How to (Quickly) Build a Cycling City - Paris

Here a comparison is outlined between to ways of making cities less car centric: this video still, probably not as extreme as US standard...

> [Cars] are a feature of the new world, just not the US. If Europe had the bulk of it's development in the post-car era, it would've turned out the same way. A huge portion of Europe was destroyed.(and consequently rebuilt) in WWI and WWII, which are both firmly in the post-car era. They rebuilt with an emphasis on trains. Where they didn't, or in later years when they chose instead to invest in car development, some of them are now turning back to human-centric development [1]. > ... Need even bigger metal boxes and you need more of them and you have to wait for them and they are often late... In terms of space-occupation in cars vs buses (or trains), mass transit absolutely wins. This is a trivial argument. There's a dozen versions of this picture [2] that shows the difference between like 80 people commuting via bike, bus, or car. The amount of redundant space taken up by cars is bonkers to me. "Packed into them like cattle", I'll grant you rush hour gets crowded, but you'll spend less time on the trains than you would trying to cram that many people through the highway. See also the "induced demand" problem of highways. Moreover, while you're not using your car, it's taking up space doing nothing. While I'm not using the subway, it's working to shuttle the other 1.6 million people who use it (that number varies wildly depending on your city, notably). To the point of transit times and the, ah, atmosphere of transit: Of course travel time will vary according to how big th

Progress is fast (much better than when Vélib was launched in 2007), most arrondissements (except maybe 15th/16th) are convenient to get around, the center has some huge lanes that bode well for the future, and there's roadwork at just about every large intersection that hasn't been upgraded yet. this video