When Paris Closed a Major Road to Cars, Half Its Traffic Just Disappeared

When Paris Closed a Major Road to Cars, Half Its Traffic Just Disappeared(fastcoexist.com)

21 points by state_machine 9 years ago | 5 comments

Tiktaalik 9 years ago |

People always fret about any sort of reduction in the space for cars and wonder, "where will the cars go?" This fails to recognize that transportation systems are about moving people, not cars.

If you reduce the incentive to travel by car, and provide transportation alternatives, people will make use of those alternatives. This is why cars so easily vanish.

visarga 9 years ago |

When this happened in Bucharest, even though it only meant a 3 minute detour for drivers, many condemned it. I can't figure these people out. It was great - ping pong, badminton, basketball, bicycles - hundreds of people were enjoying, yet many drivers saw nothing but absurdity in it.

toomuchtodo 9 years ago | |

Driver's privledge.

throwwit 9 years ago |

Based upon the well established Braess' paradox theory, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox

eridius 9 years ago | |

I don't think so. Braess' paradox is about how a Nash equilibrium may not be the optimal solution, and so closing a road might result in a more optimal Nash equilibrium. But this article is talking about how closing a road is causing there to be literally fewer cars overall on the road than before. The traffic is still higher on the surrounding roads (which suggests that the individual commute times for those roads are in fact getting worse, because higher density usually means slower speeds).

Edit: I suppose if you add alternative forms of transportation to the "network" that you're analyzing, it's possible that this could be viewed as a form of Braess' paradox, but only if the overall average commute time has in fact decreased. There's nothing in the article to suggest that the overall average commute time, covering both cars and non-car travel, has decreased.