Cities without cars sound wonderful. My personal utopia. 🤩

I’m not an urban planner, and know little about such things. But I imagine 20th century city planning plays a part in today’s tensions between status quo car-centered policies and pro-pedestrian policies. I mean, I look at how cars dominate cities like Brussels, cutting though the medieval foundations of the city, or how much of Copenhagen was turned into parking lots in the 20th century (now, thankfully, the trend is being reversed). Drivers depend on getting from A to B in the city by using their cars; pedestrians (really, everyone) suffer the resulting air and noise pollution, not to mention the sheer amount of space dedicated to blacktop and parking.

I’d prefer a city exclusively dedicated to pedestrians and bicyclists. But seeing this from the car owner’s perspective, I can appreciate that, for some, there are no viable alternatives. Public transport might take 2 hours vs 30 minutes driving. Then what do you do? In some cases, I’m guessing we’d need A LOT more investment in public transport, bike-lane super highways, etc. before it would be politically viable to completely eliminate cars, and even then, it would have to be gradual. After all, old habits die hard.

Cars ruin cities, Paris has many beautiful areas which would only be enhanced by this.

Paris without cars would be incredible. Paris with cars is still terrific, but it could be terrific-er. Good on her.

I went for an event in Paris a couple of years ago that was held on an annual day they had where they didn’t allow any pedestrian traffic into the centre core. It was an amazing experience only having to share the road with buses and taxis.

People don’t consider the tourism money involved in these actions. There were over 300 people in our group from outside of the area, just for a single day event for a longboard community. Great job by the mayor to hold strong on these actions.

Common France, W.

I want the same for my city and so does my Alderman.

Next year is a mayoral election year, so all this feels like political posturing to me. I don’t doubt that the “diesel lobby” wasn’t pleased with her changes, but the way she tells it smells like victimization. Also having a car-less approach to running a city is not exactly controversial in the year of our lord 2025. There are a lot of cities that pioneered car-less city design before she got into office ( altough in her defense, this kind of change may be harder to implement in extra large metropolitan areas like Paris ). Oh, and another thing: she’s been in office 11 years and traffic-wise the city hasn’t changed much outside the central touristy areas. You’d think she could’ve done a lot more in that kind of time. I go through the city every now and then and I feel the only thing that changed is the growing number of trikes and motorcycles on the periferiques. Maybe someone from Paris can chime in on her actual accomplishments?