Liberal Landscape

Standard three-part sign, Coast-to-Coast Trail, Ang Mo Kio. The trail’s path is marked PCN for “park connector network.”

I’ve written about Singapore’s “park connectors” before.¹ These are paths for pedestrians and cyclists that are generally separate from the city’s conventional sidewalks. The park connectors often follow Singapore’s coasts or its abundant watercourses. Sometimes they pass through parkland as well. By early 2019 there were said to be 300 km of park connectors in Singapore. In other words, they covered a greater distance than Singapore’s impressive—and growing—rail transit system. I don’t believe that there’s ever been a count of park connector users, but you don’t have to spend too much time on Singapore’s park connectors to realize that they’ve been quite successful in encouraging a fair number of Singaporeans to get out and move around.

Singapore’s older park connectors were joined in late March 2019 by a new kind of path for pedestrians and cyclists: the Coast-to-Coast Trail. The C2C Trail (as it’s often called) is 36 km long. It takes you from Jurong Lake Gardens in southwest Singapore all the way to Coney Island in the extreme northeast. Despite the trail’s name, it doesn’t quite reach the southwest coast, which is dominated by industry and port facilities and would make an odd location for a hiking trail.

Map showing route of Coast-to-Coast Trail as well as older park connectors, the Rail Corridor, and rail transit lines. The Rail Connector is a path for pedestrians and cyclists that follows the right-of-way of the old railroad line to Kuala Lumpur. Most of it for the moment is closed (or semi-closed), but it should reopen within a couple of years. MRT lines are heavy-rail lines. LRT lines would be called people movers in much of the world. “U/C” = “under construction.” Base GIS data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap and from the government of Singapore. I’ve had to modify them quite a lot.

I walked essentially the whole trail a couple of times in the course of a mid-November trip to Singapore, and the following comments are largely based on what I observed. Of course, I did look at relevant websites and articles in the Singapore press.²

The literature on the C2C Trail talks about it as being a “curated” trail. I think that what’s meant here is that the trail takes you close to some of Singapore’s more interesting, but not obviously urban, features. Thus, it starts at the attractive park surrounding Jurong Lake, which includes Japanese and Chinese gardens, a pagoda, and a Science Centre. It passes by Bukit Batok and Bukit Timah, two parks centering on substantial hills that are covered by dense tropical forest. It also comes close to MacRitchie Reservoir, a large water body in the middle of the island. It then takes you through Ang Mo Kio, a new town that contains three appealing parks: Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park, Ang Mo Kio Town Garden West, and Ang Mo Kio Linear Park. The trail’s last ten or so kilometers are along watercourses and reservoirs in Sengkang and Punggol (which I wrote about in an earlier post). Coney Island, at the trail’s end, is a forested island in Johor Straits that is kept semi-wild.

Much of the trail follows already existing park connectors. That’s especially true at its two ends. (You can identify these on the map by looking for green lines under the black dashes.)

The Coast-to-Coast Trail in Jurong Lake Gardens. Note the light-pole banner. Similar banners can be found all along the trail. In the background is an MRT train.

The Coast-to-Coast Trail along Sungei Punggol, Sengkang. Here the trail follows a pre-existing park connector that hugs the edge of a river that’s been turned into a reservoir.

A few of the existing park connectors used by the C2C Trail seem to have been created essentially to connect park connectors. An example is an elaborate set of paths under and over the Pan Island Expressway between Jurong East and Bukit Batok.

The Coast-to-Coast Trail’s elaborate tunnel-plus-bridge route under then over the Pan Island Expressway.

Where the C2C Trail doesn’t follow existing park connectors, it often runs along busy roads, following long-existing (but often improved) sidewalks. Sometimes, there’s a substantial strip of thick tropical vegetation between trail users and the highway, but sometimes there really isn’t. In one place the trail runs briefly as a sidewalk next to the Lornie Highway, a freeway!

View from the bridge used by the Coast-to-Coast Trail to get over Lornie Highway. Note the familiar three-part sign near the center of the photo.

Most of the busy highways aren’t freeways, but they generally aren’t little-used side streets either. Examples of major highways followed by the trail are Bukit Timah, Adam, and Marymount Roads.

The Coast-to-Coast Trail along Bukit Timah Road. The trail follows the covered walkway and passes through the bus stop at left. The fencing along the sidewalk is typical.

Short of passing through Singapore’s green central area (which includes space set aside for the military), it’s a little hard to see how the trail’s creators could have avoided the problem of following major highways. Central Singapore is somewhat hilly. Thus, it doesn’t have the kinds of lazy tropical rivers and canals that many of the older park connectors follow. Its human geography created some issues for trail placement too. Some (not all) of the area more or less northwest of the central business district developed during the colonial period as a neighborhood of substantial houses for well-off colonists. The area maintained its prestige after independence and became the kind of place that wealthy Singaporeans gravitated to. Here and there institutions (like schools) moved in as well. Many of the single-family houses and institutions acquired walls around their property at one point. The area became quite automobile-oriented by (I think) the 1960s. Commercial establishments often have substantial parking lots. Even when apartment buildings were added to the mix, they included parking and in most cases are surrounded by walls. As in other suburban areas all over the world, minor roads tend not to take you very far. You need to follow crowded arterials to get anywhere. This is the kind of country that the C2C Trail takes you through for something like a third of its length. You have to be a pretty dedicated urban walker to find the idea of walking along busy suburban highways very attractive. It’s arguable that the C2C Trail’s routing along highways, inevitable as it may have been, is a something of a defect.

Another distinctive characteristic of the C2C Trail is that, except at its beginning and end, it does not really lead you through most of the places it brings you to; instead it takes you by them. Thus, instead of going through Bukit Batok and Bukit Timah Parks, for example, it follows major roads at the edge of these parks. Going through Bukit Batok Nature Park would have required only a short detour (Bukit Timah, Singapore’s highest point, would have required a much longer detour, and some real climbing).

Here the Coast-to-Coast Trail follows heavily-trafficked Old Jurong Road at left rather than cutting through forested Bukit Batok Nature Park at right.

The same thing happens at MacRitchie Reservoir, which you can only see through some trees from Lornie Road. Similarly, Ang Mo Kio’s three parks would have made easy diversions. Ang Mo Kio Linear Park runs parallel to the C2C Trail for 1200 m, but those who stick to the trail never do get to see the park, which is up on a mild rise above busy Ang Mo Kio Avenue 5.

The Coast-to-Coast Trail in the center, Ang Mo Kio Avenue 5 at left, Ang Mo Kio Linear Park at right.

Diverting through these and other parks along with the way would have reduced the amount of time that trail users spend along busy highways.

The trail also takes you through Bukit Batok and Ang Mo Kio, successful new towns. In Bukit Batok, it mostly follows drainage canals that parallel highways that aren’t particularly crowded. In Ang Mo Ko, the C2C Trail stays on main highways, bypassing the thriving city center. Those walking on the trail through new towns will find that they’re sharing the trail with local people who, I’m sure, in most cases have no idea that they’re on the Coast-to-Coast Trail. The new-town segments are generally pleasant and interesting places to walk.

The Coast-to-Coast Trail in Bukit Batong.

An oddity of the trail is that it encounters numerous construction sites. That reflects the fact that Singapore is still growing quickly. Detours around construction areas are typically not marked, for example in Ang Mo Kio Town Garden West.

Construction along Ang Mo Kio Avenue 5.

Detours are especially numerous along Marymount Avenue, which is the site of construction of the North-South Corridor, an underground freeway that will some day take drivers from Woodlands in northern Singapore all the way to the central business district. (I can’t resist adding that Singapore’s desire to become a “car-lite” society is somewhat at odds with the support being given to this expensive project, which at least will contain bus lanes.)

The trail is generally well-marked. There are standard three-part signs every few dozen meters and (at least for now) banners posted on light poles as well. A few turns, however, are not well marked at all. I found myself completely confused, for example, where, going northeast, you’re supposed to turn left from Bukit Batok East Avenue 6 to Bukit Batok East Avenue 3. I’ll admit that the problem would have been solved by consulting the excellent app available from the National Parks Board.

I was struck by the fact that, while most of the parts of the C2C Trail that follow existing park connectors—for example, the trails along watercourses in Punggol at its northern end—were pleasantly but not overwhelmingly busy, the segments along major roads had few pedestrians. Because these areas are just inherently less attractive for walking, running, or bicycling, that really isn’t very surprising.

I did, however, meet a few people who were in the process of walking or running the whole trail, or a large part of it. Doing this in a day has actually become a distinctive challenge for a certain sort of Singaporean. Weekends are when you’re most likely to meet people covering the whole trail. (I suspect there were many more such people when the trail first opened last March.)

Of course, walking the Singapore’s entire C2C Trail in a day isn’t quite the challenge that, say, walking the whole Appalachian or Pacific Coast Trail over a couple of months (or much longer) is, but it has an analogous kind of goofy appeal for some of us. I acknowledge that, if you’re not bothered by heat and humidity, doing the C2C in a day is a pretty low-risk project. If you get hungry, there are plenty of excellent and/or cheap eating places along the way. If you get tired, there’s likely to be a bus stop within a few dozen meters no matter where you are, and the C2C Trail even intersects with train lines at several points. There is of course virtually no street crime in Singapore, so the human geography poses no dangers. Car drivers are likely to defer to pedestrians as long as they cross streets where and when they’re supposed to. There are even friendly signs from the government telling you what to do if you encounter a stray dog or a wild monkey. Singapore’s a pretty benign place (except maybe for the risk of contracting dengue fever).

Sign telling you what to do if you encounter wild monkeys.

It appears that walking and running pedestrians are intended to be the main users of the C2C Trail. But most of the Trail can also be traversed by bicycle. I also came across quite a few users of what in acronym-mad Singapore are called PMDs (personal mobility devices), that is, scooters and electric bicycles, even though these were recently banned from using pedestrian paths after a series of serious accidents. These devices have of course become a problem for pedestrians all over the world.

Singapore’s National Parks planners are working on a still more ambitious trail: the 150 km Round Island Route (RIR). Like the C2C Trail, the RIR will use existing park connectors and existing road sidewalks for part of the way, but it will of necessity have to include substantial new sections, including several quite long stretches through parts of western and northern Singapore that are now hard to access by any means. The RIR is not expected to be completed until 2035, but a short (120 km) version of the trail, including a long stretch on the Rail Corridor, is supposed to be open in a couple of years.

In the last few years, Singapore has been putting as much energy into creating pedestrian infrastructure as any city in the world. I found the Coast-to-Coast Trail quite an impressive example of this effort.

I recently spent nearly a week in Bordeaux, a city I had previously been in only briefly.

I was particularly interested in looking at all the ways that Bordeaux has been attempting to push back against the hegemony of the automobile. It’s developed a reputation for having gone as far in this direction as any city in France.

The context is that, during the 1960s and 1970s—an era some French writers have characterized by the phrase “le tout automobile”—Bordeaux did as much as any French city to adapt itself to the car. It sprawled enormously, and ended up with the lowest density of any major French urban area.¹ According to INSEE, Bordeaux also had the largest proportion of households with two or more cars of any large French metropolitan area.² To accommodate these cars, Bordeaux built France’s largest beltway (the Rocade), 45 km long, which of course encouraged further sprawl. It didn’t quite succeed in a plan to run freeways through the inner city, but it did improve its major north-south surface road enough so that 100,000 vehicles used it every day, passing right by its central business district.

It’s worth remembering that Bordeaux, thanks in part to its soggy soils and in part to local traditions, never was a particularly dense place. Much of the inner city consisted (and still consists) mostly of smaller, predominantly two-story buildings, and until quite recently there were hardly any structures other than church steeples higher than something like five stories in the whole metropolitan area. A partial exception demonstrates one of the ways that Bordeaux tried to adapt itself to the automobile. In the 1960s, an urban renewal project in Mériadeck, which adjoined the old CBD, replaced a working-class quarter of one- and two-story buildings with six-or-so-story offices and apartments. These were connected by a Corbusier-style platform designed to separate pedestrians from car traffic. These days the office buildings are mostly used by government agencies—a sure sign that they were difficult to rent—and the concrete platforms are generally empty. Except for a shopping mall that was built along with the project, this area is now by far the emptiest part of central Bordeaux.

Near-empty platform above street level at Mériadeck, the result of a 1960s urban-renewal scheme in which pedestrians were separated from the street.

