On & off the rails

Strasbourg--seat of the European Parliament--has a population of 265,000, less than half Seattle's, yet in the past 15 years it has built four interconnecting lines of light rail with some 50 stops. That's in addition to 35 bus lines, over 250 miles of new bike paths and plenty of bike racks at tram stops.

Another element in the plan: integrated municipal parking. Nineteen new parking garages for 6,000 cars in addition to 10,000 street spaces; cost is between 1 and 2 euros an hour, depending on proximity to the city center. As a result, the parking system alone has 3.6 million users a year. Parking a private car on the outskirts is easy and inexpensive; using it to travel to the city center is difficult and costly.

There's even a Flexcar-like vehicle sharing program that rents cars to subscribers for about two bucks an hour.

Getting to this point was not without pain; streets were torn up for years. But Strasbourg today is a model of an urban transportation system that works. No matter where you live, there's public transportation--tram, bus, shared car--within blocks, every five or ten minutes.

What made the diff was political leadership: a new mayor dumped the previous administration's expensive and disruptive plan for a glamorous subway system. It also helped that the national Transportation Ministry had picked a single standard for tramways throughout France, so the light-rail technology was already on the shelf.

Not to mention a political tradition that expects local officials to just get on with it. Are you listening, Christine? Ron? Greg? Frank?

Posted by Ronald Holden at March 25, 2007 2:40 AM