"Two major axes will service 65 'biking neighborhoods' throughout the city. Dedicated bike lanes will increase from 273 miles today to 435 miles by 2011."
The Transport Politic reports that Paris is about to get a whole lot more shareable:
If Velib’ has changed the face of Paris by providing it the largest bike-sharing system in the world with 1,800 stations and more than 20,000 bikes, there’s still plenty of work to be done in the French capital. After nine years of slow but steady improvements originating from an environmentally minded city hall, Paris is about to hit the accelerator pedal.
The new plan, to be presented in early June to the city council, where it is virtually guaranteed passage, will increase the number of bike lanes within this 40.7 square mile city from 273 miles today (most built since 2001) to 435 miles in 2014. Two major axes — one running east-west from the Bois de Vincennes to the Bois de Boulogne and the other north-south, will be designed for heavy traffic. One thousand new bike parking spaces will be added to the city’s streets every year, and bike boxes, allowing cyclists to get priority treatment at intersections, will be painted in across the city. Connections to the suburbs will be reinforced through the reconstruction of ten city “gates.” And starting this July, 65 neighborhoods, making up about half the city’s land area, will be converted to prioritize biking, with two-way travel allowed even on streets reserved for one-way car traffic.
By 2020, most of the city’s major streets will have dedicated bike lanes and the network will begin to extend out into the near suburbs.
Paris’ project, led by Mayor Bertrand Delanöe, is not revolutionary in concept — most of what is being done has been done in parts of the city before — but rather in scale. The sheer size of the city’s investments, which will bring bike infrastructure within feet of all of the city’s residents, is likely to continue the increase in the mode share of alternative transportation.
For more background and context, see Paul DeMaio's Shareable article, "Does Bike Sharing Have a Future?"
Comments
Jeremy Adam Smith wrote on 05.27.10, 12:54pm:
Your story makes me think of Boston, which was a horrible place to bike back in the 90s, and its current efforts to become more bike friendly: http://shareable.net/blog/can-the-worlds-worst-biking-city-become-the-best
As long as we're on the topic, I've been watching San Francisco try to turn Market St. into a more bike friendly thoroughfare. But the implementation is typically neurotic: one block features a painted bike lane with barrier; the next just has a stencil; the next has a painted bike lane but no barrier; the next nothing at all. It's like riding through a video game, confusing for cars and bicyclists alike. Hopefully, it will continue to evolve...
Jeremy Adam Smith
www.jeremyadamsmith.com
chicago pop wrote on 05.27.10, 12:57pm:
This really is amazing. In a way, it clashes with a nostalgic image of Paris (mostly held by Americans), but in another, more accurate sense, it follows a long tradition of radical urban planning initiatives and an embrace of new technologies going back centuries -- well before the automobile, of course. That legacy -- mostly of broad boulevards ringing the city center -- is now proving to be a very beneficial "preadaptation" to cycling and bikesharing. It will be interesting to see if other cities that are not showcase capitals can do things like this.
chicago pop wrote on 05.27.10, 1:04pm:
Good to see that progress is being made in Boston -- I think it's when half-hearted efforts are made to squeeze bikes together with cars in an old city that was never meant for automobiles that you might get the worst of both worlds. It really does take a shift in priorities, which means giving up roadway space for safe bike lanes.
Liz Kofman wrote on 06.14.10, 12:08pm:
So jealous!! I live in Los Angeles. Enough said.
I lived in Paris for a year back in college. A few weeks after I got there, I bought a bike at a department store south of the city, then rode the bike across Paris to get to my apartment on the north side of the city. It was such a scary experience that I never rode that bike again, and wound selling it to someone else. I took away an impression of the city as hostile to all the kinds of ways I was exploring mobility and exercise. How things have changed ... for the better!