At a time of progressive deconfinement of the capital, the City is testing new mobility solutions, such as transient cycle paths along the metro lines. An opportunity to give pedestrians and bikes back their place for researcher Sébastien Marrec.
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The deconfinement was started on May 11 with in particular the development of transitory cycle tracks on Paris and the small crown: where does this innovation come from?
This phenomenon is not only Parisian, nor even French or European. It is part of a long history of revaluing public space as a diversified space in terms of uses, functions, mixed audiences, and as an intense foundation of social life. Considering the city as a laboratory of experimentation, of the right to success and failure is not a new idea, even if the scale that the phenomenon has taken in recent weeks is unprecedented and remarkable. The crisis is shaking up all fields of society, urban planning and mobility are no exception. Around the world, cities are inspired by tactical town planning, but this cannot be reduced to simply rearranging the streets by reducing the space allocated to the car to give it to pedestrians and cyclists.
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From where
comes tactical urbanism?
We can trace the concept of tactical town planning back to the 1960s. At the time, in Europe and especially in the United States, town planners like Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, William Whyte or Jan Gehl challenged institutional town planning. functionalist and the planning and decision-making role of public authorities in matters of planning. They highlighted the importance of human and social interaction in public space rather than automotive and road engineering. Their proposals and methods have brought to light a new way of apprehending public space by giving priority to the needs and demands of the inhabitants rather than to order, rationalist aesthetics or the efficiency of traffic flows. motorized.
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What alternative strategies have been put in place?
Alternative strategies to institutional town planning have been implemented by many western cities, mainly in the United States, but also in Europe and Latin America. Last April, Bogota (Colombia) tested several tens of kilometers of transitory cycle paths, extending a tradition of temporary street closings started in the 1990s. In France, the phenomenon concerns almost all metropolitan areas, such as Grenoble, Lille, Rennes, Nantes, Montpellier, Toulouse, Nice and also several small and medium-sized cities such as Le Mans and Angers.
The widening of sidewalks, the creation of temporary cycling facilities, the closing of streets to motorists in transit are designed as reversible and quick to put in place. The idea is to reveal the potential of a space for other uses than those related to the car. This adaptive urban planning will allow us to think of a way of making and living the city that is both more agile and more resilient for the crises to come.
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What can this innovation bring to Paris and the city in the longer term?
Until a few years ago, the Île-de-France travel system was like an animal that rested on three legs: walking, public transport and individual motorized modes (the car and motorized two-wheelers). This animal limps, and continues to limp, because it lacks a solid fourth leg on which the system would need to rely: the bicycle.
This imbalance in the use of modes always results in major dysfunctions: the space allocated to the car, very dominant (with the nuisances of all kinds that this generates) and an increasing saturation of public transport at the time of peak, bus and trams included. The use of the fourth leg, the bicycle, remained marginal for a long time including in Paris, where almost no one pedaled at the end of the 1980s.
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The bicycle will be essential in the modes of transport
Sébastien Marrec
Searcher
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The practice has not stopped progressing since, it has multiplied by more than 10. With this health crisis, the bicycle is essential to promote its use as an alternative to public transport and the car, the return of which is not desirable, for reasons of air pollution and congestion of public space. We realize that the bicycle will be essential in the modes of travel in the more than distant but immediate future.
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The bicycle now meets both the need for physical distance and the climate emergency by contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. There are no less than 3.7 million bikes in Ile-de-France. They remain little used and ask for nothing better than to leave the garage or the cellar.
An increasingly structuring “bicycle system” will therefore likely be built up faster than expected, bringing together Paris, the Île-de-France region, the departments, but also user associations, self-repair workshops and bicycle schools, bicycle dealers (note: sellers of bicycles and bicycle equipment), local residents, etc. Our system is thus brought closer to that of other major European capitals such as Berlin, Copenhagen or Amsterdam.
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Is the period of confinement and then the beginning of the deconfinement of the capital an opportunity to rethink the place of pedestrians and soft traffic in the Parisian urban space?
This health crisis is first of all an opportunity to take into account the reality of travel in Paris. Almost 65% of journeys are made on foot in the capital and the use of the car now represents less than 10% of intramural journeys (and 5% of journeys by Parisians). The bicycle now accounts for 5% of trips and it is the mode whose use is growing the most, and the fastest, so much so that the number of trips by bike should exceed the trips by car in the next few years, if not the next few months given the context.
In addition, the rate of car equipment in Parisian households is also on a downward trend, going from 45 to 35% in ten years. The same general trends can be seen throughout the Ile-de-France region, where bicycle use has also increased by 30% in a decade, and this is particularly striking in the departments of the outer suburbs.
For the moment, the development and distribution of space is far from responding to this reality, especially in the suburbs, even if the transformation of public space is accelerating. About 50% of the space remains allocated to the car in Paris, often more on large boulevards which have not been upgraded since the post-war period, when their sidewalks were narrowed to make room for the automobile.
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There are also countless narrow streets, including many shopping streets, whose space has become sterile due to the pervasiveness of the parking lot and / or the traffic volumes.
The rebalancing of these spaces to the detriment of the car facilitates the movement of the most vulnerable: the elderly, children and people with disabilities. Regarding cycling, its potential is considerable in a city as dense and mixed in functions as Paris, where the majority of trips are less than 3km. While it was a niche vehicle twenty years ago, its image is changing at high speed and its use is gradually opening up to increasingly diverse audiences such as the elderly, the working population living in second crown. Or young households with children.
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