How Paris Kicked out the Cars

In Paris, cars once represented a rising standard of living and industrial strength—the purring incarnation of the Trente Glorieuses after World War II. Spared damage during the war and growing rapidly afterward, French cities were particularly unprepared for rapid car ownership, but planners did everything they could. A postwar highway program wove a web of highways in the Paris region in the 1960s and ’70s, including the highway on the banks of the Seine (completed in 1967, later the site of Princess Diana’s fatal car crash) and the Périphérique ring road (completed in 1973), with arteries from the provinces converging on the city limits like spokes on a hub. The suburban highway network has continued to develop since.

Inside the capital, those projects were recognized as the most significant changes since the Baron Haussmann built his famous boulevards a century earlier. “We must adapt Paris both to the lives of Parisians and to the needs of the automobile,” President Georges Pompidou, whose name adorned the riverbank expressway, proclaimed in 1971. The 1976 film C’était un rendez-vous shows automotive Paris nearing its apex, as Claude Lelouch careens down the boulevards at dawn in his Mercedes 450SEL 6.9, hitting 120 miles an hour on his way to meet a woman on the steps below the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. In 1990 more than half of Parisian households owned a car—a higher rate than in New York City, and comparable to San Francisco. The French capital still has almost twice as many households with cars as Manhattan does.

But French planners got a later start than their American counterparts. Before Paris could be carved up by expressways, resistance mounted over the familiar objections that also characterized highway revolts in the United States: destruction, displacement, pollution, the oil crisis. These protests were nested in a trio of nascent trends: the rise of environmentalism, the historic preservation movement, and the early waves of gentrification.

By the 1990s, anti-car forces were playing offense. In 1996 came Paris Breathes, a series of periodic street closures on Sundays and holidays. In 1998 the city opened Métro Line 14—the first new subway in more than 60 years, and the first of a blitz of transit investments concentrated in and around the suburbs. In 2007 the city rolled out the bike-share program Vélib’, which now offers 20,000 bicycles over 1,400 stations in and around the city. Car ownership in the region peaked in 1990 and has been declining since, even as the metro area population has grown by 10 percent.

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It is a humbling experience to try to learn any new skill as an adult. But there is a particular humiliation in learning to ride a bike. Not only because biking is something everyone already assumes you know how to do and the quintessential skill you never forget. But also because you have to do it in public, wobbling and teetering under the curious gaze of other adults who seem to be fully in control of their balance, pace, and place in the world.

So it’s nice that Anne-Lise Millan-Brun, the founder of a bicycle school in Paris, has chosen as a training ground one of the emptiest places in this crowded city. It’s shortly after sunrise on a wintry Saturday morning when her students begin to assemble by the Square Emmanuel Fleury, on the capital’s hilly eastern edge. All are women; most are first- or second-generation immigrants. All had to wait for months to enroll in the Bike School of the 20^th arrondissement, which is so oversubscribed that I was allowed to visit only on the condition I not write about it in French. Millan-Brun does not need the publicity. This is in part because she charges just 50 euros for a trimester’s worth of Saturday morning lessons. But it is also because riding a bike has, rather suddenly, come to feel as Parisian as the Métro, and nearly as essential for getting around. To twist a French idiom, vélo, boulot, dodo—bike, work, sleep.

When Millan-Brun arrived in the ’90s from Angoulême, in southwestern France, Paris had so few bicycle riders that they recognized one another. There were 3 miles of bike lanes; now there are more than 150. In October 2020, the number of daily bike trips likely surpassed 400,000—1 for every 5 inhabitants. And traffic in the city’s busiest bike lanes has grown by more than 20 percent since. Each rush-hour light change at the intersection of Rue de Rivoli and Boulevard Sébastopol, in the center of the city, brings a bewildering, silent dance of scores of bicycles. Paris is learning to ride a bike.

