spoiler
Over the past 20 years, Paris has undergone a major physical transformation, trading automotive arteries for bike lanes, adding green spaces and eliminating 50,000 parking spaces.
Part of the payoff has been invisible — in the air itself.
Airparif, an independent group that tracks air quality for France’s capital region, said this week that levels of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) have decreased 55 percent since 2005, while nitrogen dioxide levels have fallen 50 percent. It attributed this to “regulations and public policies,” including steps to limit traffic and ban the most polluting vehicles.
Air pollution heat maps show the levels of 20 years ago as a pulsing red — almost every neighborhood above the European Union’s limit for nitrogen dioxide, which results from the combustion of fossil fuels. By 2023, the red zone had shrunk to only a web of fine lines across and around the city, representing the busiest roads and highways.
The change shows how ambitious policymaking can directly improve health in large cities. Air pollution is often described by health experts as a silent killer. Both PM 2.5 and nitrogen dioxide have been linked to major health problems, including heart attacks, lung cancer, bronchitis and asