“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.

This week's must-read: "Life in the Spanish city that banned cars."

"A metro-style map of Pontevedra shows typical walking times."

No two places are exactly the same, and what works in one may not fly in another, but what this soul-boosting article informs us is that another way does indeed exist.

During the past seven years in New Albany, we've experienced a highly deceptive, and in my view purely intentional, bait 'n' switch. Road improvement projects primarily benefiting drivers of motor vehicles are pitched to us as offering enhanced "walkability," "safety," and various other buzz phrases of no more value than words used to sell breakfast cereal.

Conversely, the mayor in Pontevedra gets it. Try to wrap your brain around this statement.

I'm in awe.

“In effect, these are everyday public works that have been carried out in the context of a global project, but they cost the same or even less.” “We haven’t undertaken grand projects. We’ve done what was within our grasp.”

There is no pay wall at The Guardian, and consequently no excuse not to click through and read the whole article.

And that chart up there at the top of the page?

We need some of those here. If the city and/or Develop New Albany can't get it done, maybe downtown businesses can.

'For me, this is paradise': life in the Spanish city that banned cars, by Stephen Burgen (The Guardian)

In Pontevedra, the usual soundtrack of a Spanish city has been replaced by the tweeting of birds and the chatter of humans

 ... Miguel Anxo Fernández Lores has been mayor of the Galician city since 1999. His philosophy is simple: owning a car doesn’t give you the right to occupy the public space.

“How can it be that the elderly or children aren’t able to use the street because of cars?” asks César Mosquera, the city’s head of infrastructures. “How can it be that private property – the car – occupies the public space?”

Lores became mayor after 12 years in opposition, and within a month had pedestrianised all 300,000 sq m of the medieval centre, paving the streets with granite flagstones.

“The historical centre was dead,” he says. “There were a lot of drugs, it was full of cars – it was a marginal zone. It was a city in decline, polluted, and there were a lot of traffic accidents. It was stagnant. Most people who had a chance to leave did so. At first we thought of improving traffic conditions but couldn’t come up with a workable plan. Instead we decided to take back the public space for the residents and to do this we decided to get rid of cars.”

They stopped cars crossing the city and got rid of street parking, as people looking for a place to park is what causes the most congestion. They closed all surface car parks in the city centre and opened underground ones and others on the periphery, with 1,686 free places. They got rid of traffic lights in favour of roundabouts, extended the car-free zone from the old city to the 18th-century area, and used traffic calming in the outer zones to bring the speed limit down to 30km/h.

The benefits are numerous. On the same streets where 30 people died in traffic accidents from 1996 to 2006, only three died in the subsequent 10 years, and none since 2009. CO2 emissions are down 70%, nearly three-quarters of what were car journeys are now made on foot or by bicycle, and, while other towns in the region are shrinking, central Pontevedra has gained 12,000 new inhabitants. Also, withholding planning permission for big shopping centres has meant that small businesses – which elsewhere have been unable to withstand Spain’s prolonged economic crisis – have managed to stay afloat ...

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.

"What a human and wonderful thing: to be able to walk down the street and feel like you're a first-class citizen."

Photo credit

Remember when the ORBP's commission was prattling about mobility solutions, and concluding that a massive road-building project was the only one worth considering?

Seeking a corrective for such autocentric foppery? Click through, and get a sense of how modernity operates.

Oslo just declared that it will become the first major city to ban cars, by Leanna Garfield (Tech Insider)

Cars are no longer welcome in downtown Oslo.

Oslo plans to ban all cars from its city center by 2019, Reuters reports.

It will also build more than 35 miles of bike lanes by 2019 and invest heavily in public transport.

The permanent ban will affect the 350,000 or so car owners in the Norwegian capital.

Oslo's car ban is the largest of its kind, says Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an organization that supported New York City's Citi Bikes and advocates for car-free cities.

"The fact that Oslo is moving forward so rapidly is encouraging, and I think it will be inspiring if they are successful," he tells Tech Insider.

The car ban in Oslo will reduce pollution and make it a safer city for those on foot.

"We want to make it better for pedestrians, cyclists. It will be better for shops and everyone," Lan Marie Nguyen Berg, lead negotiator for the Green Party in Oslo, tells Reuters.

"For one month, the neighborhood suddenly got rid of every car."

It's South Korea (an organized place), it's expensive, and it would require city leaders with courage, so instead of suggesting "let's do this here," merely consider the outcome of this car-free experiment in an attitudinal sense, and compare with some of the objections aired during the Speck hearings earlier this year.

I'm not referring to the complaints of trucking magnates. Rather, residents were voicing fears not so much about two-way streets and traffic calming as elemental disquiet with any proposed change to their routines, however mundane, and even when accompanied by entire laundry lists of benefits -- including increases in value to their own properties.

Hence the value of the experiment documented here: "See, it actually can be done."

Following are excerpts, but consider clocking through and reading the entire essay. I've added bold/italic to one key passage.

Here's What Happened When A Neighborhood Decided To Ban Cars For A Month, by Adele Peters (Fast Company)

Two years ago, an average neighborhood in the South Korean city of Suwon embarked on a radical experiment: For one month, the neighborhood suddenly got rid of every car.

Called the Ecomobility Festival, it was created as a way to help the city move much more quickly to a low-carbon future by helping citizens get a visceral sense of how that future could look.

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When planning began, the neighborhood was filled with cars, and people typically drove everywhere, even pulling up on sidewalks to park in front of shops while they ran errands. "Most of the people could not envision how their neighborhood would be car-free," Otto-Zimmerman says. "They simply said it couldn't work."

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After the festival ended, the city also gathered residents for a huge meeting to ask for ideas for more permanent changes. The biggest result: The speed limit was cut nearly in half, to about 18 miles per hour. That meant that commuters no longer wanted to use the neighborhood as a shortcut, and traffic started to disappear. Neighbors also decided to eliminate side parking on some major streets—and parking on sidewalks—which helped encourage people to start walking and biking to run errands. Every month, the community also hosts a car-free day.