How Paris Became a 15-minute city | Fast Company

May 13, 2024May 12, 2024 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Four years ago, Paris embraced the idea of the 15-minute city—the concept that you should be able to live a short walk or bike ride from work, school, stores, and other aspects of daily life.

Since then, the city has radically changed. There are now 746 miles of protected bike lanes, and more Parisians bike than drive. Empty offices have been redeveloped with housing, coworking spaces, gyms, shops, and other uses under one roof. The mayor recently said that 2025 would be the year of “hyper-proximity,” with even more focus on bringing services to each neighborhood so people don’t have to get in the car every time they need to run an errand.

Paris is redesigning the Champs-Élysées into pedestrian gardens | Fast Company

January 18, 2021 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

In Paris, the Champs-Élysées was originally designed as a place to stroll. But in 2021, around 64,000 cars travel down the eight-lane avenue each day. It’s polluted and noisy, and while the sidewalks are filled with tourists, it isn’t a place where people living nearby want to walk.

As Paris transforms elsewhere—aiming for a vision of a “15-minute city” where it’s possible to easily get anywhere you need to go for day-to-day errands on foot or by bike—the Champs-Élysées will now also be redesigned, in a $304 million project that will turn the mile-long street into what Mayor Anne Hidalgo calls “an extraordinary garden.”

French Anti-Uber Protest Turns To Guerrilla Warfare As Cabbies Burn Cars, Attack Uber Drivers | TechCrunch

June 25, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ 1 Comment

Today’s taxi driver protest is getting out of hand. According to the police, 2,800 taxi drivers are protesting today against UberPOP, the European equivalent of UberX. With UberPOP, everybody can become an Uber driver — taxi drivers see the service as unfair competition as they have to get a special license. Yet, this doesn’t really explain why cabbies are now attacking Uber drivers, burning and breaking their cars.

The police have already arrested a taxi driver and an Uber driver. The cabbie was throwing projectiles toward the police, while the latter was attacking a cabbie. It is currently very difficult to go to Charles-De-Gaulle and Orly airports as taxi drivers are blocking the roads. Taxis are also controlling many parts of Paris, looking for Uber drivers.

There are other protests happening right now in Nice, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon and Lille. It’s the biggest protest so far against the urban transportation company in France as UberPOP has been expanding to new French cities.

Spotify For Magazines Comes To The US | PSFK.com

November 19, 2012 ~ lmehit ~ Leave a comment

Paris-based startup, LeKiosk, has taken the concept of a physical newsstand and transferred it online. Offering a variety of publishers across genres, ‘a Spotify of the magazine world’ if you will, they have already been touted as the top Apple app for 2011. “The world’s first 3-D newsstand” is designed to offer users the chance to peruse content in a visual and simplified manner, eliminating ownership of physical versions yet still offering the chance to save the content. The UK version of the app actually provides a version of a British-style newsstand with a virtual way to scroll through available titles in a simulated version of the real life experience