In most French cities, there was a fairly radical change of emphasis by the 1980s. There was a widespread realization that “le tout automobile” was something of a dead end. Following it to its logical conclusion would have destroyed existing cities. Most cities stopped investing in new freeways and started improving public transport and adding facilities for pedestrians and cyclists. Bordeaux was slow to make the change, in part perhaps because it’s been a fairly traditional place and in part because so much of the public debate centered on whether to build a subway, which would have been an enormously expensive undertaking, thanks in part to Bordeaux’s soils. Bordeaux’s sprawl also made it a poor fit for what would have been a short linear system.

Bordeaux’s shift to planning for pedestrians and transit only occurred in the mid-1990s. The election of Alain Juppé as mayor in 1995 was apparently a factor.  A decision was finally made to move forward with an elaborate tram system and to take numerous other steps to reduce the role of the automobile and improve conditions in the central city. The change in the landscape of central Bordeaux over the next decade was so enormous that it’s inspired at least three books.³

Bordeaux’s transformation involved several interconnected steps.

[1] A tramway system. Bordeaux started with a three-line system that barely made it out of the inner city. It was felt to be a success from the day the first line opened in 2003. All three lines have since been extended, and a fourth line is supposed to open by the end of 2019. Most of Bordeaux’s tram lines now reach the Rocade. There are something like 300,000 passengers a day, which is respectable in an urban area of approximately 1.2 million (especially when you consider how many people walk and bicycle in Bordeaux). Service is quite frequent during the day. All of the trains I rode this month were substantially full in the inner city—and rather empty out near the Rocade. It isn’t easy anywhere to get people who are part of the automobile culture to change their ways. Outer Bordeaux remains a diffuse and sprawling place. At least large swaths of it have better transit than they once did.

Tram on Rue d’Ornano west of the Bordeaux’s central business district. Note the signs forbidding access by motor vehicle. The smallish buildings and narrow, straight streets are characteristic of much of central Bordeaux. Note that the tram is getting power from an underground conduit between the tracks (“alimentation par sol”). This technology was pioneered in Bordeaux.

The Bordeaux urban area emphasizing rail transit lines and facilities for pedestrians and cyclists. Base GIS data are from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap; these data have been heavily edited.

Closeup of much of central Bordeaux. Source of data as in the previous map.

[2] Widespread pedestrianization. Bordeaux’s sprawl and something like a century of only modest pressure to alter the inner city have had one wonderful consequence. There is a very large area in which 18th- and 19th-century buildings on generally narrow 18th- and 19th-century streets predominate. The UNESCO world heritage site that covers much of central Bordeaux is said to be the largest urban UNESCO site in the world. Large parts of this area were turned into pedestrian zones when the tramway was constructed. In many places (including several key streets with no tram line) motor vehicles were forbidden completely (except, sometimes, for early-morning deliveries).

Rue Ste-Catherine in central Bordeaux, said to be the longest pedestrian street in the world. The four- and five-story buildings are characteristic of the central business district and some of its surrounding neighborhoods.

Elsewhere, lanes for the trams replaced lanes for cars and only a very narrow motor-vehicle lane was left. In some inner-city neighborhoods with narrow streets, two-way tram traffic occupied entire streets, and only local motor-vehicle traffic is allowed access, and then usually only in one direction (see photo above). As a result, pedestrianization—or at least partial pedestrianization—can be found not just in the central business district but even in what might be called the outer central city: the blocks of two-story residential buildings built mostly during the 19th century. You no longer feel in most of central Bordeaux that the automobile comes first.

The Pont de Pierre is a special case. It’s the oldest bridge across the Garonne (parts of it date to the 1820s)—and, really, the only Garonne bridge that leads directly to Bordeaux’s central business district. According to a 1968 traffic map, this bridge carried more motor-vehicle traffic than any other stretch of roadway in the Bordeaux area.⁴ These days, two lanes are devoted to trams, two lanes to pedestrians, and two lanes to bicycles, buses, and taxis. On the latter stretches, the buses and (rare) taxis are expected to travel at bicycle speed. During commute hours the bridge is jammed with people walking and cycling.

The Pont de Pierre at sunrise.

Bordeaux had its origin as a Roman city and it was only a tiny place during the Middle Ages. Thus, some of its straight Roman streets have been preserved. Pedestrianization of the irregular streets in the medieval cores of many European cities is common enough. Bordeaux is unusual in that so many of its pedestrianized streets are straight. The Rue Ste-Catherine, at 1.3 km, is said to be the longest pedestrianized street in the world (see photo above).

[3] Replacing the docks with a park that encourages “soft” modes of transportation. Bordeaux was France’s major port during much of the 18th and 19th centuries. Its prosperity was based disproportionately on trade with the West Indies (including, for a time, the slave trade). Bordeaux’s main port area was located along the Garonne, right next to its central business district, where the distinctive bend of the river left an area of deep water at the shoreline. The proximity of port to city was an enormous advantage in the era before mechanical transport. Bordeaux’s port did not do so well in the 20th century, however. Its location a hundred hard-to-navigate kilometers from the sea was awkward. Furthermore, Bordeaux did not have a heavily populated hinterland. Marseille, Nantes, and (in most years) several other French cities now have much more important ports. There is also the issue that modern, container-oriented port facilities in Bordeaux have had to be built downstream, several kilometers from the old port. Bordeaux’s central-city port was pretty moribund by the 1980s.

Years of discussion about what to do with the old port eventually led to a decision in the late 1990s to replace it with recreational land. Close to the CBD, the old port sheds (hangars) were removed completely, and the space they occupied was turned into parkland. A large part of the park’s area was given over to recreational paths. A wide multi-use path was built along the shoreline, and a path for bicycles was added on the inland side of the newly created space. This riverside parkland seemed like an overwhelmingly successful place to me. On warm weekend afternoons, it was attracting huge crowds.

Multi-use path along the Garonne.

In the early morning cyclists and a smaller number of pedestrians turn it into a major commute route.

A peculiar aspect of the transformation of Bordeaux’s old port is that cruise ships are still allowed to tie up in the old port area. The result looks a bit incongruous. Of course, it results in still greater crowds.

Downstream, the port sheds were left in place but were turned into shops and eating places. Here the recreational path is narrower—too narrow really for the number of users.

The much narrower multi-use path along the Garonne a bit downstream. Note the cruise ship on the Garonne.

A more modest recreational path was also built on the other (right, eastern) bank of the Garonne so that it’s easy to arrange to walk, run, or bicycle in a loop.

[4] Revitalization of the Right Bank. Like many cities on major rivers, Bordeaux is a lopsided place. The Garonne has always been a real barrier, and most of the built-up area is on the left, western bank. La Bastide, the neighborhood on the Right Bank immediately across from Bordeaux’s central business district, was until recently an exclusively working-class place, and much of its river bank was occupied by not-very-prosperous factories. Bordeaux’s government has taken numerous steps over the last twenty-five or so years to redress the balance. It’s built new bridges across the Garonne. A tram line that goes quite far into the Right Bank was one of the first lines to open. A park along the Garonne has been created, replacing obsolete factories. I wouldn’t say that La Bastide feels as bustling or prosperous today as much of the Left Bank, and many of the old factory sites are still empty, but it’s no longer a remote and run-down place. It’s become part of Bordeaux.

[5] Euratlantique. The latest inner-city transformation is occurring in the area south of Bordeaux’s train station, the Gare St-Jean. This area, the central part of which is traditionally known as Belcier or St-Jean-Belcier, has been an extremely modest working-class area with a certain number of increasingly obsolete industrial establishments. Its location would probably have put it in line for change even without government intervention, but the municipal government has decided to hurry the process along. While planners insist that they’ve been consulting long-term residents, they’ve developed plans to turn much of St-Jean-Belcier into a neighborhood of offices, apartments, and entertainment venues under the name Euratlantique (derived of course from Euroméditerranée in Marseille and Euralille in Lille). Over the last several years, Euratlantique has come to encompass not just the vicinity of the train station but a substantial area in southern Bordeaux, as well as in neighboring communes on both sides of the Garonne. Most of this broader Euratlantique has been a zone of industry, rail yards, and low-prestige housing, and it’s thought to be ripe for redevelopment.

The process has really only just begun, and much of Euratlantique is still the kind of place where you can see a city being altered before your eyes anywhere you turn.⁵

A lone pedestrian walks through a part of Belcier that is being turned into Euratlantique. Note that several of the old façades on the right side of the street are being preserved.

Belcier/Euratlantique has the peculiar distinction of being virtually the only part of central Bordeaux where there are tall buildings. It’s also one of the few close-in places where it was possible to keep a promise to encourage dense development along tram lines.⁶

The changing urban landscape in Belcier/Euratlantique just northeast of the Carle Vernet tram station.

The only more or less completed part of Euratlantique is a tiny area along the Garonne just south of the railroad tracks, where one can find a shiny new Hilton hotel, an even shinier Caisse d’Épargne office building, and a folly by architect Bjarke Ingels known as la Méca. Méca theoretically stands for Maison de l’économie créative et de la culture d’Aquitaine, but the name’s—provocative—suggestion of a certain city in Saudi Arabia is surely no accident, and, in fact, while la Méca provides office space for several local arts organizations, so far as I can tell, its chief function is to serve as a pilgrimage site for those with an interest in eccentric architecture. A wall helps visitors overlook the fact that la Méca, like the rest of Euratlantique, is cut off from the Garonne by a noisy highway. (There are plans to replace it with an extension of riverside parkland some day.)

Pilgrims at la Méca, Euratlantique.

Those who have known Bordeaux for several decades are pretty unanimous in declaring that the city has changed enormously, and for the better. In the 1980s and 1990s Bordeaux seemed to many to be a city in decline. The powers-that-be set out to make Bordeaux an economically vibrant place again, and a city with a status in Europe commensurate with its population. There was a sense that the best way to achieve these goals was to make central Bordeaux a more congenial place for residents and visitors. Many of the steps that were taken—replacing the old docks with parkland, for example, and diversifying the working-class neighborhoods east and south of the center—were very similar to steps taken in older port cities all over the world.  The effort to end the reign of “le tout automobile” in central Bordeaux has parallels throughout the world too, but this process has usually not been as self-conscious as in Bordeaux. It’s still not clear how successful this effort has been. The number of residents of the Bordeaux area who commuted to work by automobile dropped from 59 to 50% between 2009 and 2019.⁷ The change isn’t huge, but it’s in the hoped-for direction. The rate of automobile ownership, unlike that in Paris, hasn’t really budged, however, and public transit use has been pretty flat. Bicycle use, on the other hand, has been booming, and Bordeaux often appears on lists of the world’s best cycling cities.

What statistics cannot easily capture is that, to a short-term visitor at least, central Bordeaux seems to be thriving. There are people everywhere; shops appear to be doing all right; public transport vehicles are full; and the mostly restored 18th- and 19th-century buildings (and some of the new ones too) are quite impressive. And it’s pretty clear that at least some of central Bordeaux’s  success is connected with the fact that the vast majority of movement there now occurs on foot, by bicycle, or by public transport.

Most of the maps on this site were created at least in part with GIS data from OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM (for those who do not know) consists of GIS data—that is geographic data in a format usable by computer mapping programs—for the entire world. It differs from many other sources of GIS data in that its files are available to anyone for free—and are supplied in part by local contributors, who use information from aerial photos, satellite images, and personal knowledge. (OSM also uses publicly available government datasets.) OSM GIS data, in general, seem to be reasonably good, as several scholarly papers have testified.¹

One of OSM’s contributions to the process of amalgamating data from many sources has been to standardize it. This activity isn’t simple, and it inevitably involves some arbitrary decisions. An example of this can be found in the files for railroads. Railroad files are supposed to be track maps whenever that’s possible.² A railroad consisting of four parallel tracks will be portrayed by four parallel lines. Not only is every track shown; so are switches, marshalling yards, and repair facilities. These extra tracks aren’t very visible in maps at a small scale (that is, maps that show large areas), but they do appear in highly detailed urban maps. Because my focus in most of the maps on this site is passenger rail routes rather than tracks, I’ve often edited the extra tracks out (see the maps of Tokyo railroads for example). This is a time-consuming process, but it does result in cleaner maps. It’s doable in part because OSM data are reasonably standardized, and editing can be done in a somewhat mechanical way,

A major component of OSM’s standardization work is its classification of geographic features. Roads, for example, are classified into more than a dozen different types that are the same for the entire world. There are inevitably some issues of consistency. The category “service road,” for example,  is the lowest-ranked type of road for motor vehicles everywhere. It’s used for alleys in American Midwestern cities, and for access roads in the massive blocks of “new towns” in Hong Kong and Singapore. These aren’t quite the same thing, but neither are the urban landscapes being mapped. There really isn’t much to be done about this problem except to be aware of it. In general, one can count on OSM road data to be reasonably consistent for different parts of the world. The same is true of railroad data, where classifications like “rail” (for mainline railroads), “light rail,” “subway,” and “monorail” are used everywhere. Land-use data are similarly pretty consistent: the world’s parks may not all be the same, but it’s usually fairly clear what’s a park and what isn’t. One can count on data for water bodies to be reasonably reliable too.

