Has Paris really changed?

I made two short trips to Paris this fall.

I particularly wanted to take a look at some of the changes in Paris introduced by the administration of Mayor Anne Hidalgo, which, since 2014, has garnered a huge amount of publicity for its moves to reduce the role of the automobile in the city.

I ended up being quite impressed, although I was constantly aware that most of the recent developments in Paris are part of a long-term trend. Paris has been trying to tame the automobile since at least the 1980s.

The arguments favoring this effort are essentially the same in Paris as they are in the Western world’s other major cities. Automobiles cause vast amounts of air and noise pollution (there have been some periods when Paris has had the world’s worst air) and are responsible for a substantial number of deaths and injuries (there were more than 250 automobile-related deaths and 18,000 automobile-related injuries between January and November of 2021 in Île-de-France). Accommodating the automobile requires a huge amount of urban space (roughly 50% of the surface area of Paris), while in fact trips by automobile account for only a small percentage of all urban trips (approximately 13% in Paris, where 60% of all urban journeys are made on foot).¹ Most of the inhabitants of the majority of the largest Western cities (including Paris) do not even own an automobile. It makes no sense for urban planning to continue to focus above all on obliging automobile drivers. The end result of continuing this approach would be the destruction of the traditional city (and hardly anyone since Le Corbusier back in the 1920s has wanted to destroy the old city of Paris).

In this post I share observations not just from my most recent trips to Paris but from my many other visits there over the years. I also refer to some of the materials I’ve read. I acknowledge that a short essay by an occasional visitor on a huge and complicated place like Paris can only scratch the surface.

Recent developments fall, roughly, into three categories: [1] facilities for cyclists; [2] facilities for pedestrians; and [3] restrictions on driving.

[1] Facilities for cyclists. The Hidalgo administration has been boasting—accurately—of the facilities it’s built for cyclists. There are now said to be 1000 km of bicycle paths of one sort or another in Paris. They are, in fact, quite impressive.

Many of Paris’s new bicycle lanes are fully protected. Protected lanes between parking spaces and main roads are particularly common along some of the boulevards that were created in the 19th century under the direction of Baron Haussmann.

Where parking lanes are absent, protected lanes are typically much more modest, but there are usually still barriers of one sort or another between cyclists and automobile traffic.

On narrower streets, bicycle lanes have often been painted on sidewalks, or indicated by a different kind of pavement (in a style that’s common in the German-speaking countries):

There are also numerous contraflow lanes on narrow one-way streets.

And in one case—the Rue de Rivoli—half the roadway has been given over to bicycle traffic, and, for most of the day, private cars are no longer allowed on the lanes that are still open to automobiles.

Many of the city’s protected bicycle paths are shown on the map above.

But I wonder whether newspaper stories haven’t to some degree overstated the Hidalgo regime’s contribution to Paris’s bicycle facilities.

Paris has, in fact, been trying to improve its bicycling infrastructure for several decades. I am pretty sure that I saw my first painted bicycle lane on the Rue de Rivoli in 1969. During the 1990s, the city set up several bus-and-bicycle lanes; they turned out (predictably) to work awkwardly—buses and bicycles move at different speeds and have different stop-and-go patterns—but they were an attempt to make more room for bicycles. Early in the 21st century, Paris also began to set up protected lanes for bicycles.² I took this photo from what was then called the Promenade plantée in 2004.

An important component of bicycle infrastructure in Paris has been its bike-share system. Paris was probably the first really large city to set up such a service, the Vélib’ system in 2007. The Hidalgo administration’s contribution to Vélib’ has chiefly been allowing competition, and this change has caused a great many problems. The system is now run by a different company than it was originally and goes by a new name, Vélib’ Métropole, but it’s still functioning more or less as it has for fourteen years.

