In February we spent five days in Paris. My previous trip to Paris had been a cycling study tour, but this time I was with Camilla and Helen and didn't do any cycling. Instead we did a lot of walking -- and on a couple of occasions the others made a trip by metro while I walked it.
We were staying in a studio apartment on Rue Saint Denis, in the 4th, which was central enough to have a lot of the major tourist destinations within walking distance. (One of the advantages of visiting in February was that this was expensive rather than extortionate - the same apartment seems to be twice as much in July. And we had quite good weather for February: cool but not freezing, with just a small patch of snow and some periods of light rain.)
a "side road" zebra crossing
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a School Street
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the only 'beg button' I encountered
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Some of the key features:
- The sheer amount of pedestrianised space is impressive. Rue Saint Denis, for example, is a 1.3km pedestrianised route with just three main road crossings. (Interestingly, there weren't many people cycling on it, even though that is allowed and the cycle track on the parallel Boulevarde de Strasbourg is way too narrow and overcrowded.)
- In maybe sixty kilometres of walking around over six days, I encountered only one "beg button". And the delays for pedestrians at main road junctions and crossings were quite short. I found nothing like the horrible junctions in Oxford where a single pedestrian movement at a junction can involve four stages and take five minutes. (Anti-pedestrian "guard railing" also seems to be rare.)
- In general there was a very high quality of materials and permanent construction. Some of this will be the demands of heritage protection (which doesn't seem to stop ugly things happening in central Oxford). And restrictions can't be enforced by number-plate cameras, so School Streets schemes have to be "hard" infrastructure.
- Perhaps it's because we were coming from Oxford and were used to it, but conflicts with people cycling didn't seem particularly bad anywhere. The mostly generous allocation of space to both walking and cycling helps here, and a general avoidance of street clutter. (I saw nothing like the western end of Oxford's Broad St, where the poor allocation of space pushes people walking and cycling into conflict.)
Perhaps the most important thing about the trip? Helen likes Paris. This was not a foregone conclusion — she doesn't like London at all, in contrast.