One of the most active fronts in the war against cars is that being waged by progressive urban planners.
One of the most active fronts in the war against cars is that being waged by progressive urban planners. Among their campaigns are more (and wider) cycling lanes, fewer parking spots, higher charges for parking, low traffic networks, lower speed limits, the introduction of congestion taxes and, of course, pedestrianization stretching far beyond obvious historic or touristic sites.
One of its leaders is the socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, who also relies (amazingly!) on the support of communist and Green groups. I wrote about her in a recent article for the magazine on this “war,” and, among other points, noted her fondness for the fashionable idea of the “15-minute city”:
This is the umbrella term for projects — Paris is said to have 50 — intended to make it easier for people to fulfill more of their daily needs close to home. With more shops, services, workplaces, and so on within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from where residents live, they will have less need — wait for it — to get in a car. In such schemes that option is often constrained by pedestrianization, coercion masquerading as convenience; that this is met with bien-pensant applause is a reliable indicator of failure ahead.
As Anne-Elizabeth Moutet has reported for the Daily Telegraph, Hildalgo may be stepping down next year, but she hasn’t given up yet. A “consultation” has just been held in the French capital in which 4.06 percent of Parisians voted. Two-thirds of the 4.06 percent supported the idea of pedestrianizing 500 more streets in in addition to the 300 that already exist (most of them blocked off during the Hidalgo era).
Moutet:
The low participation (the highest recorded was 7.5 per cent) is not a bug, it’s a feature. The polling places vary; the “information meetings” take place in remote arrondissements during office hours. This favours active supporters of the policies.
Pedestrianisation, the latest city fad, has worked for under 10 per cent of the streets concerned. Its most glaring disaster is the emptying of the iconic Rue de Rivoli, running in an almost straight line between the Place de la Bastille all the way to Place de la Concorde, with its Italianate arcades and majestic buildings overlooking the Tuileries Gardens and the Louvre. The summer bike traffic doesn’t make up for the rest of the year where the avenue is largely empty, with a perpetually clogged up single bus lane.
On the Rue de Rivoli, as on other pedestrianised wider roads, shops and businesses simply close down. On smaller inner-city streets, it’s the opposite – during tourist season and at nightfall, bars and restaurants spread out onto the pavements and residents flee the noise that goes one after midnight, despite city regulations. This has been reinforced by a recent decision to close down the “ultra-centre” of the city to traffic on weekends and holidays, with a promise to close it the rest of the time soon.
During Hidalgo’s tenure (which will end after a decade next year) Paris has on average lost 12,200 residents annually.
Some of Hidalgo’s more notable acts of vandalism have included:
Closing down the banks of the Seine to traffic; reducing the speed on the Périphérique, Paris’s ring road; and partly or entirely closing off large squares (including Place de la Concorde or Place du Trocadéro), creating traffic bottlenecks that have slowed down average peak hour bus speed from 15kph ten years ago to 8kph in 2024.
In my article, I wrote that:
City life can undoubtedly be enhanced by modest, undogmatic pedestrianization. But anything more risks creating stretches of desolation, particularly in winter, where few will want to go or to live.
And:
Drivers stop-starting along busy streets are traveling in the way that — traffic jams notwithstanding — makes sense to them. They are a sign that the web of connections that make a city so much more than a sum of its parts is functioning as it should. Putting permanent barriers in the way of mobility and, by extension, convenience would steadily undermine a city’s effectiveness as a place to meet, to do business, to work, and to act as a cultural entrepôt, as would 15-minute enclaves intended to reduce the need to move about. Fostering parochialism (even balkanization) is the last thing that planners should do.
And yet they do:
The war against cars is an authoritarian crusade against liberty and technological advance. It is part of a broader campaign using environmentalism and, more specifically, climate apocalypticism to create a malleable, controlled, collectivist society, with citizens quietly living inside green boundaries set by those who know best.