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The socialists won in 1989, and Ries oversaw the development of tram lines. Initially there was only one, launched in 1994; now there are five. “In the beginning it was very hard,” says Naas. “Business owners said people won’t come to the center — it will be ‘death city.’ But it’s exactly the opposite. It changed people. Shopping is now different. Before there was cars, noise, pollution.”
The city center is an oval-shaped island, connected to the land by bridges on every side. Many, but not all, of the narrow medieval streets on the island have been closed to cars. Some of Strasbourg’s most attractive, vibrant public squares, such as Place Kleber, were actually once choked by traffic. The different elements are complementary: The pedestrianizing of downtown streets followed tram construction because multiple tram crossings made driving downtown impractical. Bicycle lanes were constructed beginning in 1981 and have been continually expanded; there are now more than 100 kilometers of bike lanes around the city, and it’s faster to bike than to drive through the city during business hours.
Most important, the system has been built and expanded with an understanding of the commuter’s psychology. Once people are in their cars, they would prefer to drive all the way to their destination rather than switch modes. So the city has created powerful incentives for suburbanites to switch from their car to the tram: Parking is provided at suburban tram stations, free with a tram ticket that covers everyone in the car (also incentivizing car-pooling). Conversely, parking is prohibitively expensive at the lots downtown. As a compromise with the business community, parking garages were constructed in the center city, but they are elegantly tucked away below ground, and are not even full.
In keeping with this approach, the city intends to improve integration between the suburban commuter trains, which enter the main station just a few tram stops from the heart of town, and the local tram system. One might expect that to be enough to get people out of their cars. But, Naas explains, if you live, say, a 30-minute drive from central Strasbourg, and you must drive to the train station and park, wait for a train, walk through the train station to the tram stop, wait for the tram and then walk from the tram to your final destination, it may take an extra 10 minutes door to door. So to improve ridership on the commuter trains they are building “train-tram,” a suburban commuter train that can move seamlessly onto the tram tracks once in the city. No transferring for suburbanites will mean less hassle, less time and, hopefully, more riders.

A “CULTURE OF MOBILITY”

The environmental benefits of Strasbourg’s transportation policies have been obvious: Thirty percent fewer cars now enter Strasbourg each day than in 1990. Less obvious is the economic impact, but it is quite real as well.

Strasbourg’s economic history is not unlike that of similarly sized American cities. Its location on the Rhine made it a natural fit for shipping and heavy industry, but those jobs are departing for cheaper wages in Eastern Europe. But unlike many postindustrial cities, Strasbourg is alive and well. If your business depends on trucking, all this public transport has not helped you. But it has been good for restaurants, retail and other tourism-related businesses such as hotels. “For service businesses it is clearly in their interest,” says Bruno Grandjean, program manager for Vehicules du Futur, a Strasbourg-area nonprofit focused on sustainable transportation. Indeed, Grandjean’s organization itself is evidence of the postindustrial economic opportunities created by Strasbourg’s transportation transformation. They could have located anywhere when they launched four years ago. They chose Strasbourg because, Grandjean says, “there is a strong culture of mobility here in Strasbourg.”

A case in point would be Vehicules du Futur’s effort to create public cars that can be used like a bike-share program. The electric cars, which will carry up to six passengers and be wheelchair accessible, will be recharged at stations around the city. The hope is to make living without a car a viable option for residents of both the city center and the urban periphery. Currently, tram and bus lines on the hub-and-spoke system bring residents of peripheral neighborhoods to and from the center, but not as much around the periphery for, say, shopping or visiting friends. But with the car-share program they can drive around for those errands or, say, to the tram station. The cars will be built by LOHR, a manufacturer of trams and car carriers just outside of Strasbourg. Ultimately, Grandjean hopes, the car-share program will enable suburbanites to buy fewer cars and therefore drive less. ”We know we have solutions for cities, and that we won’t for rural areas for a long time,” declares Grandjean. “The battle is for the suburban areas.”

Another example of the economic activity fueled by Strasbourg’s transit shifts is Auto’trement, a car-sharing business founded nine years ago as a private-public partnership. Auto’trement is essentially the same as Zipcar, in that it rents cars on an hourly basis, although there are some slight differences in its pricing model. Initially supported by government subsidies, it is now a self-sufficient organization with several employees working out of its quirky little office overlooking a tram line in the city center. According to founder Jean-Baptiste Schmider, approximately 25 percent of the 1,600 members in the Strasbourg urban community gave up their car thanks to the program, and an additional 25 percent did not buy one because of it. That’s 800 cars that have been kept off the road.

