Carless in Lyon: City’s enviable urban transport system is an efficient and healthy way to go

Downtown Lyon, France transport map. All photos by Michael Cosgrove

Air pollution in large towns and cities represents a major health risk, much of it is caused by cars running on a depleting resource. Michael Cosgrove details how one city is France has developed a comprehensive public transportation system while discouraging automobile use.

Estimates have varied over the years, from running out of oil in the 1970s to never running out at all.

In any case, cars in their present form are numbered, and the sooner we develop alternative forms of transport the better. For now though, it’s all about pollution, traffic jams, and the respiratory, cardiac and other illnesses caused by them. One way of combating this is to reduce the need for people to use their cars in cities whilst still ensuring quick and efficient transit of people in urban areas.

In other words, by improving and developing public transport networks.

Lyon, France, has a public transport system, called the TCL, which is second to none in European terms.

Lyon is the second largest city in France, with a population of 500,000 people, with all the traffic problems that an urban area of that size inevitably entails.

The system here uses a dense combination of subway lines (“metro” in French), tramlines, and bus routes, which, between them, stop at more than  3,000 places, with well over half of all trips taken needing only one change, or none in order to get from point A to B. It’s almost impossible to find somewhere in the city that is over a 5 minute walk from at least one form of transport, and many people have the choice of at least two.

The average waiting time for transport here, depending on which mode you are using, is 2 to 5 minutes during rush hours and 4 to 8 minutes the rest of the time.

Here is a subway train. The picture does not show the back of the train however, but the front. That’s because the train has no driver. The view from the front is great for kids and tourists.

One of Lyon’s subway lines is entirely computer-controlled, and all trains have front mounted cameras showing what is happening in front of the train. Sat in offices, opening and closing doors and manually controlling speed and braking only when an incident occurs, surveillance staff “drink coffee and look out for incident warning lights” as a TCL employee and friend told me.

A train I was on once stopped very abruptly between stations and finally moved off again a couple of minutes later. When I got off, at the next station, I asked a member of the staff what happened.

“Oh, someone threw a newspaper onto the tracks. On this line, if anything falls onto the tracks or if anyone climbs down onto it, sensors pick it up and trains brake and stop instantly and automatically. We know it was a newspaper because CCTV films the tracks permanently.”

Getting people to use public transport also means making it attractive, as well as safe. Done deal. Here is a subway station, complete with real trees and airy lighting.

Every station is unique in its design and decoration features. My local station has a blown-up map of the whole world on its walls, from one end of the station to the other, floor to ceiling. The detail is amazing and you can learn some geography whilst waiting for your train. (You can even see Mineral Point Wisconsin on the map.)

The system handles 20 percent of all para-urban traffic but generates only 3 percent of transport-related pollution, because 70 percent of the system uses forms of energy other than oil, and electricity in particular. In one year the TCL covers 60 million kilometers (over 37 million miles) and carries almost 600 million passengers.

Looked at another way, each time someone uses public transport they emit a relatively very low quantity of CO² and the savings in terms of barrels of oil and pollution are significant. The all-electric three-line tramline system is a good example of that.

The bus is the only mode of transport still using diesel, in some 20 percent of cases. The rest have electric engines, such as the one in the photo below.

You can hardly hear them drive by. A busful of rush-hour passengers means 40 less cars on the streets, which in turn means 70 thousand fewer litres of petrol used in one year for rush-hour traffic. Multiply that by the many thousands of rush-hour buses that run over a year and all the people on them, and you are talking a lot of economised oil. If clean-energy subway and tram passengers are counted, the figure runs into many millions of barrels.

The policy has a significant impact on urban pollution. Respiratory and other diseases caused by petrol pollution are being reduced, as are urban road deaths and injuries. The streets are quieter and safer, and pedestrian zones are becoming more and more common.

Many roads have had the number of lanes for cars reduced to make way for bus and tram lanes. Downtown car parks are costly and there are almost no free parking spaces left in the close inner-city (and none at all downtown). Municipal police armed with tickets are everywhere and fines are hefty. Driving in Lyon is becoming a nightmare, and it’s a deliberate policy.

Yes, the car is being pushed out of central Lyon, free parking is becoming scarce, and traffic jams have been slightly reduced downtown but are getting even worse for those who try their luck up to the inner-city perimeter. And they are being pushed further and further out as time goes by.

Oh, and by the way. I had to take three subway lines, two bus lines and two tramlines to go around the city in order to take the photos for this article and get back home. Seven trips in all. Would you like to know how much I paid for those trips?

I paid 1 euro and 30 cents. That is 1 dollar and 70 cents.

A monthly pass card for the network costs €40, or $53. With that card I can take 100 trips a day if I wish. There is no limit.

My car insurance used to cost twice that alone, without counting credit, petrol, depreciation, service and repairs.

I no longer have a car. If I want one in order to leave the city for any reason I hire it from the city pool.

But if the idea of getting around the city using underground public transport doesn’t appeal to you on a sunny day, you have yet another option. Go and pick up one of the thousands of bicycles available in racks all over town. 

Get one, use it, put it back in a rack, and stay fit. Cycle lanes are everywhere. And they are included in the price of the card.

Behind the bicycles is the River Rhône and you can just see the top of a cruise boat. The TCL is also developing plans to provide river transport of passengers.

Let’s face it. The numbers are on the wall. We should be planning and implementing the future of urban transport now, because petrol will not last forever. Those countries and cities which don’t make the effort to improve their urban transport networks now are eventually going to learn the meaning of the time-honoured expression “Prevention is better than cure” the hard way.