[Carfreeliving] CSM article on French "Mobility Week" in Nantes

[Dave Snyder]

thanks to John D'Avolio:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0923/p01s04-woeu.html?s=hns

from the September 23, 2005 edition

Just hop in the car? Not so fast, says one French town.

By 
<http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/encryptmail.pl?ID=D0E5F4E5F2A0C6EFF2E4> 
Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian 
Science Monitor

NANTES, FRANCE - It takes a while, as you walk 
around the streets of Nantes, a city of half a 
million people on the banks of the Loire River, 
to realize just what it is that is odd.

Then you get it: There are empty parking slots.

That is highly unusual in big French towns, 
normally clogged with traffic crawling along 
ancient thoroughfares. But here, Thursday, as one 
policeman said, "ça roulait bien" - cars were 
rolling.

Two decades of effort to make life more livable 
by dissuading people from driving into town has 
made Nantes a beacon for other European cities 
seeking to shake dependence on the automobile.

"We are not anticar," says François de Rugy, 
deputy mayor in charge of transport. "But we send 
people a lot of signals: If they come into town 
on buses, on foot, by train, or by bike, we will 
help them. If they come in cars, we won't."

The effects were clear Thursday, the high point 
of Mobility Week, a campaign sponsored by the 
European Union that prompted more than 1,000 
towns across the Continent to test ways of making 
their streets, if not car-free, at least 
manageable.

"That is an awfully difficult problem," 
acknowledges Joel Crawford, an author and leader 
of the "car free" movement that is picking up 
adherents all over Europe. "You can't take cars 
out of cities until there is some sort of 
alternative in place. But there are a lot of 
forces pointing in the direction of a major 
reduction in car use, like the rise in fuel 
prices, and concerns about global warming."

Thursday, proclaiming the slogan "In Town, 
Without my Car!" hundreds of cities closed off 
whole chunks of their centers to all but 
essential traffic. Nantes closed just a few 
streets, preferring to focus on the alternatives 
to driving so as to promote "Clever Commuting," 
the theme of this year's EU campaign.

Volunteers pedaled rickshaws along the cobbled 
streets, charging passengers $1.20 an hour; bikes 
were available for free; and city workers 
encouraged children to walk to school along 
routes supervised by adults acting as Pied Pipers 
and picking up kids at arranged stops.

Some critics dismissed the idea as a gimmick. "We 
live in a society that is organized, like it or 
not, in such a way that we cannot do without 
cars," Christian Gerondeau, president of the 
French Federation of Auto Clubs, told French 
radio. "Stigmatizing the car is the wrong battle."

Authorities in Nantes, though, are trying to show 
that there might be another way.

The centerpiece of their efforts is a 
state-of-the-art tramway providing service to 
much of the town, and a network of free, 
multistory parking lots to encourage commuters to 
"park and ride."

Rene Vincendo, a retired hospital worker waiting 
at one such parking lot for his wife to return 
from the city center, is sold. "To go into town, 
this is brilliant," he says. "I never take my car 
in now."

Indeed, a poll in April by the tramway authority 
found that 95 percent of users were satisfied 
with the service.

It is not cheap, though. Beyond the construction 
costs, city hall subsidizes fares to the tune of 
60 million euros ($72 million) a year, making 
passengers pay only 40 percent of operating costs.

That is the only way to draw people onto trams 
and buses, says Mr. de Rugy, since Nantes, like 
many European cities, is expanding, and commuters 
find themselves with ever-longer distances to 
travel.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem, says John Adams, 
a professor of geography at University College in 
London. There is no longer room in European 
cities for cars to park, so drivers must live 
farther from work, and the traffic increase 
obliges urban planners to devote more room to 
roads and parking, which worsens urban sprawl.

The danger, he warns, is that "the further you go 
down the route of car dependence, the harder it 
is to return, because so many shops, schools, and 
other services are built beyond the reach of any 
financially feasible public transport network."

This, adds de Rugy, means that "transport policy 
is only half the answer. Urban planners and 
transport authorities have to work hand in hand 
to ensure that services are provided close to 
transport links."

The carrot-and-stick approach that Nantes has 
taken - cutting back on parking in the town 
center and making it expensive, while improving 
public transport - has not actually reduced the 
number of cars on the road. But it has "put a 
brake on the increase we would have seen 
otherwise" and that other European cities have 
seen, says Dominique Godineau, head of the city's 
"mobility department."

City Hall has other plans afoot to keep up the 
pressure. This week it launched a website to 
connect potential carpoolers. It has put out 
tenders for a car-sharing system that would allow 
city dwellers to rent a car for a few hours from 
curbside locations with the swipe of a magnetic 
card.

The authorities are also encouraging big 
employers to match up to 15 percent of workers' 
monthly bus and tram passes.

"There is no single solution, but the important 
thing is to be coherent," says de Rugy. "There is 
no point in spending money on these sorts of 
things and still building more roads."

"You get what you pay for," adds Mari Jussi, a 
transport analyst at the Estonian branch of the 
Stockholm Environment Institute. "If you put 
money into tarmac, you get more cars. If you 
invest more in cycle lanes and safer streets, 
that's what you get. We have solutions now, but 
politicians are not eager to apply them."

Alain Chenard knows that only too well. As Mayor 
of Nantes in the early 1980s, he began building 
the city's tram line, the first modern tramway in 
France. The inconvenience of the construction and 
the price cost him his job in 1983.

"It seemed mad at the time," says Thomas Renaud, 
a cook, as he rode the tram to visit his parents. 
"But it paid off royally."
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://livablecity.org/pipermail/carfreeliving_livablecity.org/attachments/20050922/14deba42/attachment.htm