The car-free Boulevard F.D. Roosevelt in Luxembourg-City will remain an utopia…

… because it is impossible to completely push back the car traffic so deeply entangled in the infrastructure of the historic center of the fortress. So, are the now revealed plans for the boulevard Roosevelt good or bad news for the active transportation community? Well, a fair and nuanced answer to that question can only look at specific details, while putting the whole project into the broader context of other works around the tram.

9 min readAug 24, 2019

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The news of the day in active transportation on 22 August 2019:

Table of content of this post:
- The broader context around Boulevard Roosevelt
- Remodeling Boulevard F.D. Roosevelt
- Errors and flaws that will (or could probably) be made now will probably have a long life
- Boulevard Roosevelt will not be car-free. But will it even be traffic appeased?
- Conclusion

The broader context around Boulevard Roosevelt

The existing situation on Boulevard Roosevelt was not perfect, but bike lanes already existed. The new plans should at least not be less good.

So this traffic changes in the Centre of City Luxembourg came as a start in July 2019:

For the broader context, here is a summary of what is known about other projects and works in the neighbourhood of boulevard Roosevelt:

Future Avenue de la Liberté (Spring 2020). We know that this is only a simulation, but we notice that there are no physical separators between cars and bikes.

Future Boulevard Royal with tram.

Bike paths on future Boulevard royal, if any are planned there, do remain an unresolved mystery.

Avenue de la Liberté and Boulevard Royal are currently being remodeled for the tram line. At least Avenue de la Liberté will receive a bidirectional bicycle path.

Passerelle/Viaduc is being enlarged to secure existence of a bicycle path linking Avenue de la Gare with Boulevard Roosevelt.

Vallée de la Pétrusse will be remodeled for major gardening exhibition #Luga2023 in a few years. It is officially planned to install an elevator between the valley and the Place de la Constitution.

Remodeling Boulevard F.D. Roosevelt

What has now been revealed about the plans on remodeling Boulevard F.D. Roosevelt can be summarized as follows:

A bidirectional bicycle path will be installed. It will replace the existing bike lanes on each side of the boulevard.
To take into account the several underground parking facilities in the historic center, that bidirectional bicycle path will be installed on the opposite side of the boulevard, away from the parking access lanes. This will reduce conflict potential with car drivers, while unfortunately increasing probability of collisions with other walking and biking people.
There will be bidirectional public transportation by bus on the Boulevard Roosevelt and therefore that boulevard will be equipped with reserved lanes in both directions. This is a consequence of the fact that no buses will circulate on the Avenue de la Liberté anymore once the tram line will be operated.

The bidirectional bike path is on the sidewalk. No physical separation with the bus stop.

Bus stops will be remade to be suitable for everyone (wheel chairs accessibility etc.).
There will still be bidirectional regular car traffic, but it looks like one of the two car lanes going in direction of boulevard Royal will be sacrificed. Parking spaces along Boulevard Roosevelt will also be sacrificed, which is not a small thing (cf. electoral promises of Serge Wilmes).
While it is true that the Boulevard Roosevelt will not be car-free, the Place de la Constitution will be! This was not a scoop anymore, but the effort to push back car traffic turns out to be more than just empty promises.

At a first look, this all sounds fabulous. To be fair, it mostly is.

Nevertheless, there are some flaws that can already be spotted. It is also fair to point them out, as a remodeling of infrastructure like described above is a once in a generation thing.

The street-front of Café Independent on Boulevard Roosevelt was featured in 2016 as Twitter header photo of @luxembourgize. Minister Bausch announced that it never had an authorization and is now poised to disappear to make room for bidirectional bike path.

Errors and flaws that will (or could probably) be made now will probably have a long life

Here is a list with some, let’s say “question marks”:

The computer simulations for remodeled Boulevard Roosevelt plans did not cover the part close to Boulevard Royal: will it remain unchanged?

Bidirectional bike paths are not the best possible solution. We all know from the “Roud Bréck” that bidirectional paths, if not large enough for the bike traffic volume they have to accommodate during rush hours, can quickly bring you into dangerous situations or at least require riders to constantly do slaloming. Now, this last remark is especially true in the case of a path situated in a descent like it will be the case on Boulevard Roosevelt before the Passerelle/Viaduc: some biking people will ride at elevated speeds. That is a fact. Minor errors by walking people or people riding up hill can lead to severe collisions. Will this all be safe enough?

This part of the bike path is in a descent, in which higher speed can easily be reached. This raises questions about safety, as the bidirectional path is rather narrow. It can also be doubted that bollards are the safest option as a physical separator. This single parking slot is of no help.

To install a bidirectional bike path on one side of the boulevard requires that biking people will have to cross the boulevard at very specific points to reach destinations on the other side. How big will the temptation be to take “shortcuts” saving meters and waiting time at crossing points?

Bike detour to access to Cité judiciaire for people coming from Gare or heading there looks interesting. Will some be tempted to do shortcuts?

The bike access to the Cité judiciaire looks especially confusing on the plans now revealed. Will we see a surge in dangerous “jaywalking” there?

Biking people will be mixed with walking people at this crossing point in front of cathedral. This picture does not explain how biking people coming from the Rue Notre-Dame will have to ride.

Will that bidirectional bicycle path at the end of the day not be too confusing for some biking people? At some spots, bikers (tourists on Vel’oH e.g.) could end up biking against traffic.

Bike access to Cité judiciaire for people coming from Gare looks complicated. The paint on the road surface of the entire place looks like a traffic garden: will this be enough to slow down car traffic? Or will we witness frontal collisions of speeding cars there?

