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!

On our first day there, the Director of the school took us and a half dozen other professor out for lunch. For this august gathering, it was perfectly normal that we would all take mass transport. So as we set out from the Director’s office, we were all handed tickets for the Metro. We traveled a couple of stations along the line to the Director’s favorite restaurant, had a fine lunch, and were back at the school in time for the afternoon session.

Railway Technology’s website has this page that has more technical details about Lille’s “VAL” Metro system. It notes that the system, “has run at a profit since 1989 and… ridership figures remain healthy. Further expansion of both lines is under consideration.” It also notes that,

Following Lille’s successful experience, other French locations adopting the VAL concept include Toulouse (1993) and Rennes (2002), with airport applications at Paris Orly (1992) and a system linking termini at Paris Charles De Gaulle opening in 2007. Other applications in Turin, Chicago, Taipei and Uijeongbu (South Korea) have cemented the success of this distinctive and reliable light rail system.

For a rider, the first encounter with a driverless system can be disconcerting. (I had mine with the people-mover at the Atlanta airport.) In Lille, when the trains weren’t too crowded, I liked to stand right up front and have the whole experience of the train whooshing through the dim tunnels and coming efficiently to a halt at the stations. (You can see a You-tube version of that experience, here.) Many of the system’s stations are very beautiful. The one at the Fine Arts Museum even has elegant, glassed-in showcases with museum exhibits set into the walls of the platforms themselves.

Our apartment was in a Rem Koolhaas-designed tower block located, as it turned out, right next to Lille’s central SNCF (French national rail system) station, which is also a key junction for the two Metro lines. During the week it was easy to use the Metro to do our work-commute and all the errands, exploring, and dining-out that we wanted to do during our brief stay in Lille. During one of our weekends there, we took the Metro out to Roubais, enjoyed the beautiful art museum that has been retrofitted into a large Art Deco building constructed, back in the 1920s, as a large municipal bath-house and swimming pool; and then we took Greater Lille’s venerable “Mongy” tram system from there back to the city center. On our other weekend, we took the SNCF trains a little further afield, to the historic city of Tournai, in nearby Belgium.

In decades past northern France was widely derided as the country’s gritty, declining rust belt. But in recent years it has risen a lot in French popular esteem, it seems partly due to a continuing tradition of civic engagement in the region. Continued strong investment in mass transit systems is certainly a part of that.

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!

On our first day there, the Director of the school took us and a half dozen other professor out for lunch. For this august gathering, it was perfectly normal that we would all take mass transport. So as we set out from the Director’s office, we were all handed tickets for the Metro. We traveled a couple of stations along the line to the Director’s favorite restaurant, had a fine lunch, and were back at the school in time for the afternoon session.

Railway Technology’s website has this page that has more technical details about Lille’s “VAL” Metro system. It notes that the system, “has run at a profit since 1989 and… ridership figures remain healthy. Further expansion of both lines is under consideration.” It also notes that,

Following Lille’s successful experience, other French locations adopting the VAL concept include Toulouse (1993) and Rennes (2002), with airport applications at Paris Orly (1992) and a system linking termini at Paris Charles De Gaulle opening in 2007. Other applications in Turin, Chicago, Taipei and Uijeongbu (South Korea) have cemented the success of this distinctive and reliable light rail system.

For a rider, the first encounter with a driverless system can be disconcerting. (I had mine with the people-mover at the Atlanta airport.) In Lille, when the trains weren’t too crowded, I liked to stand right up front and have the whole experience of the train whooshing through the dim tunnels and coming efficiently to a halt at the stations. (You can see a You-tube version of that experience, here.) Many of the system’s stations are very beautiful. The one at the Fine Arts Museum even has elegant, glassed-in showcases with museum exhibits set into the walls of the platforms themselves.

Our apartment was in a Rem Koolhaas-designed tower block located, as it turned out, right next to Lille’s central SNCF (French national rail system) station, which is also a key junction for the two Metro lines. During the week it was easy to use the Metro to do our work-commute and all the errands, exploring, and dining-out that we wanted to do during our brief stay in Lille. During one of our weekends there, we took the Metro out to Roubais, enjoyed the beautiful art museum that has been retrofitted into a large Art Deco building constructed, back in the 1920s, as a large municipal bath-house and swimming pool; and then we took Greater Lille’s venerable “Mongy” tram system from there back to the city center. On our other weekend, we took the SNCF trains a little further afield, to the historic city of Tournai, in nearby Belgium.

In decades past northern France was widely derided as the country’s gritty, declining rust belt. But in recent years it has risen a lot in French popular esteem, it seems partly due to a continuing tradition of civic engagement in the region. Continued strong investment in mass transit systems is certainly a part of that.

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.

