Le Figaro Lyon
Bruno Bernard, the environmentalist president of the metropolis of Lyon, presented the evolution of traffic and mobility in 2023. According to data taken from the 1,167 road counting points in the territory, traffic fell by 17.5% in the hypercenter of the city, 9.5% on the ring road and 3.9% on the expressways (ring road, A43, M6, M7) since 2019.
Still according to community figures, travel times between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. have not really changed between 2018 and 2023. In other words, traffic jams are not more numerous today than before. Covid.
“The reduction in space for automobiles has led to the evaporation of part of the traffic
,” estimated Fabien Bagnon, the vice-president in charge of active mobility and roads.
Works, change in transport habits, difficult at this stage to precisely define the reasons for these falls even if the environmentalist president of Greater Lyon believes that the reduction in the number of lanes is bearing fruit:
“We show that the increase in the number of ways to reduce traffic jams is a myth.
It never worked.
Today, traffic is decreasing and traffic jams are not increasing
.
Bruno Bernard also assured that the objective of his majority
“was not to increase traffic congestion”
, but to
“reduce the use of individual cars”
.
The latter, however, explained that road works, already very present in the metropolis, will increase in 2024 and 2025 and warned that this would create
“traffic problems”
.
Read alsoLyon on the podium of the most congested cities... but traffic jams are decreasing
Fewer accidents
According to the figures presented this Wednesday by the vice-president, the drop in traffic - but also in speed (many cities in the metropolis of Lyon having become
"30 km/h cities"
) - was accompanied by a drop in the number of accidents and serious injuries.
1,576 road accidents were recorded in the territory in 2023, compared to 1,815 in 2022 and 2,186 in 2019. At the same time, 300 serious injuries were recorded, i.e. 15 fewer than in 2022, 49 fewer than in 2022. 2021 and even 482 less than in 2017.
Concerning other forms of mobility, the number of bicycle users has increased by almost 7% since 2022 and by 53.8% compared to 2019. At the same time, the use of public transport has decreased by 1.8%. and that of the car by 9.7% compared to the last year before Covid.
On Monday, Greater Lyon adopted its new Bicycle plan worth 500 million euros with the objective of tripling travel on two wheels by 2026.