[sustran] [World Streets] A thing so slight:

[Eric Britton (Paris, France)]

[http://blip.tv/play/AcvUegA]
The medium is the message with the Paris bike project Eric Britton,
Editor, World Streets, Paris, France

Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible
for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city
planning. But the destructive effects of automobiles are much less a
cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building. The simple
needs of automobiles are more easily understood and satisfied than the
complex needs of cities, and a growing number of planners and designers
have come to believe that if they can only solve the problems of
traffic, they will thereby have solved the major problems of cities.
Cities have much more intricate economic and social concerns than
automobile traffic. How can you know what to try with traffic until you
know how the city itself works, and what else it needs to do with its
streets? You can't."

- Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities , 1961

A bicycle? Two spindly wheels held together by a frail metal frame and
launched into wobbly motion with some kind of bizarre arrangement for
your willing feet to move you from A to B. First introduced in yes!
Paris almost two hundred years ago (1817 model just to your right), the
bike been around for something like a century and a half and has had
its moments of glory and its moments of ... neglect.

So why should it be that as we move toward the end of his first decade
of this new century I should be taking your time to talk about
something that is so small, so trivial, so out of date, so surely
meaningless in an age in which the problems of our daily lives of our
planet are enormous and in many ways crushing us to the mat? To get a
feel for that, let’s start with a quick look out the rearview mirror.

A glance back:

In order to make any sense of what an eventual renaissance of the
bicycle might make in our daily lives and in our cities, it will be
useful for us to have a quick glance back to recall what happened the
last time a rolling beast of metal and rubber appeared on the scene of
our daily lives.

Remember? There we were living and working, going to school in playing
in cities and towns across America, and getting around in our daily
lives on our feet, occasionally by bicycle, and as often as not by some
combination of buses, trams and trainings. Of course there were also
cars, but these were not really available to most of us, at least not
when the beginning of the car era started to shape up. What happened?

As prosperity reared its supposedly beautiful head in the wake of the
Second World War, more and more people started to have a new
transportation option in the form of their own car. It was, just about
everyone said, a great and wonderful thing.

And then, slowly and without our really being quite aware, they started
to change a lot of things in our daily lives and in our cities. The
story has been told many times and perhaps never better than by our
dear Mrs. Jane Jacobs, but the essence of it is that the main
contribution of this new bit of technology is the manner in which it
has transformed and in a huge number of cases virtually gutted our
cities. Pulling them apart with seven league boots that simply don’t
fit into the perimeter of our cold cities. So in case after case the
city fell apart and moved “out of town”.

Marshall McLuhan told us decades ago that the medium was the message,
and indeed that turned out to be the case with cars. We got the message
so that if you look around it's not very hard to figure out what that
message was.

True auto-mobility

Then one day, with little fanfare a transportation revolution started
to get underway, and if you have not heard a great deal about it till
now, stay tuned because this is a message that one way or another is
going to get in some form to just about every city of any size in North
America, and indeed in many other parts of the world.

The new message is the “City Bike”, or Public Bicycle System, which is
probably today the fastest growing transportation innovation in the
world. They could not be more simple.

The basic principle is that a city creates a new kind of public
transport system, this one based on free (or almost free) bicycles
which you can pick up at many points around the city, ride to get you
where you want to go, and then leave it off in another handily located
station.

Today there are more than one hundred such new systems underway, with
the most famous being the huge new system brought to Paris in the
summer of 2007 under the name Vélib’ (roughly free bike), of which
there are more than 16,000 currently in service and with 20,000
targeted this Spring (2009). Other large systems are in operation or
underway in Barcelona, Lyon, Rome, Berlin, and in North America there
are several dozen cities looking carefully at this idea, with a major
project about to come on line in Montreal in the weeks ahead..

What is interesting about these revolutionary transportation systems is
that . . . they work! Think of them as small, perfectly clean
one-person buses that you can pick up where you want, when you want,
leave when you want, and go where you want. Personal Rapid Transit.
True ubiquitous auto-mobility at last.

Come to Paris (or Barcelona, or Lyons, or or ) and have a look for
yourself.

Or, if you don’t have a ticket, you can always check it out at World
City Bikes at http://www.citybike.newmobility.org/. The Public
Broadcasting System of the United States broadcast a film on Vélib’ and
The Greening or Paris in December 2008. You can pick it up on line at
http://www.e2-series.com/, click Webcast, then Paris. A trailer for the
program is available at http://blip.tv/play/AcvUegA

--
Posted By Eric Britton (Paris, France) to World Streets at 3/30/2009
09:52:00 AM
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