Inside one of Lille’s gorgeous metro stations. Photo by Martin Araya.

In April 2006, my husband and I were both teaching two-week courses at a university center in Lille, a city in northern France. I was excited, knowing that Lille was a hub for the Eurostar train: the place where trains coming to and from London branch off and go either south to Paris or north to Brussels. We reserved a one-bedroom serviced apartment just an eight-minute walk from the Eurostar’s beautiful, modernistic station, Lille Eurogare. I must say it was a great location, and very easy to get to from London, even as we lugged two large suitcases.

The “Sciences-Po” school where we were teaching was in a rehabbed portion of the city’s industrial zone a couple of miles from the apartment. The administrators told us we could get there by Metro, airily assuring us the trains were “very frequent.” They were quite right! It turns out Lille was the first city anywhere in the world to construct a driverless Metro system, which has now been operating with a good safety record there since 1983. I was amazed at the frequency with which these little two-car vehicles zip around the two-line system. On average, each one spends around a minute and a half on each section of track and half a minute loading in each station. Overall, you never need to worry about waiting; there are departures in each direction every two minutes! Read the rest of this entry »

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He’s cute, he’s adventurous, he’s reliable, and he’s closeted. What more could one ask of a folding bike?

My latest love interest is the Dahon Speed 7. I’d been eying him in the bike store for quite a while, examining his features, and comparing him with his strong-framed brothers. Finally, in the beginning of February I decided he was the one for me.

The Dahon - or “Speedy”, as I’ve come to call him - is the latest stage in the shift I’ve been making away from private ownership of a motorized vehicle. Now I look at the Vespa I bought two years ago as a way station on that path, and I’m planning to sell it once spring arrives in full bloom.

Last September I had to give up running because of foot problems. I was accustomed to getting around the city on foot, Metro, and bus, so originally I thought the folding bike would be mainly for recreation or workouts. But in the three-plus weeks I’ve had Speedy, I’ve used him a lot more than I’d expected for errands, and for getting to business meetings and dinner engagements. This February has been a relatively mild winter month by Washington DC standards, and Speedy has given me the freedom of the city in a way that I really hadn’t expected. Read the rest of this entry »

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Dulles Airport is infamous for those “mobile lounges.” Photo by Kaptain Krispy Kreme from Flickr.

In my continuing quest to identify the elements that make for an enjoyably car-free urban existence I definitely need to mention inter-modal connectivity. After all, what use is it to have a high-quality transit network within a city if you can’t easily get into and out of that city’s airport via public transport? This has been a perennial problem for anyone using Washington DC’s Dulles airport, where the ground transportation options are pathetic. At least the Washington Metropolitan Airports Authority (WMAA), which runs Dulles, added a Super Shuttle option there a couple of years ago, which makes life somewhat easier for car-free air travelers. But click on the “Metrorail and Metrobus” button there to learn how clunky and antediluvian the mass-transit connections to this important regional air hub are.

The contrast with just about any of the world’s other significant airports is enormous. For example, this past October I had occasion to fly into Dulles with my daughter from Madrid, via Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport. We had a four-hour layover at Schipol, so we killed time by jumping on one of the frequent rapid trains that connect the airport to downtown Amsterdam, checked out the city, and caught a train back to the airport in time for our outgoing flight.

Bike parking outside Centraal Station in Amsterdam. Photo by yvestown from Flickr.

The train whisked us over numerous highways, canals, and bike-routes, and past a small windfarm, into Amsterdam’s Centraal Station. Once there we had a fun morning walking along the canals, dodging the thousands of cyclists, and doing a bit of shopping. Centraal Station, like all train stations in bike-friendly places like the Netherlands or Japan, has massive bike-garages near the exits. The station also stands at the hub of a system of recently upgraded trams. The plaza in front of the station is a clanking mass of trams, pedestrians, and cyclists who whiz by along their lengthy networks of bike-paths. A newcomer definitely needs to stay alert as this traffic is nothing like the car-centered traffic on most streets in the United States! Read the rest of this entry »

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One of Granada’s clean and nice-looking bus stops. Photo by celikins from Flickr.

In October, I spent a few days in Granada, Spain, with my daughter, Lorna. A quick stop by the city’s Tourist Information office gave us the info we needed about the city’s bus system, the regional bus system, and the long-distance bus service. We would soon be heading to the Alpujarras region of the Sierra Nevada mountains for a couple of days hiking and then on to Madrid, so the different bus services would be key for getting around Spain.

One thing we noticed the first day we went to the Via Gran Colon in Granada’s city center was that the series of bus-stops arrayed along the street were clean, safe, and good-looking, each equipped with an electronic display indicating the arrival time of the next bus. What a brilliant move! With one look at the display, you could tell whether the bus was arriving soon or whether you had time to run a quick errand and make it back in time.