Let me add that, in general, I suspect that the role of the bicycle in contemporary Paris has sometimes been exaggerated. My sense in the course of my recent trips was that the city’s bicycle lanes are not particularly crowded. When I was taking photos of them, I often had to wait a long time for a cyclist to show up. Paris’s bicycle lanes may be a bit less crowded than New York’s. Despite some newspaper stories suggesting that the city was on its way to being “Copenhagenized,” cyclists in Paris, unlike those in Copenhagen or Amsterdam, usually make up only a small percentage of those moving on its streets.³ A story in the New York Times⁴ suggested that the tendency of French cyclists not to obey traffic lights has made Paris a dangerous place for pedestrians. It was a great story, but I’m not sure that it was particularly accurate. I walked approximately 200 km on my trips to Paris this fall, crossing hundreds of streets with bicycle lanes, and I was never in any way threatened by a lawless cyclist. The New York Times story’s source was perhaps a driver annoyed by some of the new restrictions on driving (of which more below). I don’t doubt, however, that cyclists in Paris (like those elsewhere in the world) pay less attention to traffic lights than they should.

It’s pretty clear that, even if Paris’s adoption of the bicycle can be exaggerated, the city has many more cyclists than it did a few years ago. It’s said that the number of cyclists in Paris rose 79% between 2019 and 2021. There are now supposed to be a million bicycle rides a day in Paris. Some of the rise is presumably due to the fact that Covid-19 has discouraged people from using public transit, but surely part of it is also due to the very real improvements in the city’s bicycle infrastructure.

[2] Facilities for pedestrians. The Hidalgo administration has also done a great deal to increase the space allotted to pedestrians in Central Paris. It’s eliminated traffic lanes and enlarged sidewalk space in several key locations, for example around the Place de la Nation. When I was there, the new pedestrian space hadn’t been raised above street level, but bollards had been installed so that cars couldn’t enter.

The Hidalgo administration has also established the Promenade sportive végétale Nation-Stalingrad.

This is a pedestrian path now approximately 4 km long through the linear middle-of-the-street park that was constructed in eastern Paris when Métro line 2 (underground here) was built in 1903. It runs from a block north of the Place de la Nation almost to the Jaurès Métro station (despite its name, it doesn’t quite get to the Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad). The park had not been well-maintained, and barriers in many places made walking along its full length difficult. Under the Hidalgo administration, the park was renovated, traffic lights for pedestrians were added when they were lacking, some athletic equipment was installed, and signage was added.

The areas along the path include high bourgeois districts, the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and much more modest, predominantly Maghrebi areas like Belleville; it takes users on a real tour of northeastern Paris’s social geography. And, while it can’t be claimed that this park is new, it has certainly been revitalized.

The Hidalgo administration has also presided over what might be termed the recategorization of central Paris’s splendid pedestrian and bicycling paths along the Seine that replaced two one-way freeways, one on each bank. I believe this transformation is one of the few instances in Europe where a freeway was turned into pedestrian space.

These paths originated in what turned out to be exceptionally popular Sunday closings of the freeways in the 1990s (long before Hidalgo became mayor). The approximately 4-km right-bank segment, once labeled Paris-Plage (even though swimming in the Seine, a bad idea, has never been allowed), was established when Bernard Delanoë was mayor in 2007. The original Paris-Plage was joined by an additional 2.5-km segment on the left bank of the Seine called the Promenade des Berges de la Seine in 2013, also while Bernard Delanoë was mayor. The two segments were joined administratively (although not geographically) and made permanent in 2017 under the name Parc Rives-de-Seine.

Somewhat confusingly, the Parc Rives-de-Seine, together with an improved path along the Bassin de la Villette in northeast Paris, are now collectively known as Paris-Plages (plural).

There has also been a less formal and still incomplete pedestrianization of the roads along the Canal St-Martin in northeastern Paris. The above-ground portions of this canal⁵ were bordered to a considerable extent by low-key industrial and warehousing facilities and very modest housing as late as the 1980s. The area became increasingly fashionable as it was gradually gentrified, and the banks were more or less cleaned up late in the 20th century.

