The endless and, inevitably, passionate debates concerning the role cars should play in Paris – and its greater metropolitan area – have flared up again since Anne Hidalgo, the capital city's Socialist mayor, decided to lower the speed limit on the city's major ring road to 50 kilometers per hour, effective from Tuesday, October 1. This municipal directive was due to be published in the city's official gazette on Monday, September 30. In just a few paragraphs, it will strike out the 70 km/h speed limit that had, until now, been in force on the urban freeway, since it had replaced an 80 km/h limit in 2014. Its implementation, is to be gradually phased in between October 1 and October 10, section-by-section, starting in the east, while the speed limit signs are changed.
Critics have blasted what they call a "unilateral decision" and an "anti-social measure," first and foremost among them business leaders and the Paris region's president, Valérie Pécresse (Les Républicains, LR, right). For his part, newly-appointed Transport Minister François Durovray, who is close to Pécresse, has boosted these discontented voices. He has argued that the mayor of Paris couldn't make this decision on her own, as it concerns all Paris region residents. These are pretty much the same arguments and criticisms that were put forward when Paris' riverside lanes were pedestrianized in 2016. At the time, Paris City Hall had responded by citing public health and the capital's need to adapt to climate change. The case was brought before an administrative court, and in 2019, the city's Socialist-Communist-Green coalition won the case, allowing walkers and joggers, local or visiting, to enjoy the river at their leisure, away from cars, which were relegated to the city's upper quays.
Tackling the subject of the ring road, which is used by 1.1 million commuters every day, is an altogether different matter. It's a case of attacking a symbol. The 35-kilometer ring road encircling the capital, built between the and 1973, not only represents the decades in which cars were king, but also an idea of freedom and modernity that came with this period.
It is also the physical and psychological barrier between Paris and its suburbs, the capital and "the others," crystalizing tensions and resentments. Politicians have become obsessed with it. Meanwhile, urban planners have seen this over-saturated freeway, around which over half a million people live, as the embodiment of a future debate, common to all large cities: How should densely-populated areas operate in 2050?
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