“Pedestrian features,” however, are another story. The classifications are wildly inconsistent, perhaps because these have not been quite as important to OSM’s editors as, say, roads and railroads, or (arguably) several other feature types.

“Pedestrian features” are always treated as a special type of road. There appear to be four main types and several additional, less common types. The four main types are “footways,” “paths,” “cycleways,” and a type labeled simply “pedestrian.” Less common types of pedestrian features are “steps,” “tracks,” and perhaps “bridleways.”

Let’s take a look at how these terms work in practice. I’ve included below maps of the central parts of several cities.³ All these maps would be at a scale of 1:50,000 if printed on 8.5 x 11 inch paper. They use the same color scheme I’ve been using in recent posts. Red = subways or other rail rapid transit lines. Orange = streetcars or light-rail lines. Brown = other passenger rail lines. Grey = roads for cars, usually excluding “service roads.” Light blue = water. Light green = parks. Dark green = pedestrian facilities, as specified. Medium green = steps on the Lyon and Moscow maps.

I’ve included maps for central Chicago, Lyon, Moscow, Kyoto, Hong Kong, and Dubai. My sense is that adding additional cities would have suggested that the problem is even messier than it appears to be from the examples given here.

Here are the maps. Commentary follows.

“Footways” are probably the least consistently applied classification. “Footways” are supposed to be “designated footpaths; i.e., [paths] mainly/exclusively for pedestrians. This includes walking tracks and gravel paths.” But in Moscow every sidewalk is classified as a footway, and in Chicago every sidewalk in parts of the Loop and the Near North Side—but not elsewhere in the city—also gets this classification. This makes absolutely no sense to me, if only as sidewalks are essentially universal in central Moscow and Chicago; they are present along every road that isn’t a limited-access highway. Somewhat similarly,  in Kyoto most sidewalks along major streets are considered to be footways. Because sidewalks are often not present along minor roads in Kyoto (and other Japanese cities) and can be very narrow even along some important streets, it’s possible that an attempt is being made to note particularly wide sidewalks, but this process seems pretty arbitrary to me. In Lyon, in contrast, footways include a more modest (and interesting) set of features: pedestrian walkways along the Saône and Rhône; paths in parks; pedestrianized streets; and pedestrian passages in the hills on the West Bank of the Saône. In Hong Kong, the designation footway is used for many things but never ordinary sidewalks: pedestrian paths along waterfronts; pedestrian paths in parks; walking paths in the hills; the elevated walkways that thread through parts of Central; and bridges across major roads, which are quite common. This covers a lot of territory. Similarly, in Dubai, footways include some of the pedestrian paths along Dubai Creek; paths in parks; and Deira’s pedestrianized streets. Sidewalks seem to be excluded.

Employment of the classification “pedestrian” seems a little more consistent. It’s supposed to be used “for roads used mainly/exclusively for pedestrians in shopping and some residential areas which may allow access by motorised vehicles only for very limited periods of the day.” This could be interpreted to mean urban streets that have been pedestrianized, i.e., generally closed to motor vehicles. This category does seem to be used this way in Moscow, where several east-west roads off Tverskai͡a Street north of Red Square as well as in the Zamoskvorech’e District are pretty classic examples of pedestrianized streets. Some pedestrianized streets in Kyoto’s main shopping district and in Vieux Lyon are also classified this way as is the pedestrian corridor that replaced Ogden Avenue in Lincoln Park, Chicago. But “pedestrian” is also used for parts of the walkways along the Saône, the Moscow River, and Dubai Creek, which have a very different origin. And, as noted above, in some cities, pedestrianized streets are classed as footways.

The much less common classification “path” has analogous problems. It’s supposed to be used for “non-specific paths,” that is, those not exclusively for walkers, cyclists, or horse riders. This could, of course, apply quite widely, but in practice “path” is used sparingly. On the maps above it’s used most commonly on the Kyoto map, where, so far as I can see, it overlaps categories like “footway” and “cycleway” in ways that I find hard to understand.

“Cycleways” are bicycle paths. This sounds easier than it is. The OSM guidelines are concerned as they should be with whether cycleways also permit pedestrians but seem not to suggest a completely consistent solution. Also, it’s not clear whether lanes painted along streets should be included. They aren’t on the Chicago map; even protected lanes are usually excluded (and the western route in Lincoln Park that is included is not actually a bicycle path). In contrast, on the Moscow map, the narrow, little-used (and perhaps somewhat dangerous) lanes that follow the Boulevard Ring are considered to be cycleways, as are several bike paths painted on sidewalks. The Lyon map shows both separate paths and protected lanes as cycleways. There are no cycleways in central Hong Kong, so I’ve used the fourth Hong Kong map only for steps.

“Steps” are another type of pedestrian facility. They are common only in hilly cities, and I’ve included them only on the Lyon, Moscow, and Hong Kong maps. Unlike the other categories here, “steps” seem to be applied quite consistently.

“Tracks” are supposed to be used for “roads for mostly agricultural or forestry uses.” On the maps above, the category is used only in Hong Kong, for some of the unpaved trails in the mountains, which makes some sense, I guess (although the distinction between tracks and paths is inconsistent). I haven’t included tracks on any of the maps above.

The chief problem of consistency occurs for the categories “footways,” “pedestrian,” and “paths.” They are definitely not distinguished meaningfully. It might make sense to merge these categories, especially if sidewalks could be eliminated from the “footway” category.

Bridges over and tunnels under roads are another problem. Bridges over roads are noted assiduously in Hong Kong and Dubai, where they are common. The chief problem is cartographic. If you include these in a map at medium scale, you get a lot of odd-seeming green smudges on the map.  Tunnels are extremely common in Moscow (and other formerly Soviet cities), but they don’t seem to be noted in the database. Perhaps that’s just as well, as there is no very nice way to map these except at the largest scale.

In maps on this blog, I’ve typically edited the data for pedestrian facilities quite a lot. For example, I’ve generally taken sidewalks out of “footways.” This has worked pretty well, I think. But it would perhaps be better if less editing were required, and if the categories recognized in the database actually corresponded in a consistent way to differences in the real world. For pedestrian facilities, they really don’t.⁴

Moscow, as I pointed out in an earlier post, is quite a good city for pedestrians. There are high-quality sidewalks nearly everywhere, and there are lots of people using them. The enormously varied and generally attractive built environment guarantees that pedestrians will be entertained. And drivers can be relied on to defer to pedestrians when pedestrians have the right-of-way, which they do at crosswalks. I certainly wouldn’t claim that things are perfect, however. There are huge amounts of highly-polluting traffic along many major streets. Crossing these streets often requires a tunnel, which you enter and exit by stairs. Where there is no tunnel, it’s expected that pedestrians will obey traffic signals, which can take a long time to change; countdown clocks often have three digits. Widespread automobile ownership in Moscow has definitely lowered the quality of pedestrian life in the city, and there has not been as much pushback as there has been in, for example, parts of Western Europe. Still, things are much better than they were in the first decade and a half or so after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In addition to sidewalks, there are a certain number of actual pedestrian (and bicycling) facilities in central Moscow, some of which have been improved enormously in the last few years. I made a point of looking at these in the course of a recent trip to Moscow.

Map of central Moscow, emphasizing pedestrian and bicycling facilities and urban rail lines. Base GIS data are from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap; these data have been heavily edited.

The most striking such facility is a set of paths along the Moscow River, stretching mostly on the south bank from the Bol’shoĭ Kamennyĭ Bridge in Zamoskvorech’e through Gor’kiĭ Park then around a substantial river meander past the Neskuchnyĭ Garden and the Vorob’ëbyĭ Hills to the Third Ring Road, for a total distance of approximately 8 km. For nearly all this distance there are separate bicycle and pedestrian corridors.

The parallel paths along the south bank of the Moscow River. The pedestrian path is at the left, close to the river; the bicycle path and service road are at the right. Lenin Beach, a sunbathing area, lies in between. At far right is a shop where bicycles can be rented.

Part of the bicycle path consists of two one-way lanes painted along a well-maintained service road. This really is a service road, but it’s used only by a tiny number of motor vehicles. Many pedestrians—especially runners and skaters—prefer using the service road to using the pedestrian path, which can get quite crowded at certain times.

Pedestrian path along the south bank of the Moscow River on a chilly Sunday afternoon in September.

The parallel bicycle and pedestrian paths pass by numerous landmarks, for example, a group of industrial buildings on or across from Bolotnyĭ Island that have been turned into restaurants and art galleries; a fantastically ugly statue of Peter the Great; the New Tret’i͡akov Gallery (for 20th-century art); Gor’kiĭ Park with its numerous amusements; and Lenin Beach, a major sunning spot. There are several bridges across the river including two for pedestrians only and two for trains that contain pedestrian paths. These were joined just last year by a cable car line.

The enclosed pedestrian bridge at the south end of Gor’kiĭ Park. Photograph taken September 2016.

Because the river bends so dramatically, the view keeps changing. Off in the distance, one can see such landmarks as Moscow University, Moskva-Siti, and the newly reconstructed Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The river is often filled with boats. The stretch of the Moscow River with parallel bicycle and pedestrian paths is a distinctive and attractive place.

There is also a pedestrian/bicycle trail on the river’s north bank, but this doesn’t go all the way. The problem is that there’s a major road along much of the north bank. There’s often a substantial sidewalk between the road and the river, but, because of traffic noise and pollution, the sidewalk is not as pleasant as the carfree path across the river. (There’s a similar issue from, roughly, the Kremlin east; major roads hug nearly the entire riverfront.) Still, the north bank path does allow one to arrange a loop. (The pedestrian path is not noted on the map since it’s essentially a sidewalk.)

The north bank of the Moscow River just east of the Kremlin. Here, only a sidewalk is available for walking along the river.

The other major pedestrian thoroughfare in central Moscow is the long-existing Boulevard Ring (it was created the 1820s). If one doesn’t count the squares around the Kremlin, this is the closest-in of several concentric ring roads in Moscow. Despite the use of the term “ring,” the Boulevard Ring forms only a semi-circle: it runs at a distance of approximately 1.5 km from Saint Basil’s and Red Square north of the river only. The term “Boulevard Ring” is an unofficial one. Components of the Boulevard Ring go by several different official names. What connects them is the fact that they all have a similar structure: a linear park is bordered by two one-way roads. The park has enough vegetation so you aren’t particularly aware of traffic if you walk through it. The parks in the Boulevard Ring aren’t just pedestrian thoroughfares. They’re also used for art exhibitions and for public events, and they serve as pleasant places to sit.

Along the Boulevard Ring. The exhibit is devoted to new Metro stations.

The ring is interrupted at several places, once (at the Arbat) for a highway underpass, once for a parking lot, and in several places by buildings. There are also places where a pond and an archaeological site take up much of the park. Still, it’s not hard to walk around the entire ring, although you do face a long wait for certain traffic lights to change and must use tunnels in a couple of places. The hegemony of the automobile is pretty apparent even in this most pedestrian-oriented of Moscow’s thoroughfares.

A parking lot and restaurant interrupt the Boulevard Ring where it’s crossed by T͡Svetnoĭ Boulevard.

Central Moscow also has a number of pedestrianized streets. Several of the commercial strips off Tverskai͡a Street north of Red Square and the Kremlin, for example, have become pedestrian-only as have a group of streets stretching east-west past the main subway stations in the Zamoskvorech’e district south of the river.

One of the pedestrianized streets in the Zamoskvorech’e district.

Red Square itself is a huge pedestrianized space, always filled with tourists and passersby.

