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Climate notes for January 5th 2024

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I note in a tab below that there’s a bunch of research going into how urban areas can learn from what happened in Paris during and post Covid. The TLDR is that the city took huge leaps to install cycling infrastructure. And remove cars. That second sentence is the important one, because they ceded the space back to cycling, walking and public transport. In fact, as a result of a lack of cars on formerly busy routes, the need for the cycling infrastructure to be beautiful or over-engineered is gone.

The reason Ireland needs segregated cycle lanes everywhere is that there are also cars. If there are no cars, paint with arrows will do just fine. Paris learned that.

But the reason to remove cars is not to appease the ‘cyclist agenda’ (though I do have one). It’s to appease the fact that almost everyone benefits. ‘Driver’ is a weird lobby group that has been coopted into a global economic movement around oil production. They’re the front for the much more egregious end of the petrol industry because making it seem like everyone has skin in the game is easier. Turning ‘driving’ into ‘lifestyle’ was a genius choice. Even today, there are ads on bus shelters (ironically) and TV depicting the freedom, marvel and even the eccentricity of owning a car. In an urban area. Surrounded by other people. You, the driver, are the centre of the universe and you’re better off for it. When ironically, if you replace that car with a bicycle, you have a far more accurate depiction of reality when it comes to freedom, marvel and eccentricity in urban space.

But I digress. Paris taught us things we already suspected or outright knew from our Nordic friends. Infrastructure doesn’t have to be super expensive to accommodate people walking or cycling. But the benefits are unbelievable to a city. Take a simple urban space. I’ll use Dublin as an example. Today, Dame Street operates as a go-between for folks moving north or south across the city. It’s an astoundingly beautiful street, but you can’t see it. It’s littered with shitty shops or empty buildings because footfall isn’t as high as it should be. And that’s because there are so many cars in the space. It’s noisy because it’s got reasonably tall (for Dublin city centre) buildings lining it. It smells because most of the cars are diesel. And there’s a lot of visual noise because, somehow, there are umpteen signs to tell drivers what to do because the space has so many junctions where buses, LUAS (light rail) and pedestrians roam.

Now imagine it had no cars. Only buses and the LUAS (which only crosses the top of the road at College Green). No need for signage. More space allocated for seating outside on the central veranda. Imagine the council spent some money, not to make cycling infrastructure indestructible because of cars, but to clean the buildings from their decades-long collection of dirt and grime. Add some lighting so it’s pleasant at night to encourage, god forbid, al fresco dining. Suddenly you have a bustling thoroughfare that’s safe, social and less of an eyesore, more of a selling point for the city. Shops, bars, cafés and restaurants can enjoy the footfall. And guess what? There’s free-flowing buses and trams allowing folks who don’t want to (or can’t) walk or cycle to get to-and-fro.

The downstream impacts are obvious from a social perspective. But the not-obvious one is to give a gleaming example to those who have been coopted into a ‘driving’ lifestyle that there is a better option. The cart doesn’t have to come before the horse. The chicken not before the egg, etc. etc. But that not commuting by car is viable, and wonderful and gives you more options. I want to be able to cycle to a random spot and have a drink with my sons when they’re a bit older. Because we can all cycle or get transport links to wherever we want, not just specifically home or the city.

I’m macro optimistic because my weird way of thinking is becoming less weird. And I do think people are getting jaded, pissed off and just stressed about the lifestyle they have. It’s not human-centric. The French obsess over money, time and equity in society. And they’ll get violent to do that. I do not see a downside to getting paid well, being healthy, having a good relationship to your society and working-to-live, not living-to-work.

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