There are only five spaces left out of eighty, this Friday shortly after 8 a.m., when Samia Belmiloud, 54, comes to park her car in the TLC-Cuire park and ride, in Caluire, north-west of Lyon, reserved for Lyon public transport subscribers. The social worker has traveled about ten kilometers from her home in Rillieux-la-Pape, and is about to walk 300 meters to reach her workplace. “Sometimes I take the bus and the metro to come to work, but the timetables are not reliable enough and on Fridays I have to come back early”, justifies the driver.
The irregularity of the buses is also the reason given by Chafia, 64, to cross Lyon by car every morning, from the Part-Dieu district to the Caluire park. The school assistant (who does not wish to give her name) spends more than an hour in her car every day, driving through congested streets.
Public transport ? “You have to change buses, it’s too complicated, the buses are overloaded, I see two pass without being able to get on”, laments the teacher. Further in the parking lot, a doctor (preferring to remain anonymous) indicates that she traveled 3 kilometers to park her car here, in order to reach the nearby metro, to go to Perrache, on the opposite side of the city .
Three new tram lines
In Lyon, the car remains very popular, providing nearly half of the 4.3 million daily trips of the inhabitants of the agglomeration, according to Cerema’s latest Household Travel Survey (EMD)which dates back to 2015. Even if its use has been decreasing continuously for ten years, with a drop of 16% between 2012 and 2022, the massive presence of the car in the urban landscape constitutes a headache for the environmentalist executive of Lyon.
“The objective is to reduce pollution, not the car”, said Bruno Bernard, president (EELV) of the metropolis of Lyon, Thursday, September 8, on the occasion of his political return to the Lyon Press Club. Lyon environmentalists changed their vocabulary during their first two years in office. It is no longer a question of “stop the car”as elected representatives of the environmentalist majority were able to say at their beginning. “We are multiplying mobility offers to promote an alternative to the car”, says Bruno Bernard today. Behind the semantic precautions, the political objective remains to reduce the car in town.
At the head of the powerful Syndicat des transports de l’ agglomeration lyonnaise (SYTRAL), the ecologists plan the commissioning of three new tram lines by the end of 2023, as well as the extension of the metro B, towards the west of Lyon, to Saint-Genis-Laval. The metropolis is planning a total of 250 kilometers of cycle paths by 2026, for 282 million euros of investment. Between 2019 and 2022, cycling has increased by 50% in the Lyon area. The car only fell 9% over the same period.
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