Riding Le Tube Cycling goes underground in style in Lyon Cycle-friendly innovation is back in style in Lyon. France’s second city’s Vélo’v bikeshare scheme blazed the trail for Vélib in Paris, London’s ‘Boris bikes’ and a host
A different sort of hill view
of other public cycle hire initiatives. Now Le Tube, a new tunnel, gives cyclists, pedestrians and buses their own 2km carfree route beneath the hilly Croix-Rousse. This is no dark, drab or dingy underpass: far from it. Le Tube is a kind of continuous art experience, with sound effects and projected images combining to create a fantasy realm of light. It accommodates three lanes of traffic – a two-way cycle track and sidewalk for pedestrians, as well as a bus lane separated from foot and bike traffic. However, its green sheen is slightly tarnished by exhaust from diesel buses, with potential hybrid replacements still only at the trial stage. The ancillary tunnel that has been developed into Le Tube had to be built due to regulations introduced after the 1999 Mont Blanc tunnel fire; the Croix Rousse road tunnel, which runs parallel, was opened in 1952 and didn’t meet with the new safety requirements. The
Greater Lyon area had the option to build a tube which would serve solely as an escape route from the existing tunnel, but decided to see it as an opportunity to create an innovative new piece of urban infrastructure. It claims it is the longest tunnel in the world dedicated to ‘soft’ modes of transport. Le Tube cost a total of €282.8 million to build, and was opened to the public on 5 December 2013. “This is a world first, and just like with the Festival of Lights [a long-standing annual event, also held in December], we will soon be imitated”, Lyon mayor Gérard Collomb told the assembled French media. It’s not quite the first tunnel of its kind, however: the Tyne Cyclist and Pedestrian Tunnel, which runs for 270m under the River Tyne, opened in 1951. Now Grade II-listed, it’s closed for refurbishment until August 2014, so cyclists seeking an underground ride better head to Lyon for the time being. – Roger East
Underground heating A journey on the London Underground is hot and sticky at the best of times. Now, a waste heat recovery scheme hopes to make it worth the sweat by finding good homes for all excess warmth. The unnamed scheme – which has received £2.7 million funding from Islington Council and a further £1 million from the European Union – will capture excess heat from a vent at a Northern line station. From there it will be piped into the council’s Bunhill Heat and Power Centre, which already captures secondary heat generated by a local power station, using it to warm 700 homes in the borough. The added heat from the Underground will provide warmth for a further 500 properties. The project is part of CELSIUS, an EUwide initiative dedicated to implementing practical solutions to smart city heating and cooling. By putting a low-cost and readily available source of heat to good use, the scheme offers a smart response to rising energy price rises and brings a fresh perspective to the growing debate around how best to tackle fuel poverty as winter sets in. “Recovering waste heat and using it to warm incoming air or water can significantly
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Green Futures January 2014
improve the efficiency of boilers, heat pumps and [other] equipment”, explains Paul Huggins, Associate Director of The Carbon Trust. Similar projects have been launched on a smaller scale in Stockholm and Paris. The latter saw heat transferred via a staircase; Paris Habitat, the social housing organisation behind it, said that the project wouldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for this feature, as it would have been too costly to build passages to convey the heat from the metro to the 17 flats. The London scheme provides a further indication that the technology can be replicated successfully. The city hopes to see a 60% drop in CO2
emissions by 2025, and Islington Council expects the scheme to reduce emissions by 500 tonnes a year. According to Huggins, research by the Trust “has shown that for [a majority] of industrial processes recovering waste heat can reduce sector-level carbon emissions by between 3-7%”. He says that “each year between 10-40TWh is lost from industrial processes alone [and] to put that into context 40TWh is roughly what the entire food, drink and tobacco manufacturing industries in this country uses annually”. He believes emissions could be reduced by 750,000 tonnes a year, a process that further schemes to capture excess heat would help to speed along. – Rich McEachran
Feeling the heat in more ways than one
Photos: Clement Saunier/Flickr; ultraforma/iStockphoto
Warming homes with excess heat from London’s Tube