Ban cars.
It's a battle cry I love. Not as a serious policy proposal—at least, not everywhere, and least of all in places that lack reasonable alternatives to driving. But ban cars has a certain hyperbolic appeal in a moment when so much of what ails our cities is so easily traced back to the intrusion of these beasts. Ban cars prompts the question: if not an outright ban, what is the place for cars in a safe and sustainable city?
The answer depends on the place in question. Context—urban form, land uses, transportation systems—matters.
In Paris, for example, many streets were built from footpaths linking the emerging riverside town to surrounding villages, farmsteads, and monasteries. The city evolved with transportation technologies, and a city built for walking and pushcarts eventually accommodated horses and even trollies. And so it was for hundreds of years: a city built for slow travel powered mostly by humans and animals.
Fast-forward to the automobile era, which Paris embraced in the middle of the last century with the same irrational fever as did old cities around the globe. In the late 1960s the city installed parking meters and built the Périphérique expressways to bring cars right into the heart of the city. The results were ruinous: traffic, congestion, air pollution, and ever more public space devoted to moving and storing vehicles.
Thankfully, this fervor for the machine was short-lived. By the century's end, Mayor Bertrand Delanoë was pushing plans to install bike lanes and dismantle the Seine freeways—projects which accelerated markedly under his successor, Anne Hidalgo.
This tracks with the trajectory of cities across northern and western Europe—though notably less so their American counterparts—that have emerged from the fever-dream of the motoring city and have embraced policies aligned with the humanistic form of their pre-automobile cities. But few have done so with the fearlessness of the Hidalgo administration to confront cars head-on.
Paris isn't banning cars anytime soon. But it is, through design and regulation, pushing back on the incongruous dominance of vehicles in public spaces. Here's how.
Converting driving lanes to bike lanes.
It's well known now that Paris has, in remarkably short order, become one of the world's most bicycle-friendly cities. No small feat for Europe's most densely populated city. We tend to think of Copenhagen and Amsterdam as the world's most bike-friendly cities, and their networks are indeed more mature and more heavily used than Paris's. But the cityscape of Paris is about twice as old and four or five times as dense as Copenhagen or Amsterdam's, making this a much more complex and constrained environment to implement a connected and protected bicycling network.
Paris seized the opportunity of the pandemic to ambitiously increase the pace of implementation of protected bicycle infrastructure, ostensibly as a safe alternative to crowded public transit. Temporarily expanded facilities became permanent, and bicycling has since doubled. The facilities are now so heavily used that in some places bicyclists far outnumber people driving.
The wild popularity of bicycling facilities has made the city's backbone of sidewalk-running bike facilities obsolete; they're too narrow to accommodate large volumes of people biking, and they introduce dangerous conflicts between people walking or using transit and those on two wheels. The City has vowed to stop creating sidewalk-level bike lanes, and is replacing many with its next generation of protected on-street facilities. These lanes provide wide space for bicyclists to ride side-by-side or pass each other while remaining fully separated and physically protected from people on sidewalks and motor vehicle traffic alike.
These lanes are built in the street, and that street space has to come from somewhere. In most cases these second-generation lanes are built by repurposing driving or parking lanes. A street which previously had three lanes of traffic and two parking lanes might now have one or two lanes of traffic and just one parking lane. The much-needed implementation of bus-only lanes further reduces space for private vehicles to move and park.
These street redesigns are smart. They take space away from the most inefficient and polluting users (cars) and give it to more efficient and environmentally sustainable ones (people walking, biking, and using transit). There's also no question that, if people keep driving as they did, these designs will slow them down. And maybe that's fine; in a city where transit is ubiquitous, bicycling is safe and intuitive, and walking is a pleasure of the highest order, driving a private car should feel like the most inconvenient and costly choice.1
Making parking more difficult.
To make driving inconvenient and costly: these are, politically, fighting words, and politicians know it. American elected leaders, in particular,2 have exhibited a long and frustrating unwillingness to simply name cars as a challenge and to enact policies that price car travel (in time and money) to reflect their negative impacts. Instead, government speech couches such efforts in oblique, positive-sounding language like "expanding transportation options for all," or technical phraseology like "decreasing vehicle-miles traveled."
I've encountered and used both of these phrases throughout my career as an urban planner. Neither gets to the heart of the matter: we can't tackle climate change, and we can't make cities work better, unless we get people out of their cars. And we can’t do that only by providing “alternatives” like transit, walking, bicycling, and transit. The cultural attachment to driving is simply too strong to respond to optional incentives. Driving itself needs to become relatively less convenient, and relatively much more expensive, than its more sustainable alternatives.
It was encouraging, then, to see Paris launch in 2023 a surprisingly direct arrow at the scourge of SUVs on city streets. These oversized vehicles, which have only recently grown in popularity in France given its far more stringent regulation of motor vehicles, are absurd to see on Paris's tiny and congested streets. SUVs continue to grow in size; in fact, more than half of current models exceed the minimum width of a Paris parking space.
City Hall seems to have decided that enough is enough. A recent public referendum asked whether drivers of SUVs and other large vehicles should pay a higher fee to park on city streets. The measure passed, but barely, and with turnout depressingly low it was hardly the resounding mandate to pursue further car-constraining policies that the Hidalgo administration might have been hoping for. And the law is so full of exceptions that I wonder whether it will have a meaningful impact on reducing the nuisance of large vehicles in Paris's public spaces.
Still, it's a start. When asked whether there should be limits on the endlessly voracious appetite that vehicles have for urban space, the public said yes. The price to park an SUV in Paris is set to triple. That's a step in the right direction, and might soften the ground politically for further such regulations that reflect the true societal cost that motor vehicles impose on cities.
