Parisian Bus Lanes

Jarrett from Humantransit.org has an excellent blog post up about bus lanes in Paris. Here’s a section of his post:

Next time you’re involved in a debate about whether we should consider taking one lane of traffic on a busy street and setting it aside for buses, show them some pictures of Paris in 2010. Almost any boulevard, in fact. Here’s Boulevard Raspail:

Lots of traffic in two lanes, and a lane reserved for buses and two-wheels conveyances. Yes, the bus lane is empty at the moment, but this demonstrates the great and damnable paradox of bus lanes: If buses are moving well, and carrying more people than the car lanes, the bus lane looks empty most of the time. Only a failing or obstructed bus lane looks like it’s full of buses. That’s why bus lanes such a hard sell in cities run by motorists who want to do the green thing but still form their impressions from behind the wheel — like Los Angeles, for example.

But in the last two decades, while a few American cities have had long arguments about converting single lanes to bus-only, Paris just did it. Not here and there. All over the city. Name your favorite Paris boulevard, and it probably has bus lanes now.

One key to the Paris project is that these are not just for buses. They can also be used by taxis and all two-wheeled vehicles. This is a manageable range of vehicles that all serve urban mobility more efficiently than the private car, and that don’t usually generate enough congestion to plug the lane for any length of time. Now and then, something else shows up in a bus lane, such as here on Blvd. de Clichy in front of the Moulin Rouge.

But still, the buses get through.

What about smaller streets? Surely when you just have two lanes of traffic, you’d never take one of them — half of the entire capacity of the street — for a bus lane, would you? Of course you would. Have a look at Rue du Faubourg St. Denis, climbing the gentle grade from Les Halles to Gare du Nord.

Without that barrier in the middle, you could have striped this one-way street as two traffic lanes plus a parking/delivery lane on each side; in fact, if I probe my dim memories of living in Paris in 1986, I think that’s what it was. But they not only carved out a wide bus lane but also a solid median curb to protect it. (These curbs are sensible because motorists know not to drive over them but emergency vehicles still can.) The resulting wide bus lane is important because it’s shared with two-wheeled vehicles — bicycles and motorbikes and scooters, and these need the ability to pass the bus without interacting with parallel traffic.

What seems so impressive in Paris is that bus lanes haven’t been put one one or two boulevards, but on just about all the main roads. I quite like the idea of the slightly raised barrier in the middle, although if your bus lane is well monitored it’s probably not that necessary. I also think it’s useful to make the point that an empty looking bus lane is a sign that it’s doing its job, not that it’s a failure. As I’ve tried to explain previously, bus lanes can shift well over half the number of number travelling along a road – yet still appear fairly empty. I suppose a good way of thinking about them is similar to how you’d think about a train line: sure it appears empty most of the time, but it can still carry a heck of a lot of people.

Significantly extending Auckland’s network of bus lanes is without a doubt the single best thing we could do over the next five years to increase the number of people using public transport in Auckland. It would be pretty cheap to implement: often just a lick of paint, it can be quickly implemented: no lengthy construction processes. But are we extending our network of bus lanes?

Nope, quite the opposite it seems.

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