Is urbanization a brake on the development of cycling?

“Olivier Razemon, you have notably published “The power of the pedal”, Or“How France killed its cities”, we will continue to talk about mobility in the city, but this time from the point of view of an urban planner, Guy Burgel. He notably published “Revenge of the cities”. Urban planner, you were a professor of geography and urban planning at the University of Paris 10 Nanterre, we owe you a certain number of works on cities, in particular “Revenge of the cities”. Why is there today this feeling that in France we think badly of the city?

– I don't think we think badly about cities, I think that each country has its own urban history. I spend my time saying “globalization is not standardization”, so roughly speaking we have cities that were rather agglomerated cities, it was the tradition that came from antiquity, etc., and in 50 years these cities conglomerates have remained and have even taken on demographic importance on a few occasions, but at the same time there has been a dispersion effect, an urban diffusion, an urban sprawl. So it is the addition of this heritage of agglomerated cities and urban sprawl that creates the difficulty. I will add a rather sociological and economic, sociological component: the feminization of employment which is a notch, a major variable in the last half-century, which has meant that in a household, in a housing unit, we have two workers who obviously in most cases do not work in the same place, so there is indeed a choice to be made. The second thing is that the diffusion, the expansion of jobs, the dispersion of peripheral jobs, was ultimately much less than the dispersion of housing. If you combine all this, the double heritage: agglomeration, dispersion, sociology of the feminization of employment and greater dispersion of habitat in relation to employment and work, you finally have a mobility equation which is not not insoluble but which, all the same, remains difficult to solve.

– France, it seems, thinks badly of these cities, does that mean that this equation is not specific to France?

– I will take an example that is often cited as an example, the Netherlands: we say, well, 3% if I remember correctly, 3% by bike in French cities, 24% I believe in Dutch cities. But we forget one thing, which is that in the Netherlands, ultimately, the urban structure is totally different, we have what is called the Randstad Holland metropolis between Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Utrecht, The Hague, etc. , which is a multipolar metropolis, and between these poles, there is car traffic, which is once again much greater than in most French metropolises, because we do not travel by bicycle on a scale of 50 or 80 km . Inside the cities, but which are much smaller, much more crowded in fact, there is bicycle traffic, but seeing all the Dutch on bicycles is an image of Epinal which is still quite false.

Public authorities and the development of cycling

– So what can the public authorities do, precisely when you tell this story and this difference between the Netherlands and France, do the public authorities have a lot to do with it, is it the weight of the story ?

– We have fallen far behind in terms of investments, trains in large cities, we are not going to talk only about large cities, we must not forget medium-sized towns and peri-urban areas either. In the big cities, we haven't fallen far behind in investments in public transport, I don't want to focus everything on Paris, but Paris is still prototypical, as we say of a certain number of situations. We made the radial RER system thanks to Louvoyer's plans in the 60s, when finally mobility movements for the reasons I have said and others that I don't have time to explain have become rather tangential from suburb to suburb. We have a system which, ultimately, goes from the periphery to the centre, whereas the problem is from periphery to periphery. We understand very well that there is both a physical insufficiency in some way of the networks and automobile substitutions which are, if not necessary, at least quite forced.

– Were these choices made in France only, or do you also find them in other countries?

– I think it's a fairly general phenomenon, not everyone was wrong, I think there are countries which by culture, perhaps the Anglo-Saxon countries, perhaps the countries of northern Europe, are perhaps better able to understand the phenomena. But mobility is still a problem that is ultimately quite recurrent in all metropolises and in all cities of the world.

– Olivier Razemon, your point of view?

– I don't know if it's cultural, you mention the Netherlands, but when you look at other European countries, it's not just France and the Netherlands, fortunately. When you look at Germany, there too in the 50s and 60s, there was an increase in motorized travel due to urban sprawl, which we continued to do, exactly in the same way, and in fact we became aware of the problem earlier, for various reasons. So, in Germany, it was because they had acid rain in the 80s, that caused pollution problems. In the Netherlands, it was because we had more oil, etc. In northern Italy, it's because we noticed that the exhaust pipes darkened the facades, so each time there are changes and then I'll add something about French cities, that's that we continue to do wrong. I don't think it's just a matter of culture. When we decide, when a mayor decides to take Pôle emploi, the police station or such and such equipment public, or the Maison de santé, and to put it 3 km from the city center, in an industrial zone, saying, there it is very good, everyone has a car, we just have to go there go… there, it's a huge responsibility. And when the Banque de France, sometimes it's the mayor who does that, sometimes it's the urban community, sometimes national institutions, when in Poitiers they decide to take the headquarters of the Banque de France and put it 3 km from the city center, a place where there is not even public transport, there yes it is a huge responsibility.