The Hidalgo administration has encouraged a continuation of this process, making many of the streets along the canal zones of “pedestrian priority” (and closing them completely on some Sundays) so that the area has become an excellent pedestrian corridor.

There have also been some systematic street closings throughout the city. The Champs-Élysées, for example, has been closed to motorized traffic on the first Sunday of each month as well as on other occasions. (The photo at the beginning of this post was taken on the day of a road race that started on the Champs-Élysées.) There are also many street closings for weekend markets, many of which go back some decades.

Paris has constructed many other large-scale pedestrian facilities over the years, particularly since the 1990s. The extensive pedestrianization around the Centre Pompidou and the Forum des Halles has been in place for something like thirty years.

The Coulée verte René-Dumont, a 4.7-km rail trail for pedestrians between a spot just east of the Bastille Opéra through to the Bois de Vincennes, has been open for the most part nearly as long. It was established in the late 1980s, although it wasn’t fully open until the next decade. Originally called the Promenade plantée, the western half of this corridor (the Viaduc des Arts) runs high above street level.

The eastern portion runs in a culvert.

The western half of the Coulée verte appears to have been the model for the High Line in New York (and therefore of the 606 Trail in Chicago).⁶

The Hidalgo administration’s most widely-noted goal has been to turn Paris into a “fifteen-minute city” (ville du quart d’heure), in which a fifteen-minute walk or bike ride would provide access to essential services in all parts of the city. This is a wonderfully succinct way to describe a dense, pedestrian-oriented place, but, well, I’ve known Paris fairly well since the late 1960s, and it’s been a little hard for me to believe that Paris hasn’t come close to being a fifteen-minute city for all this time. For as long as I’ve been visiting the city (but probably much longer), there have been grocery stores every few blocks in nearly every residential district in the city, and schools and clinics are widely distributed too. Paris has been a dense place for several centuries and one of the best places in the world for urban walking, and it’s, of course, the city where flânerie was first identified as a distinct activity. I acknowledge that, by keeping the fifteen-minute city concept an important goal, the Hidalgo administration may have been helping to assure that rare gaps are filled. But it was continuing a pedestrian-first policy that goes back for many decades.

[3] Limitations on traffic. The Hidalgo administration has taken several additional steps to reduce the role of the automobile in the city, some of which aren’t in any obvious way based on the work of earlier administrations. For example, as of August 30, 2021, it imposed a speed limit of 30 kph in most of the city (the Boulevard périphérique and several major arterials are exempted). This seems like an important step to all those of us who’ve wondered why drivers were allowed to go so fast on the Haussmann-era boulevards. I was under the impression in walking around Paris this fall that most drivers were obeying the new speed limits (although, since average driving speed in Paris is said to be approximately 12 kph, the speed limit may not make a huge amount of difference). The speed limit is apparently popular with most Parisians.⁷

There are also plans to ban vehicles with diesel engines from the center of Paris from 2022 onwards, and to ban vehicles with gasoline engines from 2030.

The Hidalgo administration has also tried to tame scooters by limiting their speed in many places to 10 kph on November 15, 2021 (but, as in many other cities in recent years, scooters are allowed on bicycle paths, something that strikes me as rather unfortunate). And it’s also tried to limit street parking.

Statistical evidence⁸ supports the notion that automobile use in Paris has declined considerably, even before the Covid-19 Pandemic caused it to plunge still further. This is a real victory in the many-decades-long battle against automobile dominance in large Western cities.

[4] Beyond the city of Paris. Virtually all the steps described above concern the city of Paris alone and not the city’s suburbs. Paris these days has a population of something like 2.2 million. The Paris metropolitan area has a population of between ten and thirteen million depending on where its boundary is put. (Just as is true of American urban areas, the Paris region’s limits are impossible to define with certainty.) What’s clear is that, however you define the Paris area’s limits, the great majority of its population lives in the city’s suburbs.

