Transport á Paris

This is perhaps a quizzical topic for my first submission to this lovely little blog about streetcars in Cincinnati, given my lifetime of experience with our wonderful city itself, but I did just return not a month ago from an exquisite vacation in France.  My girlfriends and I spent most of the trip in the southern wine-growing regions (divine!), but wandered the beautiful streets of Paris for nearly a week.  From crêpes in Montmarte to Da Vincis in the Musee du Louvre to people watching on the Champs-Élysées, we had a marvelous time.  And not once did we step into a car!  

I miss the days when we could travel all over Cincinnati without a car.  It was so refreshing to use the clean, efficient trains in Paris.  

And today I read an excellent piece in the International Herald Tribune about this very issue.   

“What Paris has dones right is to make it awful to get around by car, and awfully easy to get around by public transport or by bike.”

Read this article. It says so much about what Paris is doing to make neighborhoods more beautiful and more accessible. Do we really want to live in a world of parking lots? I love the wonderful small neighborhoods of Cincinnati, and how better to connect them than with network of trains and streetcars?

I know this blog was started to talk about the specific downtown and Over-the-Rhine streetcar proposal, but I can’t help but remember the streetcars that once ran all over the city. Oh, to have that again! Perhaps some time again we will be the Paris of the West.

New York Bike Share Project

In addition to being a streetcar advocate, I love biking.  When the weather is nice enough, I often ride by bike from my apartment in Clifton down to the office on 4th Street.  People say Cincinnati is too hilly for lots of biking, but with bike racks on all city buses so easy to use, it’s a piece of cake to bike down the hills and take the bus up them.

There are a bunch of initiatives in the city right now encouraging greater bike usage. The Cincinnati Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee (Bike/PAC) is one group that’s doing a great job to energize current bikers, and I’m really excited about the planned bike hub in Newport that will serve as a way station and wealth of information for bikers.

But I think we have a lot of work to do toward making biking more accessible to the general public. The New York Bike Share Project, launching today, is a great example of how a community can expand biking services and make it exciting in the process. It seems kind of like a Zipcar (car-sharing program popular in Boston, DC, San Francisco etc) for bikes.

Imagine walking to a sidewalk corner and finding a public bicycle. With a cellphone call or swipe of a card, you unlock it from its bike rack and ride it across town. Once at your destination, you steer to the closest bike rack and, with one more call or card swipe, return the bike to the public network. You pay less than $.50 for the trip, and the bike is once again available for the taking.

With more companies and stores (such as Park + Vine) offering bike racks out front, it would be incredible to have a network of these places where you could hop on a bike for a small charge and get where you need to go. This would be ideal for those who don’t ride enough to need a bike of their own, and really push the message that Cincinnati is a bike friendly city.

And of course, the streetcar will accommodate bikes too.