There’s also some parkland in central Moscow, including the brand new Zari͡ad’e Park, designed in part by the American architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which is not much like a traditional city park: it’s full of things to do, many of which cost money. One of its claims to fame is that its vegetation cover has been divided into several zones, each of which is planted with species like those in one of Russia’s major ecological regions. At least it’s free to walk in the vegetated spaces, and lots of people do.

The tundra area in the brand-new Zari͡ad’e Park. Saint Basil’s Cathedral can be seen in the background.

Moscow, like many of the world’s cities, has been trying to encourage bicycling. It’s set up a bike-share program, for example, and the linear park along the Moscow River described above includes high-quality bike paths that get a substantial amount of use. Elsewhere in central Moscow, conditions are perhaps not so ideal, but there are places where the authorities have tried to accommodate bicycles. One of central Moscow’s few continuous bike paths can be found in the roads that border the Boulevard Ring. It consists of narrow lanes painted in the streets. It’s probably somewhat dangerous, and it certainly isn’t used much. When I’ve tried to photograph it, I’ve had to wait a long time for a bicycle to come along. There are more motorcycles and scooters than bicycles.

One of the rare cyclists in the bicycle lane that follows the Boulevard Ring.

There are also bicycle facilities along two of north-south streets in Zamoskvorech’e. One street (Bol’shai͡a Ordynka Street) has a painted lane on which cyclists are expected to go in the opposite direction as motor traffic, and parallel Pi͡atnit͡skai͡a Street has a two-way bike path painted on its sidewalk. Both of these facilities attract a modest amount of use, much of it by meal delivery cyclists.

Bicycle path on Pi͡atnit͡skai͡a Street, Zamoskvorech’e.

There are similar sidewalk bicycle paths here and there north of Red Square, for example along Bol’shai͡a Nikitskai͡a Street. Moscow isn’t much like, say, Berlin, but it does have at least a few streets where bicyclists are encouraged to share sidewalks with pedestrians.

The sidewalk bicycle path along Bol’shai͡a Nikitskai͡a Street where it crosses the Boulevard Ring.

Moscow, like many of the world’s other major cities, has been devoting some energy in recent years to developing and promoting alternatives to the automobile. Most of its effort has gone into expanding its excellent Metro and improving its suburban railway network. Moscow has also enhanced its pedestrian facilities in certain places, particularly in central Moscow, an increasingly gentrified area that promises something resembling a Western European environment to tourists and to those who can afford to live there. Central Moscow’s modest but reasonable pedestrian facilities are an important component of the area’s appeal.

I visited Kitchener and Waterloo last week and rode on the new ION light-rail line there. I also walked along the route for several kilometers.

This line is distinctive in that it’s in a relatively small urban area. According to Statistics Canada, the Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo census metropolitan area had a population of 523,894 in 2016. It’s thus the smallest North American urban area to have a substantial light-rail system.

It’s true that the Kitchener-Waterloo area could be considered to be part of the Toronto metropolitan area, but, officially, it isn’t, and ION in any case is completely separate from the numerous projects being built by Metrolinx, the organization in the Toronto region that manages public transit. In fact, there is a great deal of open space between Kitchener-Waterloo and Toronto. But it’s only something like 100 km between downtown Kitchener and central Toronto, and GO transit has reasonably good service to Kitchener (an hourly bus on weekdays and five trains in the prevailing direction during weekday rush hours). There is also frequent Greyhound service. Kitchener and Waterloo are certainly closely connected to Toronto.

Map of the Toronto region showing urban rail transit lines and the location of Kitchener and Waterloo. I’ve omitted longer-distance VIA lines, including the line to Niagara Falls on which a single daily commuter GO train to Toronto was recently put into service. On the GO (Government of Ontario) lines, only the eastern four-fifths or so of the Lakeshore line has frequent all-day service. But frequency is expected to increase on all the lines in the near future, and they are all supposed to be electrified as well. GIS data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, which I’ve edited quite a lot.

ION is 19 km long—longer than the light-rail lines in several larger urban areas in North America, for example, those in Newark, Buffalo, and Charlotte.¹ It has a rather complicated alignment. There are two stretches where ION follows a railroad right-of-way. It also runs in the middle of certain roads in a lane that’s closed to motor-vehicle traffic. Crossing gates or traffic signals protect these parts of the line. In addition, there are stretches where ION becomes more like a streetcar line, for example through the central business districts of both Kitchener and Waterloo where the tracks occupy curbside lanes that are also used by motor-vehicle traffic. There is signal preemption, although, on all the trips I took, the train did have to stop at a small number of red lights. I asked a driver about this, and he said that the software being used for signal preemption chiefly worked by extending green lights for light-rail cars; it did not turn a red light green.

Map of the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge area showing ION’s route.

The line is in all the obvious ways a modern light-rail system. The Bombardier Flexity Freedom low-floor cars are quite comfortable. Countdown clocks in the stations tell you when the next train is arriving, and there is also electronic information on coming stops inside the cars. Service levels are reasonable. The headway between trains is basically ten minutes on weekdays from the morning rush hour until early evening and fifteen minutes on weekends and very early in the morning and very late in the evening on weekdays. This is better service at certain times than is provided by certain North American heavy-rail systems, for example, Miami Metrorail and the Cleveland Rapid, but it doesn’t come close to the level of service provided by, say, most of Toronto’s streetcar lines.

ION, which began operations on June 21, reported that there were around 30,000 riders a day during its initial week of service: an impressive figure. But rides were free at the time. I called operator Grand River Transit to see how many passengers had been riding the system in the weeks since fares were implemented—and got hung up on! Grand River Transit hasn’t answered my e-mail either, so this may be a sensitive point.² The hope is that there will be something like 27,000 riders a day. Even if it’s only, say, 15 or 20,000, that would still be more people than ride the longer Shaker Rapid in Cleveland or the Baltimore subway. All the trains I rode had a respectable number of passengers. There were standees but also empty seats. It’s pretty clear that, even aside from ION, the Kitchener-Waterloo area (like some other college towns) has a pretty high level of transit use for a small North American urban area. Its bus system is reported to have 22,000,000 riders a year, around 60,000 a day. This augurs well for ION ridership. It may or may not be relevant that I had trouble paying my fare. The ticketing machine wouldn’t accept either my American credit card or a pristine Canadian five-dollar bill. Fortunately, I had coins. (The fare is 3.25 CAD.) Would the rider count be higher if it were easier to buy a ticket?

Inside an ION train.

In so far as the line works, it will be in part because Kitchener and Waterloo are somewhat distinctive places. North of “uptown” Waterloo, the large and well-regarded University of Waterloo is an obvious source of riders. And both cities have downtowns that looked to be fairly healthy for North American small-city CBDs.

An ION train in downtown Kitchener.

There were quite a few pedestrians on downtown streets when I was there, and there are several newish high-rise apartment buildings in central Kitchener as well as some new or newly renovated office buildings, including one older industrial building being used by Google. (The region has been quite successful in luring high-tech and electronic firms.)

Waiting for an ION train at Central Station, in an area that’s been tagged the “Innovation District.” Note the Google office building in the background.

The two CBDs are tiny, however, only a few blocks long. It’s hard to believe that there’s a congestion problem in either. And, for the moment, neither city has much in the way of population density. The residential areas around both cities’ downtowns consist mostly of very small older houses. Further out in both directions the line takes you quite quickly into low-density suburbia. The two termini are at suburban shopping malls. The corridor through which the line runs does not exactly seem like an obvious place for a rail line.

Kitchener Market station, south of downtown Kitchener. Note the small houses.

I’ve been struck, however, by the fact that the government’s arguments in favor of building the line stress its ability to reshape the region. The presence of ION is expected to encourage dense development, making automobiles unnecessary over a substantial area. There is talk of “reurbanization in the central transit corridor.” In addition, it’s argued that farmland will be saved if suburban development is curbed. Of course, the close relationship between rail transit and dense urban development and a decline in automobile use is not exactly a secret. The Toronto region as a whole (as I described in an earlier post) also has ambitious plans to use rail transit to make many of its suburbs denser and less car-centered. In the United States, officials often do not emphasize rail transit’s potential as a tool for densification for fear of causing a NIMBY reaction. Canada is (as in many other respects) different.

It will of course be many years before it’s known whether rail transit in a smallish urban area can actually bring about a reduction in automobile dependency. In the meantime, the residents of Kitchener and Waterloo have an impressive new light-rail line to ride on.

Like Japan’s other coastal urban areas, the Tokyo region is crossed by several large rivers, among which the most important are the Ara (Arakawa 荒川), the Edo (Edogawa 江戸川), and the Tone (Tonegawa 利根川) east of the city and the Tama (Tamagawa 多摩川) to the south. These rivers have been the source of Tokyo’s water since the city’s founding. They have also been responsible for numerous floods, some of which have caused tens of thousands of deaths and an enormous amount of property damage. Attempts to control the rivers go back many centuries. The Tone, the largest and once the most destructive of the rivers, flowed to the sea mostly through what is now the Edo River as late as the 17th century, when it was largely diverted to pass through less populated areas to the east. The Ara reached Tokyo Bay through what is now known as the Sumida River (Sumidagawa 隅田川) in central Tokyo until the early 20th century when it too was mostly diverted to a parallel riverbed in what is now eastern Tokyo. Since the late 19th century, all of the rivers have been dammed at numerous points upstream and acquired substantial levees or (in their most urban portions) concrete walls over much of their length. Parts of the lower Ara, Edo, and Tone now flow through mostly artificial channels created by bulldozers. Recent work has centered on making these channels at least look natural.¹

The rivers’ levees began to be used as informal footpaths long ago. Since the early 1980s, these paths have been transformed into formal recreational trails, as bicycling, running, and more or less serious walking have become as important in Japan as in the rest of the modern world.

A large swath of the Tokyo region highlighting pedestrian facilities and rail transit lines. “Pedestrian facilities” segments shorter than 30 m have been eliminated for space reasons; this mostly takes out short alleys and bridges over major streets. The classification of rail lines needs a bit of explanation. The distinction between subways and regular passenger rail lines in Tokyo is mostly a question of who runs the line. Many subway lines in Tokyo extend for some distance along suburban railroad tracks, and most rail lines operate at rapid-transit frequencies in central Tokyo. Note that the fully grade-separated Yurikamome and Rinkai lines, as well as the monorails in Tokyo, Tama, and Chiba, have been classed as subways even though they are not managed by either of Tokyo’s two subway companies. The map also shows northern routes on the Yokohama subway. GIS data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, all heavily edited. Edits include the excision of railroad yards, freight-only lines, and all but a single track on lines in the central city. It’s possible that some freight-only lines have been left near the map’s edges.

I have not been very successful in documenting this transformation process, perhaps because it’s always played second fiddle to the work of flood control. What’s clear is that building and improving the trails has been going on for forty and more years and that in many cases it’s been local jurisdictions that have been responsible for it. Because of the timeline and because the rivers all pass through numerous jurisdictions, the trails have not been constructed in a very consistent way. Some are wide, some narrow. Some are paved, some are not. Sometimes there are trails both on the levee and down on the floodplain, sometimes in just one of these places. In certain stretches, there are trails on both banks, elsewhere just on one. In many cases, carefully graded paths take users under bridges; in other cases, users have to cross roads or take stairs. Where there are wide floodplains, parks have often been established, and various amenities—baseball fields, tennis courts, benches, and bathrooms—have been added; sometimes, however, the trails are just about the only improved parts of the rivers’ rights-of-way.

View across the Edo River near Ichikawa, one of the places where the entire floodplain has been repurposed for recreational uses. Photo was made from a trail along one levee; a levee trail can be seen on the opposite bank, in the distance. Down below is a trail on the floodplain, as well as athletic fields. The trail on the floodplain continues under the bridges. It’s connected to the levee trail by graded pathways.

Narrow sections on the trails along the Tama River in Ota. The buildings in the background are in Kawasaki. The road on the right is at a lower level than the levee.

The trails also differ in the extent to which they’ve been “branded.” The trail along the Tama, for example, has much more consistent kilometer markings than the trails along the Edo and Tone. It’s also more likely than the other trails to have signs offering friendly warnings about certain obvious dangers, such as bicycle/pedestrian collisions (all these trails allow cyclists).

Sign along the Tama River trail.

