Grieve-Smith on Transportation

"Know what the problem is with these sidewalks, Daddy?" my son said to me. "They have all these holes you have to step over." Sure enough, the sidewalks of Santo Domingo are full of holes, and my son has to cross them with his short legs. Many of them, I explained, are deep gutters that are needed because the streets don't have underground sewers to drain stormwater. The previous night a friend of ours had had a difficult time pushing her toddler in a stroller; she not only had to cross all the drainage ditches but all the other places where the pavement is broken. And every time we came across a car parked on the narrow sidewalk, she had to steer the stroller across the gutter into the street and back again.

They are working on drainage here in Santo Domingo de Guzmán, capital of the Dominican Republic; an entire block of the Avenida Alma Mater is torn up, presumably due to sewer construction. Unfortunately, one night when we were walking on the Malecón, a waterfront boulevard that's Santo Domingo's answer to New York's West Street, the entire crosswalk at Alma Mater was blocked by this construction. My guidebook says that on the weekends some sections of the are opened to pedestrians and cyclists as in Bogotá's Ciclovía, but last night there was no way to cross the speeding traffic, so we had to backtrack a block to get around the construction.

The worst experience we've had so far was at the intersection of Avenida Máximo Gómez and the Avenida Mirador Norte, where the bus dropped us off on the east side of a four-lane road full of traffic speeding off a bridge. To get to the Avenida Mirador Norte, we had to cross the traffic and climb over a two-foot barrier with no traffic signal, not easy to do with a five-year-old.

The other salient features of the pedestrian environment in Santo Domingo are that it's hot, noisy and polluted. Nothing to be done about the heat, but hopefully the noise and pollution will improve in the future as older, noisier and more polluting vehicles are replaced.

Despite these problems, the streets of Santo Domingo aren't actually that bad. I'll tell you why in my next post.

I've created this blog to share my thoughts about transportation. I hope you find it useful.

Translated, annotated and hyperlinked by Angus B. Grieve-Smith, February 13, 2007.

The Mobility Plan for Paris that will be debated [and adopted] by Parisian elected officials on February 12 and 13 hinges on the proposals to close (partially at least) the Georges Pompidou expressway, to install a lane reserved for buses, taxis and emergency vehicles on the Boulevard Périphérique [an eight-lane limited-access highway], and to limit automobile circulation in the center of Paris. However, there is no explicit mention of the implementation of “congestion pricing.”

London, Oslo, Stockholm and Singapore have all used this technique to limit access to their downtowns. Milan is expected to do the same in March 2007. In Paris the subject provokes, at this point, strong opposition. The suggestion of the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, on November 13, to “request input on” the implementation of congestion pricing in Paris has met with unanimous opposition, even from the UMP [his own center-right party].

Françoise de Panafieu, conservative candidate for the next mayoral elections in the capital, has concluded that “a toll at the gates of Paris would not be possible.” Jean-Paul Huchon, Socialist president of the Ile de France [the greater Paris region], has declared himself to be “firmly against” the idea, arguing that it amounts to “a national avoidance of responsibility,” and “an admission of impotence” in transit finance. Paris’s Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, has concluded that this plan would antagonize elected officials from nearby municipalities “from the right and the left.”

Eight days after the Prime Minister’s speech, the Regional Infrastructure District of the Ile de France (Dreif), in the context of its new management plan, published a study of traffic in the Ile de France, taking a position in support of a toll for entering Paris. For Francis Rol Tanguy, director of the Dreif, the idea “should no longer be taboo.” The goal of the Dreif is to reduce automobile traffic and bring in funds to accelerate the rollout of mass transit across the region.

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