Skip to main content

Highway being built in Paris is meant for bicyclists and bicyclists only

paris cyclists highway bikes only cyclistdrone header
There’s a new highway in the works in Paris, but it’s not for cars. Rather, the 28-mile stretch of open road is meant exclusively for cyclists, but it’s being opened a very little bit at a time. Thus far, just 0.5 miles of the highway has been completed, but the city hopes that the roadway will be entirely ready for non-motorized two-wheel transportation by 2020.

It’s an initiative that began last year when the local government voted unanimously to dedicated $164.5 million to improve biking conditions in Paris. Not only will there by a nearly 30-mile stretch of uninterrupted cyclist-only highway, but there will also be two-way bike lanes on one-way streets, bike stands, and a new rule that allows bicyclists to turn without waiting for green lights at intersections (though they’ll have to proceed at their own risk).

Related Videos

These improvements come as a welcome change for the many cyclists in Paris. As Sandrine Gbaguidi told Wired, when she previously made her way around the metropolis on a bike, she was “constantly on [her] guard and annoyed or irritated,” despite the fact that “biking is supposed to be fun and relaxing.”

But now, with dedicated roadways meant for cyclists and cyclists alone, perhaps cyclists will be able to actually enjoy their commutes. That, at least, is the hope of the city, which aims to increase daily bike trips from 5 to 15 percent by 2020, when the entire roadway is open. Paris’ bike-friendly initiative will also double the number of bike lanes, and create 7,000 more technologically advanced stop lines at red lights to make for more efficient interactions between cyclists and drivers.

 Charles Maguin, president and co-founder of Paris en Selle, a biking association, said of these changes: “I hope that biking gets to be considered as a viable alternative means to get around the city, and not just a project run by green parties for the Parisian hipster.”

Editors' Recommendations

Optical illusions could help us build the next generation of AI
Artificial intelligence digital eye closeup.

You look at an image of a black circle on a grid of circular dots. It resembles a hole burned into a piece of white mesh material, although it’s actually a flat, stationary image on a screen or piece of paper. But your brain doesn’t comprehend it like that. Like some low-level hallucinatory experience, your mind trips out; perceiving the static image as the mouth of a black tunnel that’s moving towards you.

Responding to the verisimilitude of the effect, the body starts to unconsciously react: the eye’s pupils dilate to let more light in, just as they would adjust if you were about to be plunged into darkness to ensure the best possible vision.

Read more
Meta wants to supercharge Wikipedia with an AI upgrade
the wikipedia logo on a pink background

Wikipedia has a problem. And Meta, the not-too-long-ago rebranded Facebook, may just have the answer.

Let’s back up. Wikipedia is one of the largest-scale collaborative projects in human history, with more than 100,000 volunteer human editors contributing to the construction and maintenance of a mind-bogglingly large, multi-language encyclopedia consisting of millions of articles. Upward of 17,000 new articles are added to Wikipedia each month, while tweaks and modifications are continuously made to its existing corpus of articles. The most popular Wiki articles have been edited thousands of times, reflecting the very latest research, insights, and up-to-the-minute information.

Read more
The next big thing in science is already in your pocket
A researcher looks at a protein diagram on his monitor

Supercomputers are an essential part of modern science. By crunching numbers and performing calculations that would take eons for us humans to complete by ourselves, they help us do things that would otherwise be impossible, like predicting hurricane flight paths, simulating nuclear disasters, or modeling how experimental drugs might effect human cells. But that computing power comes at a price -- literally. Supercomputer-dependent research is notoriously expensive. It's not uncommon for research institutions to pay upward of $1,000 for a single hour of supercomputer use, and sometimes more, depending on the hardware that's required.

But lately, rather than relying on big, expensive supercomputers, more and more scientists are turning to a different method for their number-crunching needs: distributed supercomputing. You've probably heard of this before. Instead of relying on a single, centralized computer to perform a given task, this crowdsourced style of computing draws computational power from a distributed network of volunteers, typically by running special software on home PCs or smartphones. Individually, these volunteer computers aren't particularly powerful, but if you string enough of them together, their collective power can easily eclipse that of any centralized supercomputer -- and often for a fraction of the cost.

Read more