Despite these differences, the trails have become usable over enormously long distances. The trail along the Ara is 68 km long, that along the Edo goes on for 60 km, and the one along the Tama is at least 50 km in length. (The much less urban Tone trail has stops and starts and would be harder to follow for a substantial length.) Of course, it’s not surprising that the world’s largest urban area should have some the world’s longest urban recreational paths, but Tokyo is not generally known for its recreational facilities, and the trails, which have become one of Tokyo’s most distinctive features, have not been widely publicized.

All of these trails get a fair amount of use, at least where they aren’t too far from settled areas. It was pouring the day I visited the Ara River trail, and there were still numerous runners and cyclists using it; there were even baseball players on the athletic fields.

Along the Ara River trail on a wet and windy day. Most users were staying on the path down on the floodplain. The levee path (right) was uncomfortably windy.

The river trails are chiefly recreational trails. The rivers the trails parallel are rarely natural routes for commuting or shopping. Tokyo is definitely a multi-nodal urban area, but most of its nodes are relatively close to the traditional city center. The most heavily traveled transport links in the Tokyo area tend to be focused on the center, and are usually perpendicular to the trails. Also, because of the flooding problem, the older towns that often became the commercial centers of what is now suburban Tokyo tended not to be close to the rivers, and the river paths naturally don’t take you to these places.² The fact that some of the “rivers” now flow in courses that are at some distance from their original bed often brings them even further from traditional settlements. No doubt a few commuters and shoppers do use the trails, but I suspect they’re not numerous. I didn’t see anyone carrying a shopping bag in the many kilometers I walked these trails in July. There does not seem to be any serious movement in Tokyo urging the building of a more complete network of trails that would include routes between the suburbs and central Tokyo. The recreational trails along rivers constitute a large proportion of Tokyo’s off-road pedestrian facilities.

The recreational corridors that include the trails are clearly quite different in character from most of Tokyo, where smallish houses and other structures typically occupy a very large proportion of available land. The corridors, in contrast, seem extraordinarily open, especially those along the man-made river channels, which can be a kilometer wide. It’s quite startling to see them from train windows, where the contrast between densely built-up city and brief episodes of openness seems particularly vivid. Because these areas are distinctive and attractive, numerous moderately expensive high-rise apartment buildings have been built along some of the corridors even though the neighborhoods in which they are located are not on the whole particularly fashionable places. Although Tokyo, like other Japanese cities, is generally less segregated by class than most Western cities, much of eastern Tokyo in particular is perceived as being rather blue-collar in character. Thanks to the recreational trails, many areas have undergone a modest amount of gentrification.

Apartment buildings along the Tama River trail, Ota.

The Sumida River which adjoins central Tokyo has also acquired a recreational path, but the path has a somewhat different history and character than those along the Ara, Edo, Tone, and Tama.

Pedestrian facilities and rail transit lines in central and part of eastern Tokyo. See notes on map above for information on data. In this map, even the shortest “pedestrian facilities” have been included.

Unlike most of the longer rivers, the Sumida (or anyway its lower half) is essentially a tidal inlet off Tokyo Bay. There is no floodplain for athletic fields along the lower Sumida, and there are no levees. There are concrete walls that serve the same purpose as levees, but of course these could not be transformed into paths in the way that the levees were. Also, because the lower Sumida runs through central Tokyo, its banks were much more likely to be lined with industries than the banks of the longer rivers, especially where the river flowed into the Bay, past more or less man-made islands. (The upper Sumida River—roughly, north of Shirahige Bridge—has levees, and the path along the Sumida here seems to have roots very much like those of the longer rivers; it’s in part a byproduct of flood control measures.)

Unlike the paths along the longer rivers, the path along the lower Sumida had to be designed as a pedestrian path, and it only came into being in the early 21st century. Building it wasn’t particularly easy, since, in most cases, substantial landfill along the river was required, and also, because some of the bridges across the river were not very high, tunnels below the high tide mark had to be dug. Also, a decision was made to do some serious landscaping along much of the Sumida Terrace; this must have complicated its construction. This construction in fact is still underway, and some gaps in the path remain, but alternate routes are pretty clearly marked.

The path along the Sumida also differs from the longer trails in that it’s been given a formal name: it’s the Sumida River Terrace (Sumidagawa terasu 隅田川テラス). In addition, it’s acquired much more consistent signage than the longer trails as well as a carefully designed series of maps that are posted every hundred meters or so.

One of the many maps along the Sumida River Terrace.

The Sumida River Terrace (or at least its southern portion) differs from the longer trails in one more way: It does not permit cyclists. It also has many more benches. You certainly see runners there, but the Sumida River Terrace wasn’t really set up to be an athletic facility; it was designed to be a place for relaxing and for enjoying the urban landscape.

I can’t prove it, but I suspect that urban rivalry was a factor in the Sumida River Terrace’s construction. The people who govern Tokyo are well aware that it’s in competition with places like New York, London, and perhaps Shanghai for “world-city” status and most certainly became familiar with thriving urban features like Hudson River Park, the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, and the pedestrian paths along the Thames and the Huangpu Rivers, which made Tokyo’s once run-down and hard-to-access waterfront seem something of an embarrassment. The Sumida River Terrace is intended to be “globalized” Tokyo’s elegant inner-city waterfront walkway.

The Sumida River Terrace appears to be a success, at least on weekends and late afternoons, when there are numerous users (including many more foreigners than on the longer, further-out trails). It’s certainly contributed to the slow gentrification of the neighborhoods along its banks, which, traditionally, were rather working-class.

The Sumida River Terrace on a busy weekend.

The place can be rather empty at other times, however, when the homeless people who live on some parts of the Terrace become a major proportion of its users, especially on the East Bank, where there are some permanent-looking encampments. Another issue is that much of the East Bank and a small part of the West Bank of the Sumida are shadowed by a noisy expressway. The expressway does provide some shelter from sun and rain, but this makes it all the more attractive to the homeless.

The Sumida River Terrace, and the longer paths along the Ara, Edo, Tone, and Tama Rivers (and several shorter paths along waterways elsewhere in the urban area) nonetheless do constitute a relatively new and generally appreciated feature of Tokyo’s urban landscape. Like their counterparts in North American, European, and a small number of Asian cities, these paths are intended to be a kind of haven from the automobile- and transit-dominated city surrounding them, a place where long-distance movement on foot and (in most cases) by bicycle is convenient and pleasant. Of course, like other recreational paths in cities all over the modern world, these paths are so completely separated from roads for automobiles and so oriented to recreational use that they do not really challenge automobile hegemony either.

Anyone who likes cities to be lively and full of people at all hours would appreciate cities in Japan.¹ There are large numbers of pedestrians and cyclists not only in the central business districts but also in many of the residential zones of most big Japanese cities. It’s not hard to explain this. The large role of public transit in urban mobility guarantees that there will be numerous pedestrians and cyclists moving to and from transit stops.² In addition, the absence of free parking in Japanese cities encourages even car owners to do everyday tasks on foot or by bicycle. Radically mixed land uses in dense outer-city nodes also demand movement on foot. And it’s pretty clear that recreational walking is common in Japan.

I wouldn’t say though that conditions for pedestrians and cyclists are perfect in Japan. Narrow streets often have at most a white stripe to separate pedestrians from traffic. There are sidewalks along major streets, but, thanks to the near absence of curbside parking, one is often in close proximity to fast traffic. Even more important, sidewalks are often crowded, and there are frequently cyclists to contend with, who have a choice nearly everywhere of using streets or sidewalks. Some streets have sharrows or blue arrows for cyclists, but most don’t. And, while some sidewalks have bicycle lanes, the majority lack them, and many cyclists and pedestrians pay absolutely no attention even to the most clearly marked lane separation. Motor vehicle drivers, on the other hand, defer to pedestrians and cyclists as much as any drivers in the world. The expectation in return, however, is that pedestrians and cyclists will obey traffic lights, which, as elsewhere in Asia, can take a long time to change.

Walking and cycling in Japanese cities, in other words, are pretty safe and always interesting but also at times inefficient and a little annoying.

More or less ordinary landscape in central Kyoto.

Japanese cities do have plenty of pedestrianized streets. They tend to be either crowded commercial streets

Teramachi Street, one of several covered commercial streets in Kyoto. Bicycles are forbidden here.

or else streets that are so narrow a car wouldn’t fit. They will never take you very far.

Pedestrian path along canal, Inari, Kyoto, Japan.

In other words, most walking and cycling in Japanese cities must take place along regular urban streets.

One factor here is that Japanese cities have relatively few of the kinds of long-distance urban pedestrian facilities that many North American cities have developed over the last few decades, and those that exist rarely pass close to big-city central business districts. The same thing is true in European cities of course, where, just as in Japan, existing dense urbanization makes the creation of such facilities extremely difficult.

There are exceptions to this generalization, however.

One of them is in Kyoto, where, as in many Japanese cities, the city is bisected by rivers, in this case the Kamo River (Kamogawa 鴨川) on the east and the Katsura River (Katsuragawa 桂川) on the west. In their natural state, both rivers sometimes flooded after heavy rains or periods of substantial snow melt, and so both rivers have been subjected to elaborate flood-prevention controls. There are dams upstream and retaining walls or levees in the city, where parts of their floodplains have been parkland for a long time. These parks acquired paths many decades ago, and, in recent years, there have been systematic improvements, which are scheduled to continue.³

The Kamo River paths struck me as being especially impressive and pleasant. There are now paths on both banks for most (but not all) the length of the river, between northern Kyoto and the junction of the Kamo and Katsura, a distance of a little more than 17 km.

Map of Kyoto and vicinity showing pedestrian facilities and rail transit lines. The lines along the rather narrow Kamo River in central Kyoto may be confusing. There are walking/running/bicycle paths on both banks. Just to the east, the private Keihan Railway has an underground line. GIS data mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, heavily edited.

The route of the Kamo River path takes you through quite a variety of neighborhoods. Roughly in the path’s middle, it passes next to Kyoto’s CBD on the west bank and several somewhat traditional neighborhoods (like Gion) on the east bank.

Kamo River path, just north of the Japan Rail tracks, and just south of Kyoto’s central business district. At this point the Kamo River flows in a man-made trench, with substantial retaining walls on both sides.

In the north. it takes users through relatively low-density sections of the city, and there are parks that have room for soccer fields and tennis courts—and benches for sitting.

Kamo River path, north of central Kyoto.

In the south. it runs through working-class districts under freeway and railroad bridges that seem a long way from tourist Kyoto.

Maintenance work along the Kamo River path, south of central Kyoto, in a spot where there are two paths, one down by the river and one on a levee. Note the highway bridges. The path is maintained both by prefecture employees and by volunteers.

Over the last few years, government entities have provided the Kamo River path with the kinds of amenities that can be found in urban recreational trails all over the world. There are numerous entrances and exits; occasional bathrooms; distance markers; and a few small art exhibits. Approximately half the path is paved; the rest is hard dirt.

Marker showing distance to Katsura River junction.

The Kamo River path is used by fairly large numbers of walkers, runners, and cyclists in all seasons, although it rarely seems really crowded. While there are definitely commuters on this path, it seems busiest on pleasant afternoons and on weekends. In other words, while it serves as both a commuting route and a recreational trail, the latter use appears primary.

The Katsura River path in western Kyoto is rougher and requires some bank switches and generally runs through less dense parts of the city. As a result, it attracts fewer users. But it’s much longer than the Kamo River path and extends outside the city in both directions. In fact, it will take you via the Yodo and Kizu Rivers as far as Nara, 35 km away, or else to Osaka, approximately 50 km away. These longer-distance trails tend to run along levees and were probably created originally to facilitate levee-construction. Because the areas along the trails were historically subject to flooding, they are often the location of industries and tend to have low population densities. There are few of the urban features (or amenities) that one finds on the Kamo River path. As a result, while the longer-distance trails are wonderful facilities for people who want to go for 100-km (or longer) bicycle rides, they are perhaps somewhat less useful for commuting or for casual walking.

Nonetheless, in Kansai area (which includes Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe), there is at least the beginning of the kind of off-road pedestrian/cycling network that can be found in a few North American cities. In Kyoto itself, the Kamo River section of the regional network runs right next to the central business district and provides a genuinely useful alternative to busy city streets and a recreational facility that appears to be widely appreciated.