CUTTING-EDGE REALITY

Perhaps Strasbourg is such a hub of forward-thinking transportation enterprises because its evolution represents more than a few mere policy changes. Strasbourg leads a transportation revolution that is happening — fitfully — the world over. The revolution is the development of a fast-paced modern metropolis that does not require car ownership, a development befitting not only concerns about climate change and rising oil prices, but also the developed world’s shift from an industrial economy to a service and knowledge economy. “The future isn’t selling cars,” says Schmider. “It’s selling mobility solutions.”

“Cars are expensive and spend 95 percent of their lives parked,” Grandjean notes. “That is not optimal utilization.”

Bigger cities such as New York, London and Paris have attracted attention for their own participation in this movement, with programs ranging from congestion pricing to bicycle sharing. Perhaps cities like Detroit, Buffalo and Cleveland should recognize that the era of an industrial economy predicated on people building cars, televisions and toaster ovens for each other in developed countries is over. Perhaps the federal government, instead of (or at least in addition to) delaying the inevitable with automaker bailouts, should focus on competing for global knowledge-sector business and tourism. Are the rich Chinese corporate titans of the 21st century going to want to put offices and take vacations in Phoenix, where they will have to rent a car and navigate an incoherent network of highways, when they could go to a European city like Strasbourg?

The Obama administration, with its emphasis on high-speed rail, reconnecting public housing to surrounding neighborhoods, and its smaller emphasis on mass transit, seems to have some grasp of this transformation. In May transportation secretary Ray LaHood visited Strasbourg and received presentations from the city government and from LOHR. But the dollar amounts being appropriated for these programs in the U.S. still pale in comparison to the subsidies for highway construction and auto-making.

Endeavors like the Vehicules du Futur public-car project — there is a much larger version planned for Paris — do have skeptics, even among green transport advocates. “The potential problem is the lack of reliability, because you cannot book online,” says Schmider of Auto’trement. “It could work, but it’s too early. Maybe in 10 years it will work when other cars are forbidden in the city center, or there are high tolls like in London.”

Ask a random sample of Strasbourg residents what they think of the trams and bike lanes, and you are likely to find, as I did, complete and uniform approval. Whether old, like Richard Baron Schmidt, 63, a lifelong resident of Strasbourg, or young, like drama student Margot Becker, anyone old enough to remember the former system thinks the trams are an improvement. “Before the trams, coming downtown was difficult because of parking,” says Schmidt. “Now it is easier and cheaper.”

The only complaint about the trams seems to be that they make noise. But trams in other cities need not have that problem. In the years since the tram was started in Strasbourg, LOHR, whose massive campus sits in the cornfields (and next to a train station) just outside city limits, has developed a virtually silent tram. Rather than running steel on steel like a train, they put wheels encased in rubber on a single track. This makes for not only a quieter system, but one that is cheaper to build and cheaper to maintain. Other cities, as near as central France’s 140,000-person Clement-Ferrand and as far as Shanghai, have purchased trams from LOHR.

The applicability to America, where high-speed rail has received appropriations from Congress, is admittedly questionable. Carlessness in Strasbourg grew out of, and reinforced, existing economic and structural realities.”

AN AMERICAN DREAM

Some might attribute this phenomenon entirely to a cultural difference, arguing that the French will take advantage of bike paths and trains but Americans will not. But the Strasbourgers I interviewed, whether politicians, pedestrians or businesspeople, all told me that the French, like Americans, have an emotional attachment to their automobiles, and that it is ultimately a political choice to encourage or discourage driving. Absent the incentive structure set up by Strasbourg, the French will take the path of least resistance — a car, whenever possible — just like Americans. “When you are in your car, you feel at home. You will not change that for free,” says Olivier Hauchard, a consultant for LOHR who has lived in Strasbourg for more than 20 years. “It is not cultural. It is only a political decision.”

“We had meetings around the city and three things came up,” recalls Alain Jund, a member of Parliament who works on transportation policy. “One, there are too many cars in public places. Two, ‘I don’t have a place to park my car.’ And three, we need public transportation. There was a contradiction. As politicians we had to make choices.”
One particular cultural difference does matter: environmentalism. Hauchard says that in France, “Young people talk every day about pollution.” Indeed, many of the people I chatted with, whether in their office or in the park where I found them drinking beer in midday, brought up the environmental impact of driving. Public concern about global warming, and understanding about the link between driving and emissions, has penetrated further in France than in America, which helps build public support for green transportation. Still, there are signs of a shift here at home: When I was in Leesburg, Va., a prototypical American exurb, their transportation office told me that in 2008, on user surveys on their commuter bus, people listed the environment as a reason for taking it (and ridership spiked, although that was primarily due to high gas prices).

