Bordeaux!

Before heading to the village, I spent a few days in Bordeaux.  Bordeaux is a stunningly beautiful city, much of its old center having been designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO a few years back.  Once the heart of global trade, it now derives much of its energy from just being beautiful and literally synonymous with wine.

This ancient center of Bordeaux is a thriving, heartbeat of a dynamic contemporary city.  Cafés abound in and around the sites -- cathedrals, plazas, shopping boulevards, public gardens, museums.  The architecture is breathtaking.  The public spaces simultaneously vast and intimate.  People from everywhere come here to walk the cobblestone and be awed by humanity's creation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bordeaux is a city of superlatives.  The world's largest reflecting pool.  Europe's longest pedestrian shopping promenade.  The globe's most extensive wine museum - La Cité du Vin.  But, I wonder if its most impressive achievement isn't Most Modes of Transportation per Metre.  Check out this 2 minute video I shot while sipping a vin rosé at a bistro a block from my rented flat.

What's fascinating to me, as someone who spent most of my career in public sector community planning endevors, is the absolute barely-controlled chaos at work everywhere in Bordeaux.  And it works.  While we toil, usually frustrated, to create "pedestrian spaces" in progressive cities like Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco -- insisting on wide sidewalks, dedicated bike lanes, traffic calming measures -- Bordeaux does not have that luxury.  It is built out.  It was built out centuries ago when people navigated these streets on foot and on horseback.  So, everyone gets thrown into the mix -- trams, cars, walkers, cyclists, motorbikes.  Everyone shares pretty much everything all the time.

There are no controls for tram tracks.  Just look both ways and don't get hit.  By a tram, a bicycle, a motorbike, taxi...

Why does it work?  I'm not sure.  But, I think it's because, rather than separating everyone out into their little lanes, their own fiefdoms, where they feel safe and, dare I suggest, entitled, tossing everyone into the sam space forces each one to be engaged.  Fully, 100% engaged with what and who is swirling around them.

I will say, anecdotally, that I've been to the Dordogne 3 times this year, Bordeaux 6 separate times, and I have yet to actually witness and accident or the aftermath of one.  Which seems incredible given how terrifying it is to this American to be in the midst of that chaos.

I think they're on to something!