Return to the river
As cities beautify and expand public spaces, the role of the river remains a vital one.
Much has been said about the spectacular restoration of the Seine to its central place in the life of Paris, first by the return of the riverbanks to their rightful role as public spaces, and then by the remarkable cleanup of the river itself, an effort that predates (but was accelerated by) the Olympic Games.1 If the Seine was the birthplace of this great city, it was not always treated with the respect it deserved. Today, though, most of the freeways that once surrounded the waters have been removed, and it’s once again a gathering place that feels worthy of the 2,000-year history of the city that rose from its banks.
Every city with a river treats theirs a little differently, mostly reflecting the socioeconomic trajectory of the city itself: heavy industry pollutes, then declines, and a rebirth (or, at least, a rethinking) of healthy public space follows.
Here’s Budapest, for example. The city is pleasant for walking, but that mostly ends at the Danube front, which remains largely straitjacketed by busy roadways and barriers. The waterway is a conduit for traffic, and the city is mostly cut off from it, as is the case in so many American cities (and was the case in Paris until recently). There are some bike paths, but the actual connection points between the city and its river are few and far between.
I grew up in a much smaller city than Paris and Budapest which also straddles the reaches of a great river. Maybe the constant presence of the upper Mississippi in my childhood is why I’m forever drawn to water, especially when it flows. If I’m in a city with a river, I almost always head there straight away, often with my running shoes on.
In Budapest, a run found me on Margaret Island, which is mostly a shaggy but well-loved park that positively bustled with life on the mild day I visited. The island was encircled by a rubber-coated running track, which was a dream for the joints, and a spectacular iron bridge at one end shaded an open-air gym that afforded wonderful views across the Danube to the city.
The river was directly accessible from the park, and people flocked to it, as they do in Paris, where few barriers stand between us and the storied waters of the Seine. It’s tough to imagine that in some American cities, where a litigious culture means we often view great waterways from behind fences or other barriers.
Like the Seine, the Danube in Budapest is still a working river. The modern reality of both cities is that most stuff arrives by truck, but spend a little time in either city and you’ll soon see barges, often transporting raw material to larger downriver ports.
It used to be the same in the United States, too. But waterborne freight volume went down significantly as trucking became cheaper and easier, a decline encouraged by America’s lavish public subsidies for highways and roadbuilding of all kinds. That’s a shame, because river transportation offers big cost and environmental advantages. A single river barge can carry as much freight as 250 trucks can, and do it using 80% less fuel and emitting 60% less carbon. Barges usually travel in packs, so another way to think of it is this: a fifteen-barge float can do the work of over a thousand trucks at a fraction of the financial and carbon cost. There’s just no more efficient way to move people and things from here to there than by water.
Of course, river transportation is slower, and that’s the big challenge in an era when people want to order a toothbrush from the internet and have it at their door this afternoon. A world built on trucking has let us expect anything and everything, as soon as possible, without lifting more than a finger. But that just-in-time commercial culture eats up endless acres of land for large-scale distribution centers, and all those trucks create chaos when they penetrate our cities.
There’s some hope from this side of the pond. Companies like Ikea and Franprix already bring a significant share of their goods up the Seine from Le Havre to Paris before distributing them on trucks throughout the Paris region. That still clogs up the Paris region with heavy-duty transport, but it’s a good step toward making more efficient use of our natural systems and reducing the destructive impacts of trucking on our air, landscapes, and cities.2
I liked the scruffy charm of Budapest in general and that river island in particular. It was a good reminder that cities aren’t there to look pretty; they’re there to be used and lived in. The purpose of cities was first to protect us, but turned out to be one of humankind's best inventions to help us prosper; cities are just so efficient at bringing resources and ideas together. And, when cities are planned with smart transportation systems and ecologically sound land uses in mind, and make sustainable use of their natural assets, they can help us preserve green spaces and clean air.3 The barges of Budapest and Paris remind us that sometimes the best ideas are the old ones, and the way things were done before might become the future’s cutting edge.
For an interesting, recent (post-Olympics) discussion about the Seine cleanup, listen to Mary Winston Nicklin discuss her National Geographic cover story on the topic with Lindsey Tramuta on The New Paris Podcast.
The New York Times published a wonderful exploration of shipping on the Seine and the possibilities for a more sustainable future for the Paris region. It has some great images, too.
Despite the fuel and carbon advantages relative to trucking, the full environmental picture of waterborne transport is—as it almost always is—more complicated. River transportation usually requires lock-and-dam systems that can disrupt river ecosystems, and commercial use of waterways still pollutes (as does every other form of large-scale modern transportation). This piece by Politico covers some of the environmental and other considerations that challenge an American reexpansion of riverborne freight infrastructure. The reality is that we will need a mix of transportation options, and for all of those options to be cleaner, and that we will need big vision and transformative action to change our land use and consumption patterns in ways that favor the cleanest and most resource-efficient transportation options.
Love this: “The barges of Budapest and Paris remind us that sometimes the best ideas are the old ones, and the way things were done before might become the future’s cutting edge.”