Indeed, the high-profile SUV referendum came as the city is carrying out a plan to remove about half of existing on-street parking spaces by 2026. Parked cars (or the rare empty parking space) occupy about half of Paris’s public space, yet only 13% of trips in the city are taken by car.3 Parisens are about to see the many better ways this vast quantity of public space can be used. For example, the City plans to “daylight” every intersection in Paris, which means removing parking spaces near the corners so drivers can more easily see (and, one hopes, avoid injuring) people crossing the street.4
Such common-sense measures are essential to return public space to public use. They may also deter driving in the city, though perhaps only marginally; the city’s supply of off-street parking (in publicly and privately owned lots and garages) remains enormous, about equal to the number of cars owned by residents of the city.
Rethinking the Périphérique.
Paris has reaped magnificent benefits by reverting the banks of the Seine from expressways to public space. A few hours spent on those esplanades is an absolute must; it feels like they contain very soul of the city.
City leaders are likely to build on this success by continuing to chip away at the portions of the riverbank that remain straitjacketed in expressways, as is the case outside the central city as the river nears the encircling Périphérique expressway. This follows a strategy now common among cities globally to dismantle urban freeway "stubs" that bring vehicle traffic from peripheral freeways right onto streets in the heart of cities (New York's West Side Highway, the Embarcadero freeway in San Francisco, and the Cheonggye Freeway in Seoul are a few prominent examples).
It still leaves the problem of the Périphérique itself, though, which since its completion in 1973 has choked Paris in noise and air pollution and dumped enormous volumes of traffic onto the city's streets and boulevards. The neighborhoods immediately surrounding the Périphérique are in many places home to the city's largest populations of low- and middle-income residents. These 100,000 or so residents suffer most from the pollution the Péripherique creates, and they remain disconnected from the surrounding urban fabric by the barrier the freeway creates.
The City has an ambitious vision to convert the freeway into an urban boulevard like those successful examples in New York, San Francisco, and Seoul. It's a compelling vision, but one which will take enormous political and financial resources to realize.
For now, the City is knocking on a side door. The Hidalgo administration plans to reduce the speed limit on the Périphérique from 70 km/h (about 43 mph) to 50 km/h (about 31 mph), to take effect following the 2024 Olympic Games. The change follows a bold policy impulse and is a step in the right direction. It makes driving the Périphérique a little less convenient, and that might nudge some drivers toward better alternatives.
The new speed limit may be difficult to realize in practice, though: freeways are designed to invite fast vehicle travel, and people tend to drive as fast as feels safe in a given environment rather than adhering to a significantly lower posted speed limit. Regulatory moves aside, if the freeway's design (which facilitates travel at 70km/h) remains unchanged, driving speeds may remain stubbornly higher than the Hôtel de Ville wishes.
But if the regulatory change has a muted practical effect, it has an important symbolic one: it reframes what is today an urban freeway as something different. It signals that the days of this monument to motordom are numbered. The new speed limit is the same as that of both the West Side Highway and the Embarcadero, and the change might help Parisian drivers and residents alike begin thinking of this important public space in its future form: as an urban boulevard.
Some people might call that putting the cart before the horse. Fine with me; carts and horses (and lovers and friends) are what this city was designed for.
Paris, a city of cobblestones and stairways, remains woefully inaccessible to people with disabilities or mobility limitations. For them, transit isn't simply inconvenient; it's impossible. Private and for-hire vehicles adapted for their use are critical to meeting their daily needs, and the City rightfully has policies that permit such vehicles to drive and park in places where motor vehicle access is generally otherwise excluded.
I laud Parisian leaders for boldly taking aim at cars and driving, but even they are susceptible to the language of false positivity. To wit, David Belliard, Paris’s Deputy Mayor for Public Space, Transport, and Mobility: “We know that not everyone will cycle. We simply need to encourage more virtuous, more civic use of the car, particularly developing carpooling.” Ah, carpooling! That evergreen nugget pulled from the “feel-good transportation solutions” file. So few people carpool after a generation of promoting it with encouragement and small incentives, but it’s a politically palatable alternative to telling the truth: we do need people—in huge, “yes, this means you” numbers—to abandon their cars and to instead choose transit. For that to happen, government leaders need to heavily invest in serious, convenient, high-performing transit, and reform land use and development practices. Those things are really hard, though, and it’s a lot easier to suggest we can solve the enormous challenges cars create by just buddying up on our way to work.
A study by Apur, the regional planning agency for Paris, found that there are approximately as many parking spaces in residential buildings in Paris as there are cars owned by households. This suggests that the entire need for the city's residential parking could be met without using on-street public space for this purpose. But the balance is imbalance, with households in wealthy western Paris exhibiting a love of car ownership that far outstrips available parking in those districts (which are, it should be said, blessed lavishly with Métro and RER services).
This warrants emphasis: the City plans to daylight every intersection. All of them. They aren't issuing an RFP to find a consultant to conduct a study to determine which intersections have "highest feasibility" for daylighting given engineering constraints and the existing political environment. No, they've simply recognized that cars block intersections today because of bad design and regulatory choices, and that makes sense nowhere, and those choices can and should be reversed everywhere, and so they're doing that. I've spent my planning career listening to municipal officials say they can't redesign a dangerous intersection to be safer for people walking or biking because it would require removing a few parking spaces and that's a non-starter. The City of Paris has elegantly sidestepped that nonsense by recognizing the right thing and implementing it everywhere, turning what would have been a street-by-street fight into a systemic change.