Paris, je t'aime

Rebecca Spring

By Rebecca Spring, Manager of Sustainable Transportation, WWF-Canada
I’ve just returned to work from a brief but lovely vacation in France. Aside from wallowing in art and culture, practicing my French, and drinking wine, I couldn’t help but marvel at the sustainable transportation options that country has to offer. The electric trains! The beautiful LRTs! The bike shares in big and small cities! The carshares! The electric cars! The car-free streets! The missing gas stations!
Clearly I’m a bit of a mobility geek.
I know that we have a lot of great transportation initiatives to be proud of in Canada – carshares and bikeshares are starting to spread and improving transit is a key initiative for many cities. But the striking thing about France was that as a tourist, the ease, affordability and sheer number of alternative options made any thought of renting a car or taking taxi a complete and unnecessary hassle.
So here are some of my favorite things and places:

© Rebecca Spring, WWF-Canada

Electric Vehicles – it might not be a surprise that I’m always on the lookout for a car that plugs-in. And I spotted more electric cars in Paris than I saw gas stations. While I saw quite a few independent cars, the majority of spotting can be attributed to Autolib’ – Paris’ 100% electric carshare program. And no wonder – they currently have a fleet of 1740 electric cars and 5000 charging points!! Apparently they plan to have 3000 vehicles by 2014

© Rebecca Spring, WWF-Canada

Car-Free streets – Planning a trip to Paris or France? Take your walking shoes. There are so many places to explore just by walking (or hopping on a Velib’ bikeshare bike). Especially wonderful was the closure of main streets on the weekend to create bike-highways (and rollerblading/skateboarding/running highways) for tourists and Parisians to easily get across the city. Added bonus – it’s along the Seine.

© Rebecca Spring, WWF-Canada

Light Rail Transit – having a bit of a bad reputation in Canada (at least in Toronto), I definitely wanted to feature the beautiful LRTs that I found in Bordeaux. These sleek trains made a fantastic contrast to the picturesque old city, and easily accommodated the cobblestone and parks that they ran through. With their own signals and in dedicated lanes, and with easy to understand ticket machines at each stop, taking the LRT was a breeze.

© Rebecca Spring, WWF-Canada

Of course there were a few times that the mobility options weren’t perfect – arriving by train in the small village of St. Emilion meant that we needed to hike a kilometer and a half to our hotel through wine country and an early morning return flight required us to take a shuttle since the subway hadn’t opened yet. But the joy of not having to search for parking more than made up for those two hiccups!