My daughter Lorna works at the Medical Center at the University of California, Los Angeles and commutes to work from her apartment in West Los Angeles by bus each day. She told me that an information system like this one would be a great addition for her local bus-stop. As a frequent bus rider too, I couldn’t agree more. After asking a local how Granada’s system worked, I learned that each bus was outfitted with a GPS system, indicating the exact location of the bus from which it was possible to predict its arrival time. Read the rest of this entry »

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Cars and freeways are cutting through Cairo. Photo by seyerce from Flickr.

In Cairo, my spouse and I lived for a month in a high-rise in a central-city neighborhood called Garden City. Cairo, a city inhabited by about 18 million people, is notorious for its poor air quality. This report tells us that, “According to the World Health Organization, the average resident of Cairo ingests more than 20 times the acceptable level of air pollution a day.” (See here, too.) Many mornings, I’d look out of our tenth-story window and see little except the heavy brown miasma of pollution that had settled over the city. Those days, too, my throat and eyes would sting the moment I opened the window or walked outside.

By no means does all of Cairo’s air pollution come from cars. But certainly the cars sitting for hours in the city’s traffic jams belching out their exhaust fumes contribute to the problem. Sometimes the traffic does get to move, but with some hazard. In this 2006 account of Cairo’s traffic problem Reem Leila wrote that some 7,000 Cairenes were estimated to be killed in traffic accidents each year, and a further 35,000 injured. Although the number is staggering, it still is believable. If the traffic on the big, 4- or 6-lane streets that surround Garden City was by chance moving, it did so in a crazed, desperate way. (I never saw a single speed limit sign posted anywhere in the city.) Crossing such a street meant playing a heart-stopping game of Extreme Human Frogger. Read the rest of this entry »

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A street shot of pedestrian friendly London. Photo by *Berto from Flickr.

During the months of March and April I lived in pedestrian-friendly London, the biggest of the half-dozen cities around the world that now impose a congestion charge on motor vehicles entering the city during daytime.London’s congestion charge currently stands at £8 ($16) per day, and it has been very successful in (a) reducing the amount of traffic in the city by about 30%, and (b) raising significant revenues to support upgrading of the city’s mass transit systems. In my view, the congestion charging has also considerably improved London’s quality of life. I stayed for a month in a club near the British Museum that had four Underground stations, on three different lines, less than a 12 minute walk away. Throughout the whole of Central London there are great pedestrian accommodations, as well as extensive networks of bike- and bus-lanes. Some streets have been completely pedestrianized. On others, only buses and taxis are allowed. Sidewalks throughout the city center have been broadened. Pedestrian crossings are numerous and large, and have satisfyingly responsive pedestrian push-buttons.

Many businesses have responded well to the high volumes of pedestrians on the streets. Pubs would have a bustling clientele spilling out onto the streets for many hours of the day; new restaurants, retail boutiques, and small businesses had proliferated around the Underground stations. London has become a magnet for young people from all over Europe. It definitely had a polyglot new liveliness, and the late-evening streets seemed safer than they did back in the 1990s.

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Via our friends at Streetsblog, Ken Livingston, the Mayor of London, has just announced a plan to ban cars on certain central streets, “as part of a bold plan to create continental-style boulevards devoted to pedestrians and cyclists.”

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Photo by vfxindia from Flickr.

Since I travel internationally in connection with my work, and try to do so in a low-budget, low-impact way, I have experienced the different ways that many cities around the world handle transportation issues, and thought it would be fun to throw some of my impressions into the discussion here at The City Fix, doing so in a new column called “Eyes on the Street.”

Earlier this year, I experienced the stark contrasts between the situations in two big car-centered cities in the Middle East - Cairo and Amman - and three almost-post-car cities in Europe: London, Lille (in northern France), and Amsterdam. Those experiences drove home for me that having a good urban transit system is a quality-of-life issue, as well as an environmental issue. It’s hard to quantify exactly, but there is something very civilized (and civility-enhancing) about doing everything you need to do in a city without having to worry about the stress or expense of an automobile, and about doing so in a built environment that is scaled to the human person and that encourages sociability and a sense of human equality.

In future posts for “Eyes on the Street,” I plan to write about my experiences in Cairo and London, Lille’s driverless subway lines, car-free lifestyles in urban Japan, the great bus system in Granada, Spain, the importance of nodes and links in urban transit systems, Amsterdam, and transportation policies in Africa. Oh, and maybe I’ll write about different cities in the United States, too…I look forward to sharing these posts and hearing your imput!

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