In the 1980s I wrote a paper on the then-mostly-new recreational trails that had come into being in many North American cities. In most places, these trails were quite fragmentary. They were built where it was easy to build them, mostly along watercourses or (less often) in railroad or power-line rights-of-way or (even less often) along new highways or rail transit lines, and, in most cases, the different trails didn’t connect nicely with each other. Only in a very few places did these recreational trails form enough of a network to permit traversing the whole urban area on them, notably in Washington, Ottawa, Denver, and Calgary. In the case of Washington and Ottawa, federal ownership of a huge amount of streambank land–as well as two convenient canals with disused towpaths—helped account for the abundant trails. In Denver and Calgary, land along streams coming off the Rockies with highly irregular flow had been set aside as parkland early in the history of urban development, and this parkland could be utilized for linear trails fairly easily. In the original manuscript, I argued that the recreational trails constituted a distinctively new kind of urban infrastructure (although there were certainly precedents for them—Robert Moses, for example, built bicycle trails along some parkways in the 1930s and 1940s, and there was certainly plenty of infrastructure built for bicycles during the late-19th-century bicycle boom).

No one wanted to publish the paper, and, of course, there was no internet to send it to. I’d still stand by the basic thesis. The recreational trails (often labeled bicycle trails) that were being built in many places from the 1970s on really were in many ways a new and distinctive kind of infrastructure, and they’ve remained so as they’ve grown not just in North America but in urban areas all over the world.

It’s still true that recreational trails make up coherent networks only in a few urban areas, in North America generally the same urban areas where this was the case in the 1980s. Elsewhere, there are usually major gaps. This doesn’t matter in the way that it would, for example, for rail lines. There are usually ways for pedestrians, runners, and cyclists to move around even without formal recreational paths. But the alternate routes are often slow and inconvenient and can even be somewhat dangerous.

I was in Boston last September for the first time in nearly three decades. I’d lived in Cambridge in academic year 1966-1967 and had found myself in Boston frequently between 1976 and 1978. I had last been in Boston in (I think) 1989. I have tried to keep up with urban developments there, but that’s not the same thing as seeing for oneself. As always, I was particularly anxious to look for changes in non-automotive transportation.

Map of Boston and vicinity showing pedestrian facilities and rail transit lines. GIS data mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, heavily edited.

Boston is perhaps best-known among urbanists for the “Big Dig,” the replacement of an elevated portion of the Massachusetts Turnpike by a fantastically expensive tunnel, but starting in the 1960s several completely unrelated steps were taken to improve the area’s non-automotive transportation system, mostly under the aegis of the MBTA, a state agency. For example, the MBTA revived a complex system of suburban railroad lines that were on the verge of disappearing when I lived in Boston in 1966-1967. It took several decades of development, but these lines now attract approximately as many passengers every day as Philadelphia’s “commuter” rail system; in North America, only New York, Chicago, and Toronto have more riders on their suburban train systems. The MBTA also extended the Red Line subway in two directions between 1971 and 1985; it placed the Green Line near North Station underground in 2005; and it replaced the Orange Line’s elevated portions with tracks along the Boston and Main Railroad (in the north) and the main Amtrak line (in the south) between 1975 and 1987.¹ It also built the Silver Line BRT lines, whose only really fast portion is an impressive tunnel from South Station south through the transformed South Boston Seaport area. Boston has certainly improved its “rapid transit” lines more between the 1970s and recent years than its East Coast competitors, New York and Philadelphia.

Boston’s recreational-trail network has seen much more modest improvements. Boston has a real problem. Its main central-city recreational trails run along the Charles River. This means that they do come close to the central business district as well as to Harvard University and MIT (although the route from Harvard is circuitous). The catch is that major highways run along the Charles too, Storrow Drive and its continuation, Soldiers Field Road, on the southern (Boston) side of the Charles and Memorial Drive on the northern (Cambridge) side. These roads, which go back to the years before the automobile came along, all started as modest parkways. They were designed for slow pleasure travel. But, because they served downtown and other important destinations, they became filled with cars as early as the 1920s. The city and state governments did a considerable amount of work to improve these roads in the 1950s. Storrow Drive acquired formal exits and entrances and became a freeway in all but name, although trucks stayed banned. (Lake Shore Drive in Chicago has a similar history.) Storrow and Memorial Drive and Soldier Field Road carry truly massive amounts of traffic in rush hour, and this affects the environmental quality of the recreational paths, which are generally right next to the roads. Only along the Esplanade (which abuts Back Bay) is there an alternate trail that’s somewhat removed from the highway. Although the recreational paths along the Charles attract numerous users, many people find them painful to be on and avoid them. I was doing a fair amount of running during the period in the 1970s when I was visiting Boston frequently and ended up deciding it was more pleasant and satisfying to run 3.6 km loops around Fresh Pond (in western Cambridge) than spend time running along busy Memorial Drive. I wasn’t alone.

The recreational path along Storrow Drive runs right next to an often very busy traffic lane.

Over the last couple of decades, Boston has definitely become one of the winners of the digital age. Gentrification in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville is widespread, and, of course, there have been tens of thousands of college students in the area for a century. The students and many of the people who have moved to Boston over, say, the last twenty years are likely to use recreational paths on a large scale, and governments in the Boston area have taken some modest steps to improve these facilities. They’ve repaved and widened the paths along the Charles and extended the Memorial Drive path into Charlestown. Memorial Drive is now closed to cars on Sundays, but, despite considerable pressure to extend closing hours, that’s the only step that’s been taken to reduce traffic. Boston’s prosperity may actually be helping to make traffic worse. The trails along the Charles are still Boston’s main recreational trails, and they haven’t changed substantially since the 1970s. They can still be plausibly seen as little more than sidewalks along very busy highways.

Boston has built some new trails, although, all things considered, they’re fairly modest.

The Southwest Corridor (late 1980s) is perhaps the most distinctive. This corridor, extending several kilometers southwest from downtown, was originally supposed to be used for a freeway. But, after the land was cleared, it became obvious that there was so much opposition to building a highway that the corridor was used instead for an improved Amtrak line, the new Orange Line, and a linear park. The neighborhoods through which the Southwest Corridor runs were (and to some extent still are) generally poor and needed the parkland desperately. The Corridor is usable as a recreational trail, but the fact that most cross streets have been left in place makes it a bit frustrating for runners and cyclists. Still, it is a new recreational path in a part of the city that didn’t have one.

The Southwest Corridor, Back Bay/South End. Further southwest, this corridor runs through much more modest neighborhoods.

More recently, in conjunction with the transformation of Boston’s old close-to-downtown port into an upscale residential space, there has come into being a kind of de facto recreational trail along the edge of Boston Harbor, from North Station (where it connects with the recreational trail along Storrow Drive), along the edge of the North End, down through “South Boston Seaport,” and (with some gaps) around South Boston and by the Kennedy Library. Much of this trail just follows sidewalks (and so it’s barely indicated on the accompanying map), but it’s marked with “Harborwalk” signs, and, in the North End, there’s an impressive protected bicycle path (which was being used by more runners than cyclists when I was there).

The protected bicycle path that runs around the edge of Boston’s North End. It appears to be used by runners and even walking pedestrians as much as by cyclists.

The Harborwalk in the South Boston Seaport. This area has arguably changed more over the last fifty years than any other part of Boston. The path can be so crowded that fast walking or running become impossible.

There are also several additional mostly suburban trails, for example, the 16-km-long Minuteman Bikeway in Lexington, Arlington, and Cambridge (1992 or so); the 5-km East Boston Greenway (2007); several bits and pieces of trail along the Mystic River; and a few other short segments as well.

Despite the existence of these new trails, it can’t really be said that Boston has acquired what anyone would call a network of recreational trails. It’s not very clear that it easily could. The area’s geography just doesn’t provide the kinds of lengthy, connected corridors that could be used for such trails, except along the Charles, where the existing trails are imperfect.

Boston is, of course, like most North American cities in this regard. Although it’s possible to fantasize about elevated bicycle and pedestrian routes, such facilities would be expensive to build, cast shadows, and perhaps be all too easy to throw things from. As a result, just about all recreational trails are built in pre-existing corridors. When such corridors are scarce or short or scattered, recreational trails along them are going to be fragmentary, and, where those corridors are used for major highways, trails that follow them are going to be marred by highway noise and pollution. This is true even in an urban area like Boston whose inhabitants would appear to be particularly inclined to support such facilities.

One of the “Marseille change” signs that can be seen all over the city, this one at the Cinq Avenues tram stop. “Marseille change” is best translated “Marseille is changing.” These signs all have the same text but include different images. All the images focus on some aspect of urban life that does not involve automobiles.

Many—and probably most—French cities have engaged in large-scale urban renewal projects over the last thirty years or so.¹ Obsolete industrial and port facilities have been replaced by offices and housing. Research centers, museums, and concert halls have been squeezed into underused spaces. Housing projects (HLMs) have either been torn down or else altered substantially with a view to creating neighborhoods characterized by mixité—the mixing of people of all social classes, which has become the holy grail of much French comment on urbanism. There has also been at least a modest pushback against the hegemony of the automobile. Numerous streets in city centers have been pedestrianized. Bicycle lanes or paths have been constructed. Tram lines have been built in just about all cities above a certain size class, and rail rapid-transit lines have been extended in the cities that have them.

Marseille has done as much urban renewal work as any city in France, and I spent a week there at the end of April, making a special point of looking closely at Marseille’s renewal efforts. I’d been in the city numerous times over the years but had never stayed there for more than a couple of days.

It’s important to say that Marseille for many years has been something of an outlier among major French cities. None of Marseille’s peer cities has had as many poor, ethically non-French people living in such strikingly dilapidated housing close to the city center. There has been some gentrification but on a relatively small scale. A factor here was that the city consistently lost population—and jobs—between the 1970s and 2000, as its industries and port declined.² One result of this is that there hasn’t been the same demand among well-off people for inner-city housing that there has been elsewhere. Marseille had acquired a fearsome reputation by the early 21st century, comparable in some ways to the reputation of some rust-belt cities in the United States. It was seen by many as a dangerous place. Tourists avoided it.

Marseille’s massive redevelopment efforts over the last two or three decades have been heavily colored by a desire to improve its image.

Much of Marseille’s urban renewal work has been similar to that in other French cities. It’s focused in part on transportation. Marseille’s built tram lines, for example, and extended its subway. It’s also set up both bike-share and dockless-scooter systems.

Map of much of Marseille, showing rail transit lines and pedestrian facilities. “U/C” = “under construction.” GIS data mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, heavily edited.

Tram lines 2 and 3 along the Cours Belsunce. Automobiles are not allowed on this major street.

Marseille has also done a great deal of work to improve the pedestrian environment of the central city. It’s built a substantial walkway that circles the old port. Inland, many small streets have been completely closed to motor vehicles. There are also some weekend street closings. Parts of the Canebière, perhaps Marseille’s most famous street, become an open-air market on Sundays.

The Canebière on Sunday afternoon.

There has also been some transportation-related urban renewal work outside the central city, but it’s generally been smaller in scale. One new subway extension is under construction; a couple of tram lines have been extended; and protected bus lanes have been built along the Prado and elsewhere.

There has only been a modest amount of pedestrianization work outside the central city, perhaps because less was needed. Marseille, like most older European cities, is for the most part a comfortable place for pedestrians. It has a pleasantly complicated urban environment; reasonable sidewalks; and drivers who are generally willing to cede to people on foot. The city has added some bicycle lanes in recent years, mostly however just defined by lines painted on sidewalks. The boundaries between space set aside for cyclists and space set aside for pedestrians do not seem to be respected very assiduously by anyone.

Painted bicycle lane on the sidewalk on an island between the main part of Boulevard Michelet and a separate side road. Note the protected bus lane. This is the part of the city that contains Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation, which has been joined by several other apartment towers designed to be surrounded by parks but now mostly surrounded by surface parking lots. 