– I believe that you are fundamentally right, it is not only a reason of culture, I am nevertheless going to insist on legacies which are almost secular legacies. You talk about German cities, I was very struck a few years ago when I went to Stuttgart, to see that at an evening meeting, people who were going to return to the small towns of Baden-Württemberg were not going by car as I would have done myself. I have a meeting at 20 p.m., I know I'm going out at 23 p.m., I'm not going to go there by public transport, excuse me, I'm saving my time and my fatigue. There, we still had the physical structures of the city which means that, ultimately, we are in fact encouraged to take regional trains every 20 minutes.

The issue of mobility for French cities

– Guy Burgel, if you had to define today the way in which the problem of mobility arises today for French cities, what would you say? What are the issues today that need to be resolved?

– There is a slightly barbaric word, it's multimodality. We do not act by force, we act by conviction. People have to have a choice. When they will have the feeling that, finally, to take public transport, perhaps to take the bicycle in all security, not on cycle paths armed with pictograms, it will be won. We must give the choice and not act by constraint.

– We rather have the impression, today, that in terms of mobility, the choices that are made are choices that impose constraints on individuals, in their movements, in particular, for example, the question of the use of the automobile, can it be done otherwise?

– Like any reasonable individual, I believe that the reduction of car traffic, for long-term climate issues, etc., is necessary. I think you have to be very careful about what you do. The city is like a Calder motive, that is to say that if you make something move, something else moves elsewhere that you hadn't foreseen, so you have to take measures that are short, medium and long term, but once again, pay attention to the consequences of the measures that we take.

– The fact that French cities are old, we have in other countries the ability to see the history of cities from the 19th century, this is of course not the case for French cities, is that what? is an obstacle, today, to their planning or their adaptation to travel with the constraints which are new constraints, new concerns also in terms of ecology?

– I'm going to cultivate the paradox: it's more of a chance to have a cultural, architectural, historical heritage, it's more of a chance for small, medium and large towns, on condition once again of taking advantage of this chance. We must not play against the grain, we must not sterilize city centers, because of heritage, misunderstood tourism. The consequence of this adage “globalization is not standardization” is that there is not just one urban policy, one mobility policy.

– Fortunately, I think it's the constraint that works well, when I look at what's really going on, then, either it's a political constraint, or it's an external constraint. When there is flooding in a city at a time, there are certain lanes that are blocked, people adapt and organize themselves, when there was in Los Angeles on a weekend a kind of freeway which was blocked because the highway had to be repaired, people adapted, they thought of going to the other end of the city to the restaurant then finally they found a restaurant in their neighborhood and it was very good. We organize ourselves, and we tend, when there are axes, new axes, and when we have a car and it's easy to use it and park it, we tend to use them without ask questions and we make new ones and it goes on like that.

– In the end, you mention exceptional events, there are time scales, I believe that exceptional events indeed require an exceptional response, here we are over a long period of time, we are not disrupting the mobility in progress, that is the first thing, and secondly there are social inequalities, what you say is much easier to carry out these reports when you are a bobo. We have just finished an atlas on the Lyon region, imagine the peri-urban area 30 km to 40 km from Lyon, we are in restricted mobility, where the car is almost compulsory.

– Yes, to go 30 km, you can also ask yourself the question of what there is around your home, and then there are people who are really in precarious mobility. 8 million people do not even have access to mobility.

Urban transport by bike, a simple fad?

– In cities, Guy Burgel, we have also witnessed a number of fashion issues, today we talk a lot about cycling and a few years ago it was the pedestrianization of city center areas, is it that today we can take stock, for example, of this policy?

– We can make an assessment, fifty years ago the bicycle was the worker leaving the factory, like the postman of Jacques Tati doing his rounds, now it is rather the Parisian bobo on his bicycle or taking his car. Pedestrianization is now being called into question: it has been said that it has killed city centers, especially in medium-sized towns.

– There was also criticism of the standardization of town centres, with pedestrian areas that look alike, that is to say that we often tend to say and even to think that we find the same shops, we have a kind of city that is losing its identity.

– There is a city that I really like, it's Montpellier, thanks to the policy of Georges Frêche and his deputy, a geographer, Raymond Dugrand, now deceased. They have carried out a continuous policy, a policy of both a tram and pedestrianization, it works. It's a city that I admire in this respect because you have tickets ultimately coupled with deterrent parking on the outskirts, the tram 10 minutes from the outskirts in a still average city, of 300-400 inhabitants, which brings you to the city center, which is a pedestrian city center with real heritage. Here is an example which is not necessarily transposable, but which encourages admiration and exemplarity.

