“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.

Sunday Fact Fest, Episode 03: "How the ‘15-Minute City’ Could Help Post-Pandemic Recovery."

Automobile supremacy is a virus, too. 

How the ‘15-Minute City’ Could Help Post-Pandemic Recovery, by Patrick Sisson (CityLab)

A new C40 Cities report touts Paris’s model for putting essentials within close walking or biking distance as an economic boost for coronavirus-ravaged municipal budgets.

The Covid-19 crisis in the U.S. has torn a hole in city budgets, decimating urban economies across the country even as infections continue to roar back and the specter of second-wave lockdowns loom. Las Vegas faces “the most serious fiscal crisis” it’s ever faced. The pandemic is hitting Houston’s finances harder than Hurricane Harvey, according to Mayor Sylvester Turner. Tallahassee, Florida, city officials are trying to “defuse a time bomb” due to $23.4 million in lost revenue this year. Local governments may face a cumulative shortfall of hundreds of billions of dollars, small businesses are closing at staggering rates, and when the temporary boost in unemployment benefits expires, municipal sales tax shortfalls may get even worse.

An international coalition of cities believes that the only path forward for mayors is funding green stimulus plans focused on job creation. The newly released Mayors’ Agenda for a Green and Just Recovery, released July 15 by C40 Cities, an international coalition of urban leaders focused on fighting climate change and promoting sustainable development, was developed by the organization’s Global Mayors COVID-19 Recovery Task Force. The far-ranging series of plans offers a green prescription for financial stabilization that emphasizes several familiar pillars of progressive urbanism — renewable energy investment, energy-efficient buildings, improved mass transit, and spending on new parks and green space. One core idea: Cities are the “engines of the recovery,” and investing in their resilience is the best way to avoid economic disaster.

One of its recommendations has a more novel ring to it. The agenda recommends that “all residents will live in ‘15-minute cities.’” That term echoes the transformative ambitions of Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who has doubled down on car-free transit and pedestrian infrastructure in the French capital. Hidalgo made the idea that Parisians should be able to meet their shopping, work, recreational and cultural needs within a 15-minute walk or bike ride a centerpiece of her recent reelection campaign. The C40 proposal suggests that following such a model would help global cities live up to the document’s promise of equitable access to jobs and city services for all, and rebuild areas economically hard-hit by the pandemic.

“Fifteen-minute cities, micromobility, and more space for walking and biking are innovative solutions that will help our cities rebuild and restore our economy while protecting lives and cutting dangerous pollution,” Carol M. Browner, former EPA administrator and board chair of the League of Conservation Voters, said in a statement supporting the agenda ...

Here's a trick Irv and the trucking magnates missed.

The article goes on to say that in terms of Parisian voting districts, the mayor's most strident critics probably live outside the central arrondissements -- where her support is highest.

Paris's Car Debate Gets Personal, by Feargus O'Sullivan (City Lab)

Pro-car protestors publish Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s direct telephone number. But that doesn’t mean she’s prepared to listen.

If you’re sick of Paris’s traffic jams, go ahead and tell the mayor directly. That’s the gist of a motorists’ campaign launched Monday, which shared Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s direct phone number in a bid to encourage protestors to jam it.

Working under the hashtag #disleaAnne (“#tellAnne” in English), the motorist pressure group “40 Million Drivers” plans to do to City Hall’s switchboards what they say the administration has done to the roads: clog them up. Their goal is to ensure the mayor can no longer ignore their calls, and, more generally, force her to the negotiating table over the future of Paris’s streets.

The spat—and the distinctly personal assault on one figure—is a sign of how heated the city’s debate around cars has become. The invective has unquestionably come from both sides. Striking an anything-but-conciliatory note, last week Hidalgo suggested that some of her detractors were “big machos,” while others came from the “fachosphere”—the sphere of the extreme right.

So why all the hubbub? In recent years, Paris has adopted some of the most systematically anti-car policies of any major world city, with a pro-bike, pro-pedestrian ethos that has so far has only been surpassed by smaller cities like Copenhagen. Older cars have been banned from the roads during weekdays, part of an ongoing plan to remove more polluting vehicles from the city. The lower quays of the Seine, until recently one of the busiest east-west routes across the city, have been pedestrianized, while the Rue de Rivoli, the next major east-west axis to the river’s north, is due to have its car lanes reduced as well.

Car space is being slashed in many major squares, while car-free days have been introduced annually as a form of publicity campaign for a future without automobiles. The overall, frankly declared goal: to reach a point where the city is essentially car-free—a potentially reachable goal in a country which plans to ban gas-fueled cars by 2040.