Even more than is the case with American urban areas, Paris’s suburbs are often considered to be the place where the region’s major problems lie. Some of these are familiar ecological problems. Even though Paris’s suburbs are generally denser and have better public transportation than American suburbs, there are still enormous areas that can only be accessed efficiently by automobile. These days, no one thinks that this is a good idea. There is also the issue that a large proportion of the region’s poorer and/or immigrant population lives in the suburbs, sometimes in modest older housing and sometimes in one of the housing projects (HLMs, habitations à loyer modéré) that were built between the 1950s and 1980s. Zones with large populations of immigrants often have problems that are comparable to those in American ghettos (although there are fewer guns and murders). There is a feeling that the inhabitants of these areas are alienated in part because they find it difficult to participate fully in the modern economy. There are many reasons for this. One of them, it is often said, is that they don’t find it easy to move freely around the region.

But middle-class inhabitants of the suburbs have transportation problems too. Car dependence for many is as complete as it is for the majority of the inhabitants of American cities. Traffic jams and the need to travel vast distances make moving around Paris’s suburbs a tiresome and inefficient activity.

These problems have led to hugely ambitious plans to change the character of Paris’s suburban areas. These are subsumed under the label “Grand Paris” (“greater Paris”). Grand Paris, the subject of many books and a huge amount of short-form writing as well, involves many things, but perhaps the most important are attempts [1] to create stronger, less automobile-oriented nodes in selected parts of the Paris suburbs and [2] to join the nodes with a series of exceptionally fast, automatic Métro lines.⁹ The longest of these is a circumferential line two to seven kilometers beyond Paris’s city limits.¹⁰ Two semi-circumferential lines further out are also planned as are a branch line to Charles de Gaulle Airport and extensions of several existing Métro lines out to meet the Grand Paris Express.

The ambitious goal is not only to improve public transportation between Paris’s sprawling suburban areas and to improve life for the suburbs’ inhabitants but also to reduce the role of the automobile in the Paris region. Because the project more or less by definition lies entirely outside the city of Paris, the office of the mayor of Paris has had little to do with it.

Most of the work of creating Grand Paris lies in the future, but it’s the very near future. The nodes have been chosen, and construction of some of the new Métro lines has begun. And, as a kind of preview of what’s to come, the suburbs have been the scene of a massive infusion of tram lines over (roughly) the last twenty years, some of which are circumferential and some of which take passengers from Métro termini further into the suburbs. The only tram lines entirely in the city of Paris—lines 3a and 3b–follow the Boulevards des Maréchaux, a series of non-freeway arterials that run for the most part just inside the city limits.

Just about all aspects of Grand Paris have been the source of debate, and plans have changed a bewildering number of times. The number of government agencies that have been involved in the project is huge, and the cost of constructing everything that’s planned is enormous.

Cynics should remember that Paris has a history dating back several centuries of coming close to finishing its grand projects. Think, for example, of Baron Haussmann’s activities in the 19th century. The RER is another, near-contemporary example of a complex project that has mostly actually been built. Its key component is a group of fantastically expensive deep tunnels under the center of Paris that join suburban railroad lines. One of these tunnels (the RER A line) traverses nearly the entire city, east to west. The RER was planned in the 1960s, and its first line opened in stages between 1969 and 1977. That is to say, it was begun during a period sometimes characterized in French planning history as an era of “tout automobile,” when urban development in France chiefly involved figuring out ways to accommodate the automobile. The RER was developed despite the emphasis elsewhere in France on planning for cars, and it’s continued to grow—slowly!—in the decades since. The Grand Paris Express is in many ways a continuation of the same large-scale planning process out into the suburbs.

Whether the Grand Paris Express will accomplish its goal of reducing automobile usage remains to be seen. It’s pretty easy to be cynical. There really aren’t many (or perhaps any) cases where an automobile-oriented area has been transformed into one that’s genuinely pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly and significantly less automobile-dependent. But Paris may be in a better position to move in this direction than anyplace else in the world.