Paris: "Seeing the city in another way than through the use of cars."

Photo credit: City Lab

Or, "divert(ing) motor traffic without kick-starting Armageddon."

And, concurrently, adding parkland that reinforces, not defeats, adjacent businesses.

Just because things work the way they do now, doesn't mean they can't work differently ... better ... to achieve multiple outcomes, not just one.

In Paris, Plans for a Seine Reinvention, by Feargus O'Sullivan (City Lab)

Paris seems to be getting less and less motorist-friendly by the day. Following a set of promises to slash diesel usage, extend lower speed limits and bar polluting cars from the city core, Mayor Anne Hidalgo this week announced a plan to thoroughly reclaim the quayside on the right bank of the River Seine for pedestrians. With cars already banished from a long strip of the Left Bank, the Seine in central Paris will as of summer 2016 be entirely encased within two lush, motor-free parkland buffers. Sounding more French than ever, Hidalgo described the plan as “an urban, almost philosophical project, which consists of seeing the city in another way than through the use of cars.”