London: culture capital of Europe

[princealbertofb]

And the French have a terrible reputation dealing with anyone who does not speak French.

Londoner, I know they are trying hard on behalf of the fish & chips sellers and the pubs, but the article is blatant promotion. Travel is simply a matter of preference if not for business and the nice people behind the article want us to prefer London.

For those of you who may have experience in such, which has the worse traffic? Rome? Paris? Madrid? Boston? Washington, D. C., or London?

Interesting question, [MENTION=20933]LJay[/MENTION]. My knowledge of the subject will be limited as I have not set foot in Paris for a while, nor in Boston, actually. I don't know Rome nor Washington D.C. so I won't even go there, though I think Rome has a bad reputation for traffic.
In London these days, it is still difficult to go by car, but people can get by quite easily from neighbouring towns and villages through quite a complex range of means of transport. Trains, the Tube (subway), bicycles, buses and taxis are run effectively to reduce the city's car and lorry traffic. It's better than it used to be, however the trains can't always be relied on since they've been denationalised. London has been handed back to pedestrians and that's not bad even though in surface area London is much more extended than Paris, so you'd have to walk a good deal further into the suburbs even.
Means of transport in Britain and in London remain quite costly. What I liked about Madrid was that the traffic wasn't as bad as one might expect, but it is also a much smaller city than both Paris and London (about half the number of inhabitants). The transport systems in Spain are good, buses and taxis are very cheap, and you can get many rides in Madrid for the price of one ride in Paris or London. Many people don't hesitate to take public transport when it is effective and cheap. I hear that Paris remains quite engorged at times and I would not like to have to deal with the city's rush hour (which, in effect is getting pretty hopeless even in provincial areas like Lyons, Marseilles, Grenoble or Geneva.

What I remember of Boston goes back to the 1980s and it wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great either at the time. You did what you could to avoid the rush hours. When on holiday, that's no too hard to manage. Maybe Boston has also invested in a more ecological infrastructure for people to get about on bikes that you can rent. Lyons has gone that way, and I think Grenoble has too. Since you can't drive very fast in such crowded cities, nor find space to park (or at least the parking will cost you a packet) then the solution of the bike seems a good one if you don't have many miles to cover. It's pretty fast and it's quite effective. I've seen kids and adults on scooters that can get away very efficiently.