It’s part of a larger movement—spanning a half-century, two decades, or the mayoral tenure of the Socialist Anne Hidalgo, depending on whom you ask—to expel cars from the heart of the largest metropolitan area in the European Union. Car trips within Paris declined by almost 60 percent between 2001 and 2018, according to research from Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme, the city’s planning arm; between the city and its suburbs, they have fallen by 35 percent. Car crashes have fallen by 30 percent; pollution has fallen too. A huge investment in bus corridors, tramways, and subways has caused mass transit ridership to jump by almost 40 percent in that time.

A man wearing a helmet rides his bike down a cobblestone Paris street near the Eiffel Tower.

Henry Grabar

What’s to come is more radical still: a low-emissions zone for Paris starting next summer that will exclude older, high-emission vehicles. A total ban on gas-powered cars by 2030. A ban on through traffic in the city center, including some pedestrianized areas. A reduction of street parking by half. A redesign of the ring road highway. A pedestrian-friendly renovation of the Champs-Elysées. Paris will become a cleaner, greener, cooler, quieter city, the proponents of these measures say. But detractors say it’s on track to become a toy city—hostile to people who work with their cars, and increasingly inaccessible to residents beyond its walls.

Switching things up in France isn’t always easy, as the past few months of pension-reform protests demonstrate. “It’s not the street that decides,” French President Emmanuel Macron has insisted, though that isn’t always true. In 2018 Macron’s proposed gas tax was met with the angry demonstrations of the Yellow Vests movement, as fed-up motorists cut the president down to size; he withdrew the proposal. Hidalgo’s efforts in Paris, by contrast, have found surprisingly little opposition. Many people dislike her decisions, but there has been little organized protest—no one I spoke to could name a politician who incarnated the opposition.

For a city supposedly frozen in time, all this adds up to some undeniably dramatic changes, of which bicycles are only the most visible. A car-choked capital is transforming before our eyes, the dream of urbanites around the world who are eager to reassess the automobile’s dominant role in the city. The question posed by these changes transcends the daily debate over bicycles and cars. It is nothing less than this: Who is the city for?

No one has taken credit, or blame, for this long evolution like Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor now in her 9^th year running the French capital. In 2017 she turned the city’s central expressway into a permanent riverside pleasure path, and prevailed in a subsequent court battle over it. She has since picked up the pace with a kind of anti-car shock doctrine, taking advantage of a long transit strike at the end of 2019 and the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, which prompted behavioral changes and created an excuse to redesign the streets. In 2020 she renovated the Right Bank’s main east-west artery, the Rue de Rivoli. It has gone from six lanes of traffic (four moving, two parked) to one for taxis and buses, with the rest a bike path serving 8,500 riders a day. (In a pinch, the bike path is wide enough to serve as a traffic-free route for emergency vehicles; an analysis recently showed that this has helped the city lower fire response times to under seven minutes for the first time in more than a decade.) Tens of thousands of parking spaces have been commandeered for new uses. Streets have been permanently closed to traffic in front of hundreds of schools. Beyond physical changes to the streets, Hidalgo has instituted a citywide speed limit of 30 kph (less than 20 mph), forced the city’s ubiquitous motor scooters to pay for parking, and priced all-day street parking at 6 euros an hour in the city center.

But most of all, she and her deputies have explicitly embraced the controversial idea that the automobile’s prominence in Paris is at the root of many of the city’s problems—its frequent smog days, lack of green space, vulnerability to heat waves, noisy streets, geographic inequities. And thus fewer cars will allow the city to become a cleaner, quieter, cooler, fairer place. Hidalgo puts Sempé’s whimsical bicycle cartoons on her greeting cards. She and her team are outspoken about cars in ways that, from the vantage point of a North American city, seem unadvisedly forthright. Speaking in a city meeting in April 2020, as Paris slumbered through its first COVID-19 lockdown, Hidalgo announced that the city would not be going back to the way it was before: “It is out of the question that we let ourselves get invaded by cars and pollution.”

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