The most impressively improved pedestrian facility in Marseille may be the set of paths along the Corniche Kennedy. Marseille’s Corniche (which acquired the name Kennedy in 1963) is a road winding along the cliffs above the Mediterranean between the old port and the Prado area approximately 5 km south. It’s been around since the 19th century. The wonderful views from this area caused many well-off people to move in even during an era when it must have been difficult to get there. When automobiles came along, the area filled in quickly, and the Corniche became a crowded two-lane highway. When cycling and running became popular in the 1980s, the sidewalk along the highway attracted numerous cyclists and runners. There are no major parks in central Marseille, and the Corniche is one of the few places where it’s possible to bicycle or run for several kilometers without encountering cross-traffic. The views are an added bonus. It took years of nagging, but Marseille’s government has finally responded to the demands of cyclists and pedestrians and begun widening parts of the Corniche sidewalk. In places, there are now three separate parallel paths along the highway: a protected bicycle lane right next to the road; a raised running path next to that; and a pedestrian right-of-way at the cliff edge which includes what is claimed to be the world’s longest bench.³ It’s a really impressive facility despite the proximity of road traffic, although when I was there part of it was closed for repair. Apparently, the supports that hold the paths to the cliff were beginning to fail.

The three parallel paths along the Corniche Kennedy, at the point where they are interrupted for construction work. The Mediterranean is just out of sight to the left, many dozens of meters lower.

In one important respect, Marseille has outdone other French cities in its renewal work. Much of its effort has been put into a new quarter, Euroméditerranée (or just Euromed in everyday French). Euroméditerranée is a substantial zone of 480 hectares that’s said to be the largest urban renewal project in southern Europe. It’s been replacing what is in part an older port and warehousing area lying along the Mediterranean coast just north of its CBD around the Vieux Port. Work on the southern half of the area started as long ago as 1995 but took some time to get going. In the last ten years, however, the extreme southwestern portions of Euroméditerranée have been almost completely rebuilt. (Marseille’s selection as one of the 2013 “capitals of European culture” was apparently a real impetus to move its urban-renewal work forward.) The zone incorporated in Euroméditerranée was extended north into partly residential areas in 2007, but the northern areas have not yet seen as much activity as Euroméditerranée’s southern half. It’s relevant that it’s in northern Marseille where a disproportionate number of its poor inhabitants live.

Map of the southern half of Euroméditerranée and vicinity. Sources of GIS data as in earlier map.

Overview of part of central Marseille looking north from the Marseille’s highest point, the Basilique Notre-Dame de la Garde, a point just below the bottom center of the map above. Euroméditerranée’s most altered area stretches from Fort Saint-Jean, in front of the Ferris wheel at the left center and now part of MUCEM, to the two skyscrapers at the photo’s right center, which were designed (left to right) by Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel.

Marseille’s choice of a name for this quarter and at least some of what it’s aimed to do with it have involved an attempt to capitalize on what it claims to be one of its special characteristics. Marseille’s a port city with long-term intimate contacts throughout the Mediterranean Basin, including the non-European parts of the Mediterranean area. It’s hardly the only city of which this can be said, but there is at least some basis for the argument that Marseille has particularly rich historical links to many parts of the Mediterranean. The city was founded by Phocaeans, Greeks from what is now Turkey, and much of its current population has roots in North Africa. Tens of thousands of the French who had to leave Algeria in 1963 (the so-called pieds noirs) settled in Marseille, and something like a quarter of the Marseille region’s population is ethnically North African, consisting either of relatively recent immigrants or of their descendants. (There are also large numbers of people with roots in sub-Saharan Africa, the Comoros Islands, and Italy.) Marseille’s North and sub-Saharan African connections are of course not always seen by people elsewhere in France as a good thing, so Marseille’s emphasis on its Mediterranean roots could be viewed as including an element of bravado, but the chief point is that there may be something genuine about this. In its branding efforts, Marseille (unlike some cities) is not pretending to be something that it definitely isn’t.

From a tourist point of view, Euroméditerranée’s key feature may be the new MUCEM (sometimes MuCEM), the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, which is located at the entrance to the harbor at the extreme south end of the Euroméditerranée site. MUCEM’s focus on Mediterranean civilization jibes perfectly with Marseille’s emphasis on its Mediterranean roots in its branding work. MUCEM does indeed have a permanent exhibit on Mediterranean rural culture, rooted in great measure in the work of Fernand Braudel. It’s a nice exhibit but reveals the fact that the museum does not have a very distinguished permanent collection. What it does have is an impressive building by Rudy Ricciotti, which is connected to and incorporates the partly medieval Fort Saint-Jean, which stands at the entrance to the harbor and from which there are remarkable views. MUCEM has been attracting substantial crowds despite the €9.50 admission price and has been a key factor in improving Marseille’s image.

Most of central Euroméditerranée is considerably less tourist-oriented and less connected to the district’s branding than the MUCEM area. Much of it was designed to deal with the fact that Marseille had a shortage of office space suitable for banks and insurance companies, whose decision-makers have perhaps felt a bit skittish about setting up shop in the ethnically complicated central business district around the Vieux Port. Much of central Euroméditerranée has been given over to new offices. There are two starchitect-designed skyscrapers, the CMA-CGM Tower by Zaha Hadid and La Marseillaise by Jean Nouvel. There are also quite a number of smaller (and rather bland!) seven-to-ten story office buildings.

Newish (2014) tram line running through a part of Euroméditerranée largely used for medium-sized office buildings.

In addition, the largest old warehouse in the district has been preserved and has reopened as Les Docks, whose upper floors are devoted to offices, while its lower floors have acquired restaurants.

Les Docks, Marseille, an enormous warehouse converted into an office building with numerous restaurants on the ground floor.

These are also several hotels and entertainment venues as well as a big shopping center, Les Terraces du Port, which includes a nice terrace overlooking a part of the outer harbor (which, however, is no longer a particularly active section of the port).

There are apartment buildings as well, but most of these—both new and renovated—are on the edge of Euroméditerranée. The fact that Marseille has not emphasized residential buildings in Euroméditerranée probably reflects the fact that there has been only a modest market for housing in a quarter whose edges can still feel a bit grotty. But this is changing. Many new residences are planned, some of which will push Euroméditerranée into the difficult quartiers nord. Among these is a big project, Smartseille, whose status as an “ecocity” is particularly emphasized on the Euroméditerranée Website.

Transportation changes as always have accompanied renewal work. One of Marseille’s tram lines was extended in 2010 to serve central Euroméditerranée (see photo above). An elevated freeway was (a bit oddly) replaced in part by a surface boulevard and in part by an elevated one-way freeway paired with a tunnel for traffic moving in the other direction. The OpenStreetMap database shows Euroméditerranée teeming with pedestrian facilities, but, in fact, all that have been built are wide sidewalks, sometimes with a little used bicycle lane painted down the center.

Bicycling/pedestrian path along the edge of Euroméditerranée. The tall building in the background center is Jean Nouvel’s La Marseillaise office building. The building in front of it is the Silo d’Arenc, a concert hall created from grain silos. 

There are certainly people at all hours of the day and evening in central Euroméditerranée, but I wouldn’t describe it as being particularly crowded, especially in comparison with the area around the Vieux Port. Still, there is no doubt that Euroméditerranée has made a big chunk of northern Marseille a respectable area. It really is in some ways functioning like the modern (if blander) extension of Marseille’s central business district that it was intended to be. This is no small accomplishment.

It has also almost surely been one reason for the gentrification of Le Panier, a medieval quarter on a hill overlooking MUCEM. Twenty years ago, this was one of Marseille’s dilapidated inner-city quarters of poor people. Today, tourists are more common than actual residents. Cynics would be tempted to claim that Le Panier’s chief economic functions these days are serving “authentic” bouillabaisse and selling expensive souvenirs.

I had the impression that, perhaps in part because of the work in nearby Euroméditerranée, the traditional CBD around the Vieux Port is also more crowded and prosperous-seeming than it was a few years ago, even though it remains a more ethnically complicated place than the CBD of most big Western European cities.

Marseille has definitely not succeeded in reworking itself in the distinctive way that, say, Lyon has. Marseille’s inner-city neighborhoods still have many more poor residents than comparable areas in Lyon (and most other French cities). Furthermore, Marseille’s Euroméditerranée does not have the quirky architecture and substantial housing component of Lyon’s otherwise roughly comparable Confluence; a lot of Euroméditerranée just seems to have been built to project an image of normalcy. And there is nothing in Marseille comparable in scale to the pedestrian facilities along the Rhône and Saone either.

But Marseille has made a pretty serious attempt to get beyond its indifferent reputation in part by capitalizing on what is arguably a genuine and significant part of its heritage: its long role as a port city and its historical connection with other parts of the Mediterranean. Marseille’s Office du Tourisme offers some statistics that seem to demonstrate that it’s succeeded. Perhaps Marseille really has become a bit less of an outlier among French cities.

I spent a week in Buenos Aires last month. This was my fourth (and longest) trip to the city. I had been there previously in 1986, 2002, and 2015. In the course of my recent trip, I tried to learn everything I could about the self-conscious efforts that have been made in recent years to improve conditions for pedestrians and transit users in the city.

A little background is (as always) in order.¹

Buenos Aires was a poor and tiny place until late in the 19th century. Much of what is now Argentina was not controlled by the state until well into the century, and the city’s small hinterland contained no silver and was too far south to grow sugar.

Things changed radically in the last two decades of the 19th century when Argentina became a major exporter of wheat and beef (the latter required refrigeration that wasn’t available until the 1880s). By the time of World War I, Argentina had become one of the world’s richest countries, and it attracted immigrants (mostly from Italy and Spain) on a very large scale. The Buenos Aires urban area was, by one count, the world’s 12th largest in 1914, with a population of 1,630,000. In 1925, with 2,410,000 people, it ranked 8th, and it continued to grow rapidly through the 1920s and beyond.²

The fact that Buenos Aires became so big before World War I meant that its early growth took place before the era when the automobile could have a significant effect on urban morphology. Thus, as is true of the other big cities of its era, its core was built up to an extremely high level of density, and its most prosperous inhabitants worked out ways to live comfortably despite the crowding. That core is still there. It could be said to include most of the area now encompassed by the autonomous city of Buenos Aires (roughly the area served by the Subte [subway] on the accompanying maps, below), but the densest and most distinctive parts of the city are the areas within four or five kilometers of the city center, and especially the northern, more prosperous half of this zone. These were the areas that filled in during Buenos Aires’ late 19th-/early 20th-century decades of great prosperity. This is the part of Buenos Aires that gave rise to its being called the “Paris of South America.” Both public buildings and the housing of the well-to-do were built in an elaborate late 19th-century style well into the 20th century. Many of these buildings remain, and they give central Buenos Aires and neighborhoods like Retiro, Recoleta (Barrio Norte), and Palermo a distinctive architectural character different than that of any other place on earth. South and west of these central neighborhoods are middle-class quarters like Abasto and Belgrano where the older buildings are less opulent but otherwise not so different from those in the core wealthy neighborhoods. The southern parts of the city of Buenos Aires are with certain exceptions where poorer people live. These areas too mostly filled in at high density early in the 20th century. The older buildings in these neighborhoods were (as one might expect) plainer and less distinctive than those in the northern quarters.

Regional map showing most of the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. Includes two suburban railroad lines that are currently closed for renovation. GIS data mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, heavily edited.

Map showing most of the city of Buenos Aires (the Distrito Federal). The coverage and sources are the same as on the previous map. Sources of GIS data as in previous map.

It could be said that in some ways daily life in the central and northern neighborhoods of Buenos Aires hasn’t changed enormously for the last century or so. Housing in these areas varies greatly, but it consists mostly of apartment buildings, both old

Palacio Estrugamou (1929), a luxury apartment building in Retiro. Photograph taken 2015.

and new.

Newish apartment buildings near the intersection of Avenida Santa Fe and Avenida Pueyrredón, Recoleta. Photograph taken 2015.

Walking is still clearly a major mode of transport for many journeys in these areas. Neighborhood sidewalks are crowded.

Sidewalk along Avenida Santa Fe, Recoleta.

They are lined with small stores as well as restaurants and cafés.

Café at the corner of Avenida Santa Fe and Avenida Coronel Díaz, Recoleta.

There are also numerous sidewalk kiosks where newspapers, flowers, and many other things are sold.

Kiosco (newsstand) on Avenida Corrientes.

A certain number of shopping centers have been added to the mix in recent years. So far they seem to have strengthened neighborhood commerce.

The Abasto de Buenos Aires, a shopping mall created from an old wholesale market in a middle-class neighborhood also called Abasto.

Many of the inhabitants of these areas are in the habit of taking the subway or riding the bus.

Subte passengers.

A substantial percentage even of prosperous households are carfree.³ And, if only because the area is busy and safe, it’s a magnet for people not only from the entire metropolitan area but from all over the world. Its inhabitants, as a result, have long since become accustomed to being in a place with people of many cultures and ethnicities.