Biking people will have to wait at crossing points on Boulevard Roosevelt, using beg buttons to get green light and watching cars (driving to parkings) and buses rush past them. We are not speaking about some anonymous arterial road in the suburbs, but about the historic center of this capital. Can this all seriously be considered as a transportation paradigm shift in the center of Luxembourg? Especially when one considers that Boulevard Royal is poised to remain mostly a no biking zone?
Suppressing car parking on Place de la Constitution is one thing. Not defining an alternative spot for tourists buses coming to the center of City Luxembourg is another one: shouldn’t those buses have the right to get as close to the center as the cars going to the underground parking? The logic behind this decision is not entirely clear for the moment.
Will bikes be allowed to cycle up Rue de la Congrégation, a shortcut to the Center?

Boulevard Roosevelt will not be car-free. But will it even be traffic appeased?

Generally spoken, the car will still dominate the Boulevard Roosevelt. In the Netherlands some cities were more courageous in their accommodation of cars. In s’Hertogenbosch e.g., cars mostly have to stay outside the fortress walls.

To be fair, one must take into account that the topographical situation of the ancient fortress Luxembourg is barely comparable to the conditions in the Netherlands. It is hard to imagine where massive additional parking facilities close to the center (without being full center) could be implemented. So, getting rid of existing underground parking in the center itself is not an option on the table.

The remodeled Boulevard Roosevelt will remain a car traffic magnet for those heading to underground parking. But it should be a goal to eliminate cars circling around to find a parking slot. Imagine a system where parking card holders would have to stop in front of a retractable bollard before even entering Boulevard Roosevelt. Tourists would of course have a separate lane to buy their parking ticket. That would be a real traffic appeased solution with less potential for collisions with the tram on the crossing Boulevard Royal/Boulevard Roosevelt. Mark my words.

To announce a car-free place de la Constitution is one thing. That will not change the fact that in the past years City of Luxembourg did not hesitate to put massive concrete blocks on the existing bike path during Christmas market partly established on that place, forcing biking people to ride in car traffic of Boulevard Roosevelt during one of the most dangerous times of the biking year.

The car-free Place de la Constitution is at least a ray of light.

Elevator planned on Place de la Constitution to link Valley of Pétrusse with historical center would of course benefit biking people coming from Hollerich/Merl.

Unfortunately, reality is that Boulevard Roosevelt will still be a place of drive through traffic. As a compensation, it would be really nice if that small public space in the Rue des Bains would get a car-free treatment as soon as possible.

Rue des Bains: compare how much space is taken away by a few parked cars and then count the people waiting at the bus stop!

Compared to a car-free Boulevard Roosevelt, as envisioned by the LVI, suppressing a few parking slots in the Rue des Bains would be very easily feasible, while this would improve quality of life for many.

To conclude this blog post, it has to be clearly stated, despite the “ergonomic” critics written above, that the center of City Luxembourg will at the end of the works not have one, but two bike path connections with Quartier Gare: one using Pont Adolphe, the other one using Passerelle/Viaduc. This was never guaranteed in a not so long ago past. We have to remember that minister Bausch took decisions making this possible.

Conclusion

The glass is not half empty, it is half full. Are the proposed plans perfect for biking people, in the sense of exemplary compared to international standards emerging in other cities giving highest priority to active transportation? Certainly not. Would there be a realistic alternative to what is now planned to do it better? As a non-specialist in mobility planning, the writer of this post can only pass on the question to the specialists.

Should biking community now be unhappy about the plans? Not really. Nevertheless, every detail in the execution of the works and in the safe usability later will hugely matter. To eliminate possibilities for cars to illegally park where they want and to make sure that there are no avoidable points where cars can enter into collision with biking people will make the difference.

The point in LVI’s car-free vision of Boulevard Roosevelt was to transform it into an open place where people could have moved freely around and even stayed for some time. Cars would not even have been allowed there anymore. The problem is, implementing this would have in reality turned Rue Notre-Dame, the obvious underground parking access path, into a nightmare. And there would have been no solution for bus traffic, which is still needed too.

So, from the point of view of active transportation (walking/biking), this is probably the biggest deception in the now planned evolution: instead of allowing people to freely move around, the remodeled Boulevard Roosevelt will still require everyone (including walking and biking people) to stick to precise lanes, paths and rules just to accommodate the car traffic. Rules like in the military world. For a famous old fortress like Luxembourg, this does perhaps make sense after all. Sort of. The important thing is that safe bike access will be provided. The soon to be car-free Place de la Constitution will at least make LVI’s vision partly a reality. But only if City of Luxembourg immediately stops its habit of putting massive concrete blocks on the existing bike path, like they already did during Christmas market in the past years.

@luxembourgize is a cycling advocate on Twitter.

Disclaimer: the opinions expressed by the author of this post can be incomplete, debatable or even wrong. If necessary, this post will be edited to correct or to add new elements based on reader’s feedback.

Full disclosure: the author, who also owns a car, only bikes in this city. His opinions can therefore of course be biased “pro-bike”, while recognizing that going full “anti-car” is probably not realistic in Luxembourg-City and too radical. The conclusion has been edited on Sunday, 25 August 2019 (one day after release of blog post). A “question mark” about Rue de la Congrégation has also been added. The case of the concrete blocks on the bike path during Christmas market has been inserted.

Explore the following hash tags for more background information and news updates: #BoulevardRooseveltLux #BoulevardRoyalLux #AvenuedelaGareLux #LuxAvenueLibertéVelo #PontAdolphe #PasserelleLux