How Paris is Leading a Sustainable Transportation Revolution

this is a picture from the 1990s of Rue de Rivoli in Paris for the last hundred years it's been one of the most important roads in the city because it's one of the few roads that cuts directly from east to west but here's what that same road looks like today what used to be six lanes for cars is now a cycling Highway and a single Lane for buses and taxis this is just one example of the dramatic Transformations taking place across Paris [Applause] all across the city streets that used to be choked with traffic and pollution have been converted into bike paths and protected Lanes Riverside highways have been converted to cafes playgrounds and even beaches streets that used to be filled with parked cars are now full of trees and bike parking so what's going on in Paris and what can cities around the world learn from this massive project for much of the last 50 years Paris has been dominated by cars but like most cities this hasn't been the case for most of its history as you can see in these pictures of Paris from the early 1900s most streets were filled with pedestrians and the rare horse-drawn carriage or Model T but that changed after World War II as French incomes grew and cars got really cheap by the 1960s more than half of French households had a car but this quickly created a problem for cities like Paris roads were soon inundated with traffic in order to solve this problem the government embarked on a huge project to build infrastructure for cars they built highways around the city and along the sand River they built parking garages under historic buildings and they laid concrete roads all throughout the city but it wasn't long until this expansive project faced backlash as the number of cars in the city grew so did the amount of pollution in the air by the 1990s Paris had some of the worst air quality in the world but it wasn't until recently that Paris really began to take back its streets from Cars [Music] by the early 2000s political support for ditching cars in Paris began to growl one of the first major efforts to reduce car dependency was the launch of a bike share service called velim it's a very kind of standard Bike Share system as we understand it now but at the time time it was pretty revolutionary in terms of the expanse of the number of stations that's Marcel a researcher who's been studying bike infrastructure in Paris for the last five years he told me that velib was one of the first key events in the story of the rise of biking in Paris and so that was the Kickstart before really the infrastructure was in place that was the Kickstart to start getting more and more parisians cycling but when velipe launched there were very few bike Lanes in Paris take a look at this map of bike Lanes in Paris from 2009 at this point there were just a dozen bike Lanes in a city with more than 2 million people but this too would soon change foreign [Applause] parisians elected and Hidalgo a socialist who promised to transform the city and make it easier to get around without a car and she has been uh strident supporter and proponent of bike bicycling in in the French capital in order to accomplish this goal Hidalgo and her team have used both carrots that encourage more biking walking and Transit use and sticks that discourage people from driving so the most obvious carrot in what I study is the bike infrastructure so Paris is rolling out protected intersections and and roundabouts and separated paths in 2015 Hidalgo announced 150 million euro investment in bike infrastructure with that money the City built 80 kilometers of new bike Lanes including a few bike highways cutting through the capital in addition to building new infrastructure Paris has also given residents money to buy e-bikes so those are some of the carrots but one of the things that sets mayor Hidalgo apart from some of her peers in other cities around the world is the fact that she isn't afraid to pass policies that actually discourage driving in 2016 Hidalgo closed a highway along the sand and turned it into a bike path and pedestrian area then a few years later Hidalgo made another controversial move when she converted Rue to Rivoli the road I mentioned earlier into a bike path in addition to closing roads Hidalgo has also taken aim at the city's car parking one of the big sticks has been the removal of on-street parking in 2020 Hidalgo announced that she would remove a staggering 72 percent of the city's on-street parking to accommodate cyclists Marcel has documented much of this showing street corners that used to be full of parked cars that now have bike parking and bike Lanes but many of the most dramatic changes to the city's infrastructure came from something that no one could have anticipated univirus coronavirus hovid supercharged cycling in Paris for several reasons one there was the immediate kind of fear of transmission of covet on Transit Paris has a really expensive transit system but there's a fear around Transit and so the the rates of people using bikes and scooters during those lockdowns skyrocketed in order to accommodate all the new cycling traffic Paris did something that few other cities did they built pop-up bike Lanes Paris circumvented the standard construction process for bike Lanes which is cutting into the asphalt laying down new blocks we circumvented that in 2020 by just laying out staggered concrete blocks and they really put up bike Lanes overnight both the pop-up bike lanes and the more formal ones proved to be very popular in the summer of 2020 Hidalgo won re-election thank you during her campaign she promised to continue taking back the streets from Cars the following year she made good on that promise when she announced a 250 million euro investment in new bike infrastructure as a part of that plan the city set out to build 180 kilometers of separated bike lanes and triple the amount of bike parking in the city and all of these changes seem to be working between 2020 and 2021 cycling traffic in Paris grew by 70 percent since Paris started this broader project two decades ago car ownership in the city has fallen from 60 to 35 percent and all this has helped Paris cut its carbon emissions by 20 percent over that same period but that doesn't mean that Paris has achieved the status of biking Utopia I went to Paris in 2021 and biked around the city and I'll be honest it was incredibly stressful the city has a lot of work to do if it wants to rival biking capitals like Amsterdam or Copenhagen but to urban planning experts like Marcel that's part of what makes studying Paris so interesting as I covered in a recent video Dutch cities have been building bike infrastructure for decades but Paris is trying to transform itself over a much shorter time frame and the changes that are taking place they're happening right this moment

Channel: Distilled

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Length: 6min 55sec (415 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023