— By former BikePortland Assistant Editor, Lisa Caballero
I’m in Geneva, Switzerland, on vacation with my husband, but I can’t stop thinking about Portland. That’s because every time I see a nice bike or pedestrian facility, which is constantly, my mind races back to our own efforts to make Portland safer, greener and more livable.
Geneva is a wealthy city, with enviable pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and it has already successful transitioned away from car dependence. So it’s exciting to be here, and to be reminded that Portland gets a lot of things right.
On the other hand, I can’t help but bemoan all our plastic wands and paint.
The design elements aren’t so different between the two cities — the protected bike lanes, lane narrowing and road diets — it’s just that Geneva uses permanent materials and makes bolder changes. No half-measures or timidity here. So I’m writing this post as encouragement — you’re on the right track Portland, go for it! But also as a gentle kick in the butt.
Join me if you will, for a photo tour of some first-rate infrastructure. I’m also throwing in a little history too, because Geneva wasn’t always like this. How it went from being a city overrun by cars to where it is today shows that the transition is possible, not easy or cheap, but possible.
Bike lanes
I can’t pass one of these parking-protected facilities without thinking about the Broadway bike lane debacle. Geneva has parking-protected bike lanes all over, other cities do too. So Portland isn’t doing anything unusual or experimental by installing them — parking-protected bike lanes have become standard fare.
And look at how unapologetic Geneva is about reclaiming a whole lane from cars. The width of those cycle tracks in the first photo is generous. Nothing about them reads as temporary or added-on, they are an integral part of the street.
As you can see in the map above, the Geneva area has built a network of cycle tracks (shown as solid pink and orange lines). I don’t know when it dates from, but in 2018 a national initiative passed which required cantons (states) to plan and build connected bike networks, and the Swiss government to build “quality” bike facilities on 500 km of federal roads.
Closing streets
Councilor Mitch Green lit up the BikePortland comments a few weeks ago with talk about closing streets. There are many ways to do that, and Geneva uses most of them. Once you become attuned, you can find repurposed streets and parking lots all over the city.
Europe wasn’t always like Europe: some history
I can hear it from all the way across the ocean: “But Portland isn’t ___.” Fill in the blank [Paris, Milan, Geneva].
I understand that. But what many folks might not realize is that, not so long ago, those European cities were overrun by automobiles. (Remember Art Buchwald? He was mostly before my time too, but he had a joke: “Why are there so many churches in Paris? So you can pray before crossing the street.”)
Corny jokes aside, I took my first trips to Europe with my husband in the 1990s, from Manhattan, and I can tell you that car traffic at that time felt more threatening in Paris and Geneva than in New York City. And things weren’t that great in pre-Bloomberg NYC either.
Geneva tore out its tram network in the 50s and 60s. In the 70s, in the name of urban renewal, it razed entire neighborhoods. It also widened streets to accommodate cars. Europe surely had its own version of Robert Moses.
The rue de Carouge
For me, the rue de Carouge represents an inflection point, a specific location where the pursuit of modernity finally came to a halt. You can see it in this photo:
Notice the inconsistency in building setbacks? The street was slated for widening; in anticipation, the city required bigger setbacks for new buildings (the old buildings were to be torn down).
But the widening never happened. And all that’s left to mark the beginning of what has turned out to be a significant urban design course correction is this jagged line of façades. (There should be a commemorative plaque or something.)
The other cool thing about the rue de Carouge is that it carries the only original tram line that Geneva didn’t tear out. The last one standing. Apparently too many people used it to stop the service.
That’s all about to change, though, because Geneva has already broken ground on it’s big new plans for the street: it’s soon to be the heart of a car-free zone. Here are the current and future street cross sections:
The rue de Carouge is one of the main retail districts through Geneva, comparable to Hawthorne, Division or NW 23rd. Can you imagine if Portland closed a half-mile of those streets to cars?
Why Geneva can get tough on cars
After its last tram deinstallation in 1969, Geneva, at great expense, began building a new tram network in the 1980s. It expanded its trolley-bus network also.
Having a good public transportation system has let the city put policies in place to discourage car use:
- Geneva doesn’t seem to have any free parking.
- The city heavily taxes car ownership based on vehicle age and weight, with no income accommodation. (A friend of ours who owns an old car pays over $1,000 a year in city tax.)
- Additionally, residents pay around $200 for a blue zone residential parking permit.
- The city has removed a shocking number parking spaces.
Tear down those signals!
As a result, there is a noticeable drop in the number of moving cars through the city. Like in Manhattan, residents who own cars mainly use them for getting out of town on the weekend, not for commuting or errands — so there are many perma-parked cars, and it is difficult to find a parking space.
With so much less car traffic, Geneva has taken the bold step of removing traffic signals at some intersections. It looks chaotic — and maybe it is — but crossing at one of these decommissioned intersections feels pretty comfortable.
I like the intersections where they have removed the signal and replaced it with a painted circle to indicate a round-about. Drivers appear to respect the paint.
Traffic fatalities
I’m not going to look for historical data to try to establish a correlation between reduced number of cars and traffic deaths, but the Geneva area presently has few traffic fatalities. I can’t find statistics for just the city (which has less than a third of the population of Portland anyway) but the Canton of Geneva has about the same population as Portland, so I’ll use the state numbers.
In 2023, the canton saw 13 traffic deaths, nine of them on two wheels: four cyclists, three scooterists; two motorcyclists; one car driver, one passenger, and two pedestrians.
In 2024, it was one cyclist, three motorcyclists, three scooterists, two people in cars, and four pedestrians. Of the pedestrians, two were hit by trams.
Geneva characterizes these numbers as “stable, but high.”
Here’s Portland in 2024 according to BikePortland’s Fatality Tracker: 67 deaths in total, nine motorcyclists, five cyclists, twenty-six pedestrians and twenty-four people in cars.
I’ll let you chew on those numbers yourselves, I‘ve got to wrap this post up. I wouldn’t have been able to write it without my husband, who is from Geneva and knows the city like the back of his hand. I’ve relied on his memory in a couple of places, and fact-checked him where I could. To him, and the friends and family who shared their transportation experiences with me, thank you.
