglected areas:

“Everybody wants to plant in their neighborhood,” said Jeff Salem, director of communications for the Arbor Day Foundation. “But this helps that conversation of, ‘Hey, you might live in North Chicago in a really great neighborhood, but really, as you can see here, there’s some neighborhoods on the South Side that really could use your support with trees.’”

Planting trees is never enough, however. The hard part is to nurse what you plant through the critical early years, That takes support from the neighborhood. Here in Connecticut, New Haven’s Urban Resources Initiative has been a longstanding model for getting neighbors involved. The Post also says Groundwork Bridgeport, in the state’s sixth poorest city

has figured out how to host successful tree giveaways (door knocking works better than direct mail, and it helps to have friends at community gardens). Last year, they distributed 100 trees to residents on the east side of the city. If all those trees are still around in 30 years, it will boost the area’s NatureScore by 15 points, amounting to an increase of a year of life expectancy for people in the neighborhood, NatureQuant told me.

Full disclosure: Richard Conniff lives in a town with a 97.9 NatureScore—not too surprising given the subjects I write about—and its population is 92.43% white, for which I have no excuse.