[greatgib]

Here in Paris, it is becoming a nightmare.

The cityhall is led by incompetent and for a few years now they have started to do "media visible" demagogic actions without real thinking or discussion with the population.

For cars for example, they don't really try to be intelligent and have the most efficient and fast mix of transportation. They just try to annoy as much as possible the car drivers even when it was not justified.

And now Paris is dying, it becomes derelict and ugly, and it is losing inhabitants every year. And let's not speak about the abysmal debt that was created in a few years. So much debt, in fact, that the city hall is not anymore able to pay for maintaining the city, like fixing pot holes and city furniture.

It is easy to think that the car is bad, and people are angry because they don't want to lose their egoistic comfort. But here you should see the overall situation:

Except during the covid period, Metro and regional trains are most of the time in over capacity, late and unreliable. In addition to be dirty and sometimes dangerous.

With the stupid urban changes, the BUS are blocked by the car policies and not able to operate well, efficiently and safely anymore. (For example, having bus stop in the middle of a street in a middle of a busy bicycle lane).

Some commercial area are dying because no one away more than 15 minutes by feet could by anything there and be able to transport it back home.

And for bonus point of idiocracy, it is said that Taxi prices will raise a lot now, because the taxi fares are calculated like this: higher than 30km/h, price per distance. Lower than 30 km/h price per minute.

[Agingcoder]

Well, to add some nuance, cars are not fast anyway because of the bad traffic, the city is extremely polluted (there are days where we are told to stay inside) so cars are indeed a problem, and people are leaving for many reasons, one of them being that the city is too expensive.

The metro is not unreliable - it can be very crowded, but it's ok. I understand the regional trains can be very unreliable.

As to the politics of the city, the current mayor is a very divisive person, so you will find people who really like her, just as you will find people who really dislike her (parent comment ).

She did make a number of mistakes, but Paris is not dying in any way because of her. Sure, the city is not very lively these days, but it's mostly because of the consequences of covid ('I want a garden', 'I need a health pass to go to a restaurant', etc), and people wondering whether it's worth paying so much money to live and moving out.

[throwaway0a5e]

>The metro is not unreliable - it can be very crowded, but it's ok. I understand the regional trains can be very unreliable.

The regional trains are exactly the ones that need to be reliable in order to replace cars.

[Agingcoder]

Yes and no.

The regional trains need to be expanded first: the paris transit network is star-shaped, and it's very difficult to navigate around Paris without going through the center of the star. This immediately overcrowds the existing lines, and then trains are late/you wait a lot (people fainting when it's too hot, massive queues because too many people, etc) . There's currently a massive project going on ('le grand paris', aka 'greater paris') which is supposed to achieve this. I haven't followed it very closely though.

Then, I agree with you : the trains must be reliable. However, this can't be achieved unless some kind of rerouting happens first.

It's worth noting that the speed limits apply to Paris only, which is absolutely tiny (about 100 sq km). In many (most?) cases, it's already more efficient to go to Paris by train than by car, even if not very reliable, and within Paris you have the metro. Outside of Paris, the regional trains are not very good (not dense enough), but the speed limit point doesn't apply.

[greatgib]

What you repeat is the propaganda but not the reality.

Out of peak hours and places, cars speed goes reasonably well. Especially if you have to come in or go out of Paris. But also the mayor administration created a lot of congestion with stupid rework projects like the "place de la Bastille"; closing direct ways across Paris and blocking big avenue to force all drivers to pass by small streets to zigzag.

The air pollution could have been a real reason, but sadly it looks like to not be real: during the worse lockdown, the traffic was reduce to almost zero, and still the air pollution was just reduced of a tiny fraction. Paris is located in a lower part of a big valley, so the pollution is in big part the result of the industries and other of the valley that concentrate there for the most part.

I will not be against a better mix that intelligently reduce the car, for example by having park and drive, big avenues crossing as straight as possible for cars and small streets and blocks dedicated to walk, bicycles, ... Sadly it is not something intelligent like that, that they are doing. A lot of well known urbanists complained about what is done.

The mayor pretends that the changes are to done to have a more vegetal and eco-friendly city, but in reality she is pouring concrete everywhere and doing ecologically bad projects.

For example, she said that she will plant 700 000 trees during her tenure, so far, the net result is at least -1000 trees in Paris.

Also, for example, in honor of the Olympics she built a big fan zone that no one asked, useless, costly, on top of a major landmark, despite the city council assembly voting against the project.

In the famous champs de Mars in front of the Eiffel tower, she built a huge "ephemeral" exposition building for the future Olympics. This took 1/3 of the surface of the champs de Mars Park, but in Additional destroyed the ground by injecting hundred of concrete pillars deep into the soil for this project.

There use to be a free floating shared electrical car service, because of bad contracting they had to kill it.

There was a very good, efficient public shared bicycle system that was well used (Vélib). She decided to renew the contract to go with another provider officially to get some new bullshit features. Now the service is a mess, it did not worked at all for a long time, now it is working badly, with less stations than before, and more costly to the city and to riders than the previous service. This is typical of the mayor administration. The provider even blackmailed the city hall to get more money and the city hall paid...

This is a good example of the real acts of the mayor that despite her speeches are against a good ecological design. Only at my level, I was used to use a lot the Vélib, and now I haven't used it for a few years because it never worked when I wanted to use it.

For the metro, imagine, having all your trips face to face, ass to ass with other persons. With a micrometer of space around you. Having to fight to enter the train or not sure that you will be able to go in.

Paris is really losing inhabitants, debt goes to the roof, and shop and services are closing. So you can't say that it is just a number of mistakes because it is a continuous work for multiple years.

If you want to laugh, just have a look at the hashtag #saccageparis on tweeter

[Agingcoder]

I'm not advocating for the mayor - the velib debacle is indeed one of the many mistakes. She also happens to have been re-elected, so some people think she's not that bad.

However, the harshness of your comment does show that she is extremely divisive.

Furthermore, I've been living in central Paris as an adult for more than 20 years, would you mind being a bit more civil, and not describing me as 'repeating propaganda' (which I find offensive, If I am honest)?

[greatgib]

She was re-elected with the vote of less than 13% of the inner city Paris inhabitants! (Without taking into account that the inhabitants of the Paris suburbs and region can't vote)

Also, the election was in the middle of the worst part of the pandemic and people were not sure that it was safe to go out to gather in vote offices.

In addition, she started and announce a lot of the crazy stuffs just after being elected!