“Forget Crossing Through The City By Car,” says the Mayor of Paris as automobile eroticists squeal and howl.

Anne Hidalgo is not backing down. Other articles on the topic have pointed out that in terms of Parisian voting districts, the mayor's most strident automobile supremacist critics live outside the central arrondissements, and her support is highest in the center where these changes are occurring.

Paris Mayor: “Forget Crossing Through The City By Car” by Carlton Reid (Forbes)

In the first major interview since her re-election as Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo told Le Parisien that her manifesto promise to crack down on motoring in the French capital would be kept.

“We must forget the crossing of Paris from east to west by car,” she told the daily newspaper.

‘The city needs to evolve,” she added.

Comfortably re-elected in June for a second term, she said she intends to create permanent curb-protected cycleways and expand the number of lockdown cycleways, known in French as “coronapistes.” At an urban planning conference later this month she also plans to reveal plans on restricting petrol-powered motoring on the usually car-clogged highways on the upper quays of the Seine.

Paris created 45 kilometers of coronapistes during lockdown, and now a further 10 kilometres of wand-separated cycleways will be added.

Of course the auto supremacists lurk in Paris, too.  

Not everybody is happy with Hidalgo’s plans. In the run-up to the mayoral election, Pierre Chasseray, leader of 40 Millions d'Automobilistes, a group with a claimed 320,000 members and which lobbies against speed cameras and other “anti-motoring” initiatives, said:

“[The Mayor] is wrong to take advantage of the health crisis to accentuate its anti-car policy.”

On the contrary, the “epidemic requires giving space to the car,” he added, more in hope than expectation because space for motorists in Paris has been much reduced over recent years.

As for Reid's conclusion, we know of at least one (local) mayor who remains oblivious. 

The plan, it seems, is for motorists to become an endangered species in many parts of the Paris of the near future. Mayors in other major cities around the world are watching with great interest.