PARISIAN TAXIS AT FOURPENCE A MILE.

Shannon News, 16 August 1929, Page 4

PARISIAN TAXIS AT FOURPENCE A MILE.

TRAFFIC PROBLEMS

.From the point of view of traffic, no two great cities are alike; each has its special individuality, and therefore each has its own traffic problem. At the one pole is Manhattan Island, wherein New York, enclosed between the. East River and the Hudson, has been forced to sprout upwards into skyscrapers, writes the Manchester Guardian. At the other pole is Tokio winch, with less than half the population of London, spreads with its little dwellings over an area greater than that of any other city in the world. There, are, roughly speaking, great cities that sprawl, others that are bounded and shut in. To each category the population test applies differently. Even more than New York, Paris is an island city. What has made it an island .are its ring of fortifications created'in the 'forties of the.last century. The encircle it like &■ mediaeval wall and moat, traversable only at the various gates, and at these gates the stranglehold is made all the more intense by the absurd octroi system. Paris, in a word, is still a walled city, and within its walls dwell nearly three million people, and, what is most to the point, virtually the whole of the motoring class. Such a congestion, both of human beings and vehicles, is not to be found elsewhere. Hours of Encumbrance.

Comparing London and Paris as a whole, the French capital would come out on the average some three or four storeys higher, a 'fact which accounts for the barrack-like regularity of all the 'streets alike, and renders Paris, outside one or two main avenues, so extremely ugly as a city. To give full force to this vertical element, it should be added that the Paris population is pretty Avell entirely herded into tenements (rich and poor alike), and that save for the dark courtyards of the tenement blocks there are virtually no open spaces, gardens or parks. At lunch time and at nightfall this virtually congested population pours into the streets simultaneously. These are what in Paris are called "the hours of encumbrance," an exact phrase. At these hours the city traffic is brought pretty well to a complete block. Between midday and 2 a.m. and between s«p.ml and 7 p.m. no one who was not an invalid would dream of traversing central Paris in a mtor-car or taxi. Mors and ihore during these hours taxi-drivers in the outskirts are refusing to take clients into the centre. The government of the city is partly to blame. Why it should object to the .compact double-deck bus of the London type and prefer the long, unwieldy, caterpillar-like single-decker, often six-wheeled,so that in making the slightest manoeuvre it blocks a whole thoroughfare, is % beyond imagining. ■ •'■■ Had Paris anything like the London motor-bus service or the Manchester tramcars, life would be much ensier. But why it should be so is a mystcrv that only tradition, prejudice and tlie singularity of Pans as the only great, human agglomeration m Franco—in other words, the lack of experience—can explain. Superfluous Taxis. The result is an enormous superfluity of taxis. In Paris a taxi costs only fcurpence a mile. There is no extra charge for extra passengers, so that for three or four people they are even cheaper than buses. And then m a virtually walled city there are such short distances to go. No wonder that Paris has more—let it be said in justice, better—taxicabs than probably London and all the other cities of the United Kingdom combined. No, woiiclcr t 0 not only to the taxics. but the innumerable private cars in a land where the petrol and mot°r-tax ia so low-that the traffic problem of Paris is beginning to appear insoluble. Nor is the comic press guilty ot _excessive satire where it suggests t hat at certain times of the day it would save time and money both for taxi driver and client if the one could a<tach a taximeter to the leg of! tho other, accompany him on foot to Ins destination, and charge him accoiding 17 The V dictator of Paris traffic is M. Chiappe, Prefect of Police the mos. energetic, innovating and mirac « working Corsican since Napoleon incidentally, with some of his fan Its;. Five years ago the traffic control hoic wa« almost comically chaotic, the 307 of "every English visitor; to-day it is ecu- , if not superior, to that of London or even of New York No capital • itv can boast of such splendidly effii out -"pointsmen"; few of so wel - drilled a mtor world, even though. . he somewhat excessively at the _ox pon,., of the pedestrian. No other can tal possesses so fine or so large a noK of taxis or such skilful-too skil ful and too darink-taxi-dnvers.