At a time when cars are increasingly being pushed out of town centres to make way for so-called "soft" mobility and pedestrians, the quality of public spaces reserved for pedestrians has become a real attraction for urban tourism. More and more cities are boasting about their policies towards pedestrians, cyclists and other mobile solutions that exclude the car.
In France, the "Place aux Piétons" collective has published its first barometer of walkable towns and cities. And it has a number of surprises in store for the good and not-so-good performers in this field. Overall, it is clear that cities are less and less open to pedestrians. And that they do little about it. Surprising or not, cycling was singled out in most responses. In everyday life, there is a real conflict between cycle paths and pedestrian areas, with the former making access to the latter more difficult.
Paris is one of the cities most reviled by walkers. The latter are increasingly coming into conflict with bicycles, scooters and other non-motorised forms of mobility.
Eight major cities above the average
With just over 40,000 responses, the Barometer identified around fifty cities with more than 100 responses and 150 with fewer than 100 responses. 75.14% of respondents feel that the situation for pedestrians has worsened over the last two years69.77% think that there are few facilities for the comfort of pedestrians, and 69.12% think that pedestrian areas are not free from encroachment and are not respected. These impressions are in fact feelings and do not necessarily correspond to the reality on the ground..
Of the fifty or so French towns where the number of responses allows meaningful conclusions to be drawn, only one exceeds a score of 12 out of 20. This was Le Rheu, a town adjacent to Rennes with just 8,000 inhabitants. In other words, it's not very significant.
If, on the other hand, we look at towns with more than 100,000 inhabitants, the top three are Versailles, Annecy and Dijon - all three scoring above 11 out of 20. The other cities meeting or exceeding the average are Angers, Besançon, Grenoble, Rennes and Strasbourg. The very large cities scored poorly: Lyon scored 9.49 out of 20; Paris 8.56; Lille 8.19, Toulouse 7.7 and Marseille was at the bottom of the table with 5.04...
Table: ranking of "walkable" towns with more than 100,000 inhabitants (Source: Baromètre Collectif Place aux Piétons)