The day I bought him I took him on a one-hour-plus ride up the Capital Crescent Trail to Bethesda, hung around the bookstores there for a while, then had the great pleasure of riding downhill all the way home. I’ve taken him to Capitol Hill; I’ve taken him on lunch dates; and on a particularly nasty evening with freezing rain I took him on a dinner date to Georgetown. He makes going to the Post Office or doing other routine errands a whole lot more fun, and personally I think there’s a certain cachet to arriving at meetings with a bike helmet tucked under my arm. Between the backpack and the luggage rack, Speedy can easily haul home enough groceries for five days.

Washington DC has become much more bike-friendly since I lived here in the 1980s and 1990s. There are many more bike lanes now, and bike racks seem to be a standard part of the sidewalk furniture in every street rehab project. A large proportion of the buses have bike racks too, and the Metro allows riders to carry on bikes at any time except rush-hour. Folding bikes, however, can be carried on even during rush-hour, but they have to be enclosed in a bag. They can also be carried as hand-baggage onto Amtrak trains, so I can bring my new bike on any trip I take up to New York City.

For now, the love affair continues…

Full disclosure: My husband still has a car, and he is generous in both letting me use it and even chauffeuring me to and from various carpool arrangements, and Amtrak and Greyhound stations. So my weaning away from car-dependence is still far from total. And yes, I think he approves of my new affair with Speedy!

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!

I had checked the times for return trains before we left the station, and we got back to the airport in plenty of time. Then, after our seven-hour transatlantic flight we arrived at Dulles airport to face the depressing prospect of dealing with (a) the horrendously inefficient system of “mobile lounges” with which WMAA still attempts to move passengers around the airport, and then (b) the onward trip to Washington DC.

Well okay, on this occasion my husband picked us up at Dulles in his car and drove us into the city. Otherwise, we’d have been waiting for the Super Shuttle or perhaps – given that it had already been a long day – I would have laid out the $60-plus that the cab-drivers charge for this trip.

But still, the contrast between the approaches the two countries take to intermodal connectivity was evident. The Washington regional planning bodies have been deadlocked for more than 30 years now over whether, when, and how to extend the city’s Metro (subway) system out to Dulles. Recently there has been some progress on this, but they still haven’t been able to agree on whether the line should go over or under the vast regional retail- and office-center at Tysons Corner. And so, hundreds of thousands of people who travel through Dulles airport every week have been left heavily reliant on private automobiles.

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!

I had checked the times for return trains before we left the station, and we got back to the airport in plenty of time. Then, after our seven-hour transatlantic flight we arrived at Dulles airport to face the depressing prospect of dealing with (a) the horrendously inefficient system of “mobile lounges” with which WMAA still attempts to move passengers around the airport, and then (b) the onward trip to Washington DC.

Well okay, on this occasion my husband picked us up at Dulles in his car and drove us into the city. Otherwise, we’d have been waiting for the Super Shuttle or perhaps – given that it had already been a long day – I would have laid out the $60-plus that the cab-drivers charge for this trip.

But still, the contrast between the approaches the two countries take to intermodal connectivity was evident. The Washington regional planning bodies have been deadlocked for more than 30 years now over whether, when, and how to extend the city’s Metro (subway) system out to Dulles. Recently there has been some progress on this, but they still haven’t been able to agree on whether the line should go over or under the vast regional retail- and office-center at Tysons Corner. And so, hundreds of thousands of people who travel through Dulles airport every week have been left heavily reliant on private automobiles.

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.

One of the impediments to building and retaining a strong middle-class ridership for transit systems is that many people feel concerned at the loss of “control” over their own time. (If you’re a car-driver or passenger stuck in traffic, the idea of such control can is quite illusory.) But having more information about the arrival-time of your next bus or train does improve this problem. In most US cities, subway systems now have arrival-time information boards installed on the platforms, but I haven’t yet seen them offered at bus-stops on intra-city bus systems.

Of course, it was also important that the buses in Granada arrived on time; that once they arrived the loading system was quick and efficient; that the buses were frequent, clean, and well-maintained; that the numerous bus-lanes in the city-center sped the buses along; and that the broader information about timetables and fares was clear and easy to find.

For our regional and long-distance bus connections we took a bus from the city-center to the Estacion de Autobuses that’s about 1.5 miles west of the city center, and made our bookings and departures from there. On the regional and long-distance systems we were able to make advance bookings, with designated seating, making the whole experience easy, efficient, and pleasant. Our ride from Granada to Orgiva took us along some stunning mountain roads, and past a wind farm. Our ride to Madrid took five hours, about the same time it takes to get there by train and at a fraction of the cost. What’s more, it also had a lot more options for departure times than the train did.

The contrast between the long-distance bus service in Spain and the Greyhound service I ride between Washington DC and central Virginia was stark. What? A bus system with clean terminals, helpful and well-informed ticket agents, helpful and accessible rider information, and no price-gouging on on-line ticket purchases? I’d almost forgotten such a thing existed!

My bottom line is that to maintain a strong and satisfied ridership, good customer service is really important. And finding ways to provide timely, accurate, and helpful information to the riders at all stages of the journey – from planning to riding to disembarking – is a big part of that. Viva Granada!