Spurred by another superficial review of Paris’ push for bicycle lanes1, I decided to write out why I think so many of these takes are overly superficial, and thus fail to provide useful lessons when applied to other cities.
First, by way of background, I feel like I have rather unique vantage point of being trained in Transportation Planning (in Civil Engineering), paired with having lived and studied in all three of France, Canada, and the United States. On one hand, my schooling was in Utah, one of the few places in the US where they are still building urban freeways2; on the other, I spent three years in France (including 8 months in metro Paris) relying almost exclusively on public transit. In a word, I’ve lived and commuted in both.