Dispute over Paris’s crusade against cars comes to a boil with slashed speed limits
This article was written by Allan Woods and was published in the Toronto Star on November 24, 2024.
Hell hath no fury like a driver scorned.
Take the trafficchoked French capital as an example, where an attempt to reduce vehicle collisions, gridlock, emissions and noise on a highway encircling Paris has provoked a headon political crash.
The longsimmering dispute over what many see as Paris’s crusade against cars has come to a boil over a controversial decision to slash speed limits on a 35kilometre highway known as la périphérique.
In some ways, it is the European equivalent of the fight between Toronto, the most congested city in North America, and the carfriendly Ontario government, which wants to tear up the city’s bike lanes and build a tunnel beneath Highway 401 to ease gridlock.
In one lane is Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo.
In a measure intended to cut noise, pollution, traffic jams and accidents on the Paris ring road she recently ordered speed limits reduced to 50 km/h from 70 km/h.
It’s one step along the path to a more extreme transformation that reimagines the carsandconcrete highway as a boulevard shared by buses, bikes and bipeds.
In the opposite lane is a convoy of irate suburban commuters, motorcyclists, professional drivers like cabbies and truckers, and opposition politicians.
They are now charting lawsuits, legislation and political campaigns, arguing that Hidalgo’s anticar policies have now swerved recklessly across the median line.
“What is very different with the 50 km/h (speed limit) compared to the other anticar measures in Paris is that this affects many more people who did not vote for her, who did not choose her as their representative and who are deeply opposed,” said Alexandra Legendre, a spokesperson with the Drivers’ Defence League, a group that lobbies
Gridlock, noise and emissions
The Paris ring road was built on the site of fortifications erected around the French capital in 1844 and torn down in 1919 at the end of the First World War. More than three decades later, work began on the circular highway intended to liberate drivers from the evils of traffic jams, letting them reach their destinations without having to negotiate the hustle and bustle of central Paris.
“In a few days, getting around Paris without meeting a single red light will no longer be a dream,” a television announcer proclaimed ahead of the completion of the final section of the loop in 1973. Yet the work had barely been completed when complaints of peakhour traffic jams and overuse by suburban commuters began. Other, more serious problems soon appeared.
Noise from the fastmoving cars has long been a nuisance for the 500,000 residents who live next to the highway and is believed to be linked to health problems, such as sleep loss, cardiovascular problems and stress, according to the World Health Organization.
And the 1.3 million cars that use it each day are responsible for about a third of Paris’s total emissions of nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, according to Airparif, an agency that tracks air quality in the greater Paris region. Naturally, there are also accidents, albeit very few fatalities, perhaps owing to the highway’s congestion, which keeps daytime speeds to a little over 30 km/h.
To tackle these issues, officials have, over the years, installed sound barriers to cut the noise levels. In 2014, reduced the maximum speed on the highway to 70 km/h from 80 — a measure that experts said had positive effects on emissions entering the atmosphere as well as the fluidity of traffic.
Car wars
This was the same year that Hidalgo, a member of France’s Socialist Party, was chosen as mayor and launched what her opponents say has been a frontal attack against cars and drivers.
Over a decade in power, she has shut down express lanes on the banks of the Seine River, reduced the number of downtown parking spaces, converted car lanes to bike lanes and pedestrianized city streets.
Just recently, her administration designated the central core of downtown a limited traffic zone — barring through traffic by drivers seeking to quickly cut from one end of the city to the other. without an express purpose such as a medical appointment, tickets to a show, or getting to work.
Residents have long grumbled about the inconveniences caused by Hidalgo’s car wars. However, when the collective joy of last summer’s Olympic Games dissipated and she announced that the city would be moving forward with a longplanned cut to the speed limit on the city’s ring road, many saw it as a step too far.
“They’ve put in place a policy where cars are excluded, but there has been nothing to compensate for the absence of cars,” said Séverine Manna, a Paris lawyer preparing a legal challenge to the 50 km/h speed limits.
She said city officials haven’t done the necessary studies to back up the new limits. She added that the restrictions have not been accompanied by a more robust public transport system to give people alternative ways to get to and from Paris in a timely manner.
“They’re telling people: `There are no more cars — get used to it,’ ” Manna said. “We are all ecologists in our souls but there are times when there are realities that are not being heard.”
Others have complained that Paris failed to consult with neighbouring municipalities before taking a decision that has a great impact on commuters from the suburbs.
A regional elected official, Valérie Pécresse, has deemed the new speed limits “antisocial and ineffective” and urged Hidalgo to instead install sound barriers along the ring road or turn over responsibility for the road to the region.
In addition to the war of words, a statistical battle has broken out.
The city has started releasing a weekly bulletin showing drops in nighttime noise, traffic jams and accidents — though no significant reduction in emissions.
In response, Pécresse ordered her own officials to begin tracking noise, pollution and traffic indicators along the route. The initial findings for the month of October show reductions in every category, including pollution.
`Traffic evaporation’
Paris is hardly alone in wanting to transform its infrastructure to make it safer, greener or more amenable to the people who live and work in its vicinity.
New York, Barcelona, Helsinki, Vancouver and many other cities around the world have all questioned the sustainability and uses of highways built for an era when the car was king and the environment was an afterthought. Before opting to rehabilitate and modernize the Gardiner Expressway Toronto, too, flirted with the idea of dismantling or burying its main easttowest highway as a way to reconnect the city with its waterfront.
The evangelists of highway transformation see no alternatives.
“The question is: can we imagine that our highways remain as they are? We’re in a very deep climate crisis,” said Paul Lecroart, a senior urban planner for the Paris Metropolitan Region. “The question is how can we do things faster.”
Lecroart acknowledges that fear and the inconvenience of adopting new habits plays a big role in the public resistance to such largescale change. The key to success is to provide readymade alternatives and demonstrate their benefits.
The main one, in Lecroart’s estimation, is “traffic evaporation.”
“People give up on movements that are less useful,” he said.
The shining example is South Korea, where 80 per cent of automobile traffic disappeared after the mayor of Seoul decided to demolish the sixkilometre Cheonggyecheon Expressway, reclaiming and rehabilitating the stream that ran beneath the highway as a public space.
In other cities, Lecroart said, traffic dropped between 20 and 25 per cent due to people opting instead for public transport.
“They are never forced. We’re in a liberal system where everyone can do what they want. People can take their car downtown, but either we encourage it, (or) we discourage it,” he said.
Construction ahead
Paris hasn’t completely laid out its longterm vision for la périphérique, perhaps for fear of raising the ire of its fourwheeled adversaries. But the French capital also has likeminded allies too.
In the eastern suburbs, officials have drawn up a rather extreme plan to overhaul a sixlane highway that ushers motorists into and out of central Paris. It’s a slowmotion transformation that starts with the installation of dedicated publictransit lanes in 2026, continues with lowered speed limits in 2032 and cutting the space for cars by half in 2040. The project concludes in 2050 with a road — one lane moving at 30 km/h in either direction — in something resembling a nature park, surrounded by reclaimed and reforested land, bike paths, and picnic tables.
Gaylord Le Chequer, a city councillor in Montreuil, said the initial reaction of residents was surprise and, for some, hostility — the sense that they were being deprived of something or punished.
“For us, it’s important not to be seen as punishing people but to demonstrate, going step by step, that the transformations are useful — notably from an environmental perspective — and that they are possible,” he said.
“Whether you are right or left … there is a movement that is growing to say on behalf of the residents who live in proximity to this infrastructure, that we have real problems and so it’s time to act.”
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