“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.

What would it take to make Paris (or anywhere) a ‘15-Minute City’?

Inconvenient facts for Glasser & Speck.

Ultimately, the "15 minute city" (or less) is is the goal.

It's not taking away your car, just lessening (in ways great and small) the necessity of using is as much as you are now, because there are only benefits to this lessening in the sense of health and well-being for everyone.

Right now, where we live on Spring Street, many amenities are within walking distance. With improved public transportation, there'd be more. Grocery shopping remains a challenge, but if I could leave the car parked most of the time, then use it once or twice a week for groceries, that'd be an improvement. We might find it unnecessary to have two cars, and already have discussed selling one of them.

What has to occur first is this: One must be able to imagine another way, unlike car-centric opinionating bloviators like Lindon Dodd and John Gilkey. As for me, I'll continue to try to offer alternatives to the absence of creative thought so sadly lacking in my aging white male brethren. 

What It Would Take to Make Paris a ‘15-Minute City’ (CityLab):

So close, yet so far: Imagine a city where all your essentials are just a short walk or bike ride from your doorstep: the doctor, your local boulangerie, even your office job. That’s the vision behind a 15-minute city, which is at the center of Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s re-election bid. The plan calls for creating a more thoroughly integrated urban fabric, where stores mix with homes, bars with health centers, and schools with office buildings.

It's a bold plan that counters the planning orthodoxy of separating residential areas from retail, manufacturing, and office districts, and would require reversing car-centric, suburban-style zoning, writes Feargus O'Sullivan. But Paris isn't the first city to explore the concept. Cities from Barcelona to Portland, Oregon, are taking steps to curb car dependency and boost hyper-local development. The question is: Can a city like Paris expand neighborhood amenities without leaving people behind?

Service amenities: "The Real Source of America's Urban Revival"?

But they'd still have to drive to the water slide.

The Real Source of America's Urban Revival, by Eric Jaffe (City Lab)

Millennials, housing costs, and shorter commutes are the usual explanations. But a careful new study points to another reason young college grads returned downtown in the 2000s.

 ... New living habits of Millennials and Baby Boomers, delays in starting a family, a tougher home-buying market, a hatred of long commutes—those social factors have all altered cities in recent years. But Couture and Handbury pin the return of downtown on a new fondness for service amenities: music venues, theaters, bars, gyms, and the like. Not the growth of these things but a fresh taste for living near them, a broad cultural shift that could make urban revival more durable.

“If this revival comes from a change in preference, then it could be a long-lasting phenomenon,” says Couture. “We have ruled out various explanations based on temporary trends.”

Strategies and amenities suitable for Redevelopment to ignore.

At urbanscale.com, two collections of strategies and amenities help make the point that even for a city of New Albany's relatively small size, we can leverage our location in metro Louisville to punch higher than our weight.

Assuming, of course, that we read books and think outside self-imposed boxes.

Coming in at Number One on John Karras' hit parade is the strategy we seem determined to get wrong, and probably will continue to botch for so long as John "My Way Means the Highway" Rosenbarger has influence to peddle about it, even as he blames his sad political predicament for the situation. Sorry, John; we're not buying the BS any longer.

Vibrant Downtown Strategy #1

Turn one-way streets into two-way streets.

Why?

One-way streets are great if your only goal is to channel traffic through your downtown, but they are bad for pedestrian activity and retail opportunities. Two-way streets create a more comfortable pedestrian environment and have been shown to increase property values.

There is a good reason that the Main Streets that sit at the urban core of small towns and cities across the U.S. are almost always two-way streets. From Wichita, KS to Charleston, SC, cities across the U.S. are realizing the benefits of two-way streets in their urban cores.

12 Strategies That Will Transform Your City’s Downtown

10 Small Cities With Urban Amenities That Most Big Cities Lack