The applicability to America, where high-speed rail has recently been touted by the Obama administration and received appropriations from Congress, is admittedly questionable. Carlessness in Strasbourg grew out of, and reinforced, existing economic and structural realities. The sectors that benefit from the transportation links — hospitality, services and retail — fit with the city’s natural advantages. Tourism was a natural growth area, thanks to the presence of the European parliament, the medieval center, the fact that it is a French city 10 minutes from Germany and fewer than three hours from Switzerland, Austria and Belgium. With a large university that specializes in science and engineering, it also made sense for Strasbourg to adopt transportation that appeals to students and young professionals. Bioengineering firms, which are increasingly able to locate anywhere, have been agglomerating in Strasbourg, and its high quality of life is one reason.

All of this is complementary with France’s impressive nationwide transportation network. The high-speed TGV train has made it possible to go from Paris to Strasbourg in two hours and 20 minutes, for as little as 20 euros each way. That is half the previous travel time of a normal-speed train. So now shoppers at Strasbourg’s famous Christmas festival can come in for day trips and hop on a tram from the train station to downtown. “Every part of Strasbourg is irrigated by the TGV effect from Paris,” says Grandjean. The TGV effect from Paris helps Strasbourg because Paris is a center of wealth and economic activity. If you link two depressed areas by high-speed rail, as Grandjean himself points out, there may not be the same economic multiplier effect.

So this is not a model that could be imitated by midsized American cities that lack any of Strasbourg’s advantages. Detroit, for example, might not see a lot of development in its decimated urban core just because the city builds a tram there. But what about cities with more similarities to Strasbourg? Buffalo has a rich architectural heritage, Olmsted parks, a major university, a nascent artist community and proximity to the Canadian border, Niagara Falls and Toronto. Could Buffalo, where the streets are often walkable but regional mass transit is limited, implement a creative class and tourism service economy development strategy through urban planning innovations like Strasbourg’s?

Alas, Democratic Rep. Brian Higgins, who represents Buffalo, told me at the Revitalizing Older Cities conference that he thinks Buffalo’s comparative advantage is its absence of traffic, and that should be reinforced, by continuing to accomodate cars and keeping density low. Such a strategy is short-sighted. Artists and other creative-class professionals are generally unenthusiastic about driving, and the era of cheap oil, as recent price shocks have demonstrated, may not last forever. And that’s not even raising the moral considerations with regard to pollution and climate change. Whether any given city will realize the benefits that Strasbourg has if it adopts a similar transportation policy is obviously an unknown, but there is not a known example of such a policy causing massive depopulation, pollution, destruction of street life or economic decline in the way that its opposite — subsidizing driving through building highways — did to cities from Baltimore to St. Louis. Strasbourg, for its part, still has terrible traffic in its core — eliminating road capacity is hardly a recipe for reversing that — but now that one does not need to drive downtown, Strasbourgers are not prisoners to the traffic, and the streets are more pleasant.

One myth worth dispelling is that urbanists such as those who have revolutionized Strasbourg are as doctrinaire in their dedication to one mode of transportation as the car-huggers who built San Diego. That may be the stereotype of bicycle or tram advocates, but the facts on the ground do not bear it out. As Strasbourg expands the reach of its mass transit links, it takes a flexible approach embodied by the Vehicules du Futur project. They are going to build bus rapid transit for marginal areas, because it is cheaper than trams. Ronan Golias, Strasbourg’s transportation chief, is described by colleagues as “a good engineer.” The leaders of Strasbourg’s smart growth strategy are pragmatists, not ideologues.

Today’s visitor to Strasbourg would be as ignorant of the local history of traffic congestion and its discontents as a Vassar alum from Indiana would be of her new East Village block’s history as an open-air drug market. Arrive at the train station and you can walk through its tall glass walls showcasing a park and the city beyond, or hop on a tram just a stop or two from the center of the city. When you arrive on the island that constitutes its medieval core — surrounded by a natural moat, it is now a UNESCO world heritage site — you will find a network of pedestrianized streets, and public squares with fountains. It would never occur to you that these tiny streets were once choked with cars, or that the fountains were once isolated by giant roads surrounding them. The only thing more absurd is the idea that anyone would rather have it that way.

Reporting for this article was funded by a grant from the German Marshall Fund.

This article appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!