Daily life in the central and northern parts of the city of Buenos Aires, in other words, resembles daily life in the other places in the world where well-off or middle-class people have been living at a high density over several square kilometers close to the CBD for many years, for example, in much of Manhattan; in most of central Paris and the analogous parts of many other large European cities; along the northern edge of Hong Kong Island; and possibly in a few areas in Tokyo. This really can’t be said of anywhere else in Latin America.

Argentina gradually lost its status as one of the world’s wealthiest countries after World War I. There were many reasons for Argentina’s much-commented-on decline. One factor was that the export of wheat and beef ceased to be the basis for great wealth. But poor government, corruption, and Argentina’s location on the periphery of the world trading system have also been proposed as reasons for Argentina’s problems.

Argentina, with a GNI per capita (PPP) of something like $20,250 (2017), remains a solidly middle-income country, and its middle-class and wealthy residents still live reasonably comfortable lives. Its poorer residents don’t, however. Income inequality is substantial,⁴ and what has been described as the “Latin Americanization” of Buenos Aires has been one of the major changes of the last few decades. Buenos Aires now has numerous squatter settlements, mostly away from its center, and there is a crime problem that it’s claimed simply didn’t exist in earlier times.

Over the last thirty or forty years, Buenos Aires has also suffered from the environmental problems that come with increasing automobile ownership. Despite a great deal of freeway construction, there are traffic jams on quite an impressive scale, and inner-city air quality can be poor. Higher automobile use also undermined Buenos Aires’ pretty good public transportation system, which includes Latin America’s oldest subway system, the Subte (whose first line opened in 1913), and what appears to be the most heavily patronized suburban railway network in the Western Hemisphere (its 800 km of tracks put it second in trackage length only to New York’s three systems). Both the Subte and the suburban rail network became pretty run-down by the 1990s.

Argentina could have allowed the automobile to continue to do its dirty work and ended up with a capital city whose central neighborhoods were just as depressed and decrepit as city centers in the rest of Latin America, but it didn’t.⁵ Over approximately the last thirty years, a series of generally unrelated and uncoordinated government actions have aimed to improve conditions for pedestrians and transit users in central Buenos Aires. While causation would be difficult to prove, these actions appear to have helped halt the decline, and many aspects of the traditional way of life of central Buenos Aires have been preserved.

[1] The rail lines were fixed up. Like many of the world’s cities, Buenos Aires has made an effort over the last two or three decades to revive its urban rail system. A few short subway extensions in the 1980s (including the “Premetro,” a light-rail line in the southwest) were the first steps in this process, which picked up in the 1990s. Operation of the Subte was turned over to private enterprise in 1994, and the new corporate managers renovated the stations and presided over the introduction of new rolling stock. Since then one new line (the north-south H Line) has been built, a short extension of the E line should open this year, and there are plans for further additions. The Subte these days appears to be doing pretty well. There are nearly a million passengers a day on weekdays (some sources say more than a million). The stations look great, and trains run frequently.

The Lima station on Linea A, the oldest of Buenos Aires’ Subte lines. The signage, the TV monitors, the yellow “don’t stand here” areas along the tracks, and the air-conditioned trains have all been added over the last quarter century.

Buenos Aires is unusual in that its suburban rail lines carry more passengers than its subway. The Subte only serves the autonomous city of Buenos Aires, which has less than 20% of the urban area’s population and occupies something like 5% of its land area. The suburban rail lines cover an enormously larger area, and some of the lines run trains nearly as frequently as many of the world’s subway systems, every few minutes during rush hour and every fifteen minutes at midday and in the evening. The lines were all built by private enterprise and, as a result, are not all of the same gauge and use different propulsion systems. Furthermore, none of them quite reaches the central city; only one of the six termini is within easy walking distance of the Microcentro. There have been numerous attempts over the years to make the lines more useful. They were nationalized under the Perón government in 1948, but, in the ensuing decades, no government was willing to invest enough to maintain them. Thus, as was the case with the Subte, operation of the suburban rail lines was privatized in the 1990s. Many received new rolling stock as a result. In recent years, most of the rail lines have been renationalized and put under the control of parastatal firms. This time, the result has been a great deal of serious renovation. The impressive downtown termini have all been fixed up. Tracks are being repaired. Furthermore, the surface San Martín Line is being elevated for part of its way through the city, and the branch of the Belgrano Sur line that traditionally terminated awkwardly in the somewhat remote Buenos Aires station is being rerouted into the Constitución station.⁶

Construction of an elevated portion of the San Martín suburban line. The old tracks (visible here) were on the surface.

Furthermore, there are serious plans, not yet implemented, to create an RER network by means of tunnels through central Buenos Aires. This project would, of course, be quite expensive. Even without this final step, Buenos Aires’ elaborate rail system no longer feels as though it’s in decline. Some sources say there are approximately 1,400,000 passengers/day; other sources suggest a lower figure.

[2] The bus lines have been improved too. Buenos Aires’ buses, like those in most places, carry more passengers more places than its rail system, but, as everywhere, their effectiveness has been undermined by traffic congestion. Buenos Aires’ Metrobús system, an attempt to get around this problem, has been added to the public transport mix in the years since 2011. The Metrobús system is a kind of light BRT. Unlike in, say, Bogotá and Curitiba, it doesn’t involve distinct branding and rolling stock. Instead, long-established bus lines have been rerouted onto special lanes that have been constructed in the center of several of Buenos Aires streets. Some of the wider streets now have four bus lanes in their center; the outer lanes allow passing. The buses are still subject to red lights and, in most cases, the stations have no prepayment facilities, but route times have been speeded considerably. It hasn’t been very easy politically to create the Metrobús system, since, in most cases, adding the bus lanes meant reducing the number of car lanes, but the system is now up to more than 50 km, approximately as many as the Subte system.

The four-lane Metrobús line that runs down the middle of the wide Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires’ city center.

[3] There have been some serious attempts to discipline drivers. Argentine drivers have a reputation for being quite aggressive. The Lonely Planet guidebook says that “Being a pedestrian in Argentina is perhaps one of the country’s more difficult ventures.”⁷ In fact, compared to their counterparts in, say, India or Indonesia, Argentine drivers seem pretty disciplined. They obey red lights. They know they’re supposed to yield to pedestrians when making turns and where there are clearly marked crosswalks, and, in my experience, they can almost always be persuaded to do the right thing, but aggressive pedestrian behavior is often required. This isn’t of course particularly comfortable or safe for pedestrians. When I was in Buenos Aires, there were signs all over the city telling drivers to yield to pedestrians (“Siempre prioridad peatón”). It would be nice to feel that these were having an effect. I did not, in any case, feel particularly unsafe there. The situation is roughly comparable to that in, say, New York or Chicago.

Digital “Siempre prioridad peatón” sign over a street, one of many thousands of such signs.

[4] Bicycle lanes have been added. Latin America, with its often narrow streets and aggressive drivers, isn’t a particularly logical place for pushing bicycle usage, but bicycle facilities have been added in numerous Latin American cities over the last ten years, including Buenos Aires. Protected bicycle lanes (“ciclovías”) appear to be particularly common in the most prosperous parts of the city, where they are definitely used at least to some extent.

Protected bicycle path at a street corner, Avenida Coronel Díaz, on the border of Recoleta and Palermo. Photograph taken 2015.

There are also several streets in the old central business district, the Microcentro, where something like half the street has been turned into a pair of corridors that might be termed “bicycle-priority lanes.” The Spanish term for this arrangement is “carriles compartidos” (“shared lanes”).

Street with a carril compartido (“shared lane”) in the Microcentro.

[5] There has also been a great deal of street pedestrianization. This has been especially common in the Microcentro, where Calle Florida, pedestrianized several decades ago, was for many years considered the most important shopping street in Buenos Aires. Several other streets in or near the Microcentro have been pedestrianized in recent years.

The pedestrianized Calle Lavalle, Microcentro.

It’s claimed that the advent of the Metrobús system has encouraged this since it’s allowed several routes that once ran on minor north-south streets to be moved to the Metrobús corridors along the Avenida 9 de Julio or along the route known as El Bajo that runs closer to the Rio de la Plata.

Further pedestrianization is planned. In one case a hybrid Metrobús/pedestrian corridor is under construction. Two lanes along several blocks of Avenida Corrientes, a street known for its entertainment venues, are to become a Metrobús corridor by day and a pedestrian corridor in the evening. (Exactly how this will work is a bit of a mystery.)

What will become a bus lane during the day and a pedestrian path in the evening along Avenida Corrientes.

Unfortunately, some of Buenos Aires’ pedestrianized streets, while bustling by day and well into the evening, have acquired a reputation for being dangerous at night despite the presence of dozens of police officers.

[6] A serious effort is being made to fix up sidewalks. A major problem for pedestrians is that the sidewalks are not maintained very well.

Broken sidewalk along Calle Defensa in San Telmo.

Buenos Aires’ insistence on using ornamental bricks rather than concrete slabs means that sidewalks require frequent repair. A Plan Integral de Veredas (“Complete sidewalk plan”) has been established to deal with the problem. There were definitely quite a number of repair projects going on when I was in Buenos Aires last month. In the short term, these actually make walking a bit harder, because pedestrians must detour around construction zones, but they might eventually make a real difference.

Sidewalk under repair, probably along Avenida Pueyrredón, Recoleta.

[7] Parks are being added. Buenos Aires is not particularly well supplied with parkland, and most of the bigger parks that exist adjoin its well-off neighborhoods and are somewhat cut up by roads. There are some weekend road closings, for example in the 3 de Febrero Park, but they only help so much.

The Parque 3 de Febrero, Palermo.

A particularly wonderful park that adjoins the central city has been added in the years since the 1980s: the Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur. This park was created on islands in the Rio de la Plata that had formed to some extent accidentally as a result of river currents and landfill disposal. These islands eventually acquired plant cover and attracted wildlife, and they look natural even if they’re not at all. The area covered by the Reserva is bigger than Central Park,⁸ but the park includes substantial lakes and mangroves, and much of it is quite reasonably fenced off-to discourage pedestrian access. The paths that do exist enormously increase the number of close-to-CBD pedestrian spaces in Buenos Aires, and they get pretty busy on weekends.

One of the few open spaces with dry land in the Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur. The large water body is the Rio de la Plata.

Heading back to the city from the Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur late on a Sunday afternoon. The tall buildings are in Puerto Madero.

[8] Puerto Madero, a new neighborhood, has been created to be pedestrian-friendly. Puerto Madero is a residential/commercial neighborhood that has been replacing the old, obsolete port since the 1990s. It is comparable in many ways to neighborhoods like London’s Docklands and Hamburg’s HafenCity. As in these other cities, the designers of Puerto Madero preserved some older buildings (as well as numerous cranes). They also added quite a few, including many of Buenos Aires’ largest skyscrapers, some residential and some commercial.

Pedestrian “street” along the old harbor in Puerto Madero. The tall buildings include apartments or offices.

As with other “neoliberal” urban renewal projects throughout the world, Puerto Madero’s advertising often stresses its ecological soundness, including its pedestrian facilities, but there is no hiding its attempt to be sound commercially as well. Puerto Madero includes, for example, two pedestrian “streets” along the old harbor. But these aren’t the kind of streets where local people leave off their dry cleaning on the way to work. They’re lined so completely with cafés and restaurants as to become a little uncomfortable for pedestrians who simply want to walk. Elsewhere, the streets of Puerto Madero have good, wide sidewalks, and there are several new parks as well, but the developers have included parking facilities in every building and have also left space for arterials.⁹ Puerto Madero was clearly not built for pedestrians in quite the way that much of the Palermo district, for example, was, but at least pedestrians have not been forgotten. And no one would argue that Puerto Madero is a failure. It’s become the most expensive place to live in Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires, in other words, has made a real effort in recent years to restore and improve the status, safety, and comfort of pedestrians and transit users in much of its central city. The phrase that much of the extensive documentation on this effort sometimes uses is “prioridad peatonal” (literally, “pedestrian priority”).¹⁰ By all accounts this effort has been reasonably successful. It’s also been popular politically, at least with the inhabitants of the central city, who (unlike most Latin Americans) have never lost their taste for high-density urban life. The well-off and middle-class parts of the city of Buenos Aires still seem for the most part to be healthy, reasonably safe, and deeply urban places.¹¹