Under Anne Hidalgo, mayor since 2014, Paris made a deliberate decision to end the tyranny of the automobile. Commuters ride their bikes in a bike lane along Boulevard de Sebastopol, in central Paris on April 4.KIRAN RIDLEYKIRAN RIDLEY/AFP/Getty Images
The Bourne Identity is a 2002 spy thriller starring Matt Damon as an assassin with amnesia who is struggling to uncover his past. It’s a movie-night favourite at my place and I have watched it more times than I can count.
The Paris that Bourne races around, trying to avoid the many cops and killers who are out to get him, is a place of honking cars and heavy traffic, completely dominated by the automobile. Today’s Paris is a different city altogether.
When I visited this week, fleets of bicycles sailed along busy bike lanes and crowds of pedestrians strolled along streets that have been closed to motor-vehicle traffic. The air is cleaner, the streets quieter than when I’ve been before. Friends who are living in Paris say they wake up to the sound of bird song instead of growling car and motorcycle engines.
None of this happened naturally. Under Anne Hidalgo, mayor since 2014, Paris made a deliberate decision to end the tyranny of the automobile. In keeping with its history, the city where the car was king committed regicide.
It added hundreds of kilometres of bike lanes, expanded its wildly successful bike-share program, removed thousands of parking spots, raised downtown rates for street parking, cut the speed limit to 30 kilometres an hour and banned vehicle traffic around many schools.
You would not be wrong to call it a war on the car. The result is a victory for the city.
A study last year found that 11.2 per cent of trips in Paris proper (excluding its suburbs) are made by bike, compared with just 4.3 by car. Half of trips are made on foot and 30 per cent on the city’s superb public transit network, which has been growing by leaps in recent years.
A host of other cities have taken a similar path. Amsterdam and Copenhagen, once clogged by traffic, have become cycling meccas. Equally clogged London brought in a congestion tax that discouraged people from driving downtown at peak hours. Even New York recently started charging a $9 fee for driving south of 60th Street in Manhattan. Result: fewer car-crash injuries, fewer noise complaints, fewer school-bus delays, more transit riders and faster bus trips.
If Doug Ford has absorbed any of this, he is not showing it. Instead of joining the Paris-led urban revolution, he is attempting a counter-revolution. The Ontario Premier has announced plans to rip out three Toronto bike lanes. This week’s provincial budget added two more to the hit list.
He is also removing the tolls on part of the 407, making a cut to the gas tax permanent and spending billions on new and improved highways. The words “highway” and “highways” appear 156 times in the budget document tabled on Thursday. It reiterates Mr. Ford’s nutty vow to build an underground expressway beneath the congested 401.
All is not lost, though. Despite Mr. Ford, Toronto can still become more Parisian. With the aim of reducing the number of traffic fatalities on city streets, it has already lowered speed limits, increased the number of red-light cameras, built out the bike-lane system and created special safety zones around schools.
Naturally, it is getting some pushback, especially over bike lanes. Many motorists are feeling frustrated, even persecuted. A speed camera that stands along a busy commuting corridor, Parkside Drive, has been cut down by vandals four times in five months.
Paris faced lots of resistance, too. Conservative politicians and motorists’ organizations screamed bloody murder when city council ordered the permanent closure of a highway along the right bank of the Seine, now a pleasant waterfront park that sports deck chairs, palm trees and beach sand during the summer. Taxi drivers and many motorists still curse the name of Ms. Hidalgo for slashing the number of driving lanes on major streets such as the Rue de Rivoli. Some Parisians say that, these days, speeding bikes and scooters are nearly as much of a menace as cars once were.
But the city is pressing ahead. Its latest big step has been to limit traffic in much of its historic centre. Only those who live and work there are supposed to drive into it. Just this March, Parisians voted in a plebiscite to convert another 500 streets to pedestrian zones.
Ms. Hidalgo has said that after making so much progress, it is “out of the question that we let ourselves get invaded by cars and pollution” again. There will be no return to the tyranny of the car in Paris.