– In smaller towns, what happens is that we have pedestrianized one or two streets, Vierzon one street, Nevers 2-3 streets, and then that's it. The challenge is not to make it pedestrian, it's to be able to cross the city on foot, and apart from the pedestrian streets which are indeed quite uniform, from a commercial point of view it's ultimately complicated, because you fall immediately on a huge intersection that is difficult to cross with a stroller. The question is to appease the city, including the average city, so that we can cross it on foot and by bicycle.

– Which means, despite everything, that this pedestrianisation, which for you has not been done with enough ambition, scale in small towns, has not at all prevented the movement, for example, of shopkeepers in proximity ?

– I both agree with indeed an amplification of pedestrianized streets, but at the same time, when you are an ordinary household, you have your weekend shopping to do, whether it is pedestrianized for the whole city ​​center or whether for a few streets, when you face the competition of shopping centers, including in small and medium-sized towns, which you reach after ten minutes by car, there again, a kind of daily rationality . You have to understand that people go door to door between their ascent of garage and car park from the supermarket. We have to stop building new ones.

A cycling novelist's point of view

– I will welcome Aurélien Bellanger, a novelist who has seen his “Grand Paris”, is the title of his latest novel, re-published today in paperback. Aurélien Bellanger, you are very interested in the appearance of cities, in town planning, and also in cycling since you are cyclist. Your point of view on this issue of mobility in an urban environment?

– This is a very interesting question. What you really experience on a bike is the phenomenon of continuity, of discontinuity, you make a lot of cycle paths, you just have to have small edges, a little too big for you not to cross them. don't take a bike, because what we want is to go very quickly and without transition, and that even raises the question of the long-term sustainability of the Grand Paris Express. It is a network that is extremely deep and still creates a break. The crack in the metro, it is a century old, we have more or less accepted it. The metro has become Parisian, it has no longer become the catacombs, the kingdom of the underworld. If we make a network that is more than 40 meters deep where we have to take three escalators to go down, etc., it becomes less spontaneously taken, and we will end up with a phenomenon, as we have been able to experience, I fear , with the RER, or the RER just because it's deeper, just because it doesn't have some Guimard codes, some Parisian codes, the RER has never been an urban transport, c It was a transport, how to say, from suburb to suburb, a transport for commuters, and it never strictly became a city, or else it made a city that people never fully appreciated and we just symbolically see how orange or red and RER are associated today with anxiety-provoking experiences. So it's the little adjustments, the little seams in fact that are important.

– And on the physiognomy of cities, the way in which it evolves to adapt to the movements of people, Aurélien Bellanger?

– I imagine this has already been dealt with, the incredible injustice that is done to other transport, compared to the car, where the car has almost all of the public space, which is starting to look like, more and more for public opinion, to a confiscation of space. Every time a new mode of transport arrives, whether it's the electric scooter or that sort of thing, the question is the occupation of the public domain, whereas the scooter electric plus free-floating bicycles, we must be on 1 for 1000 of the occupation of public space. The car tops out at 70% and has no issues. It's very strange that people say that it takes up space on the sidewalks.

The importance of respect between motorist and cyclist, cyclist and pedestrian

– Guy Burgel, your point of view?

– My latest book “Urban issues” ended with a kind of axiom of the livable city, I said respect. People have to learn to respect each other, that means that the motorist respects the cyclist, that sometimes cyclists respect pedestrians. I am a cyclist, on my own time, I know what that means. When scooters arrive on both bike paths and sidewalks, it's a lack of respect. The city is also urbanity.

– There is this aspect which is striking with the system of contra-flow cycling that has been put in place, there is something very Levinassian in cycling, when you are confronted face to face, facing a car, it something happens and we know very well that morality is like the ring, of I don't know what in Greek mythology, it's something that makes you amoral because it makes you invisible.

– At the moment, there is a problem of bicycle accidents, not only in France but also elsewhere in the world, which comes from the fact that there are a lot more trips by bicycle, so there is an increase and then there is a lack of organization. It's a question of organizing the public space so that this cohabitation is possible, in some places you have to separate, in others you have to mix, but at a fairly low speed. If we don't do that, we actually have people who do nonsense, we haven't dealt with the question of motorized two-wheelers for years, we are paying today with all this stuff that are on the sidewalks.”

Free transcription of the program: “Bicycle plan: a way to redesign the city?”, Les Matins de France Culture, September 17, 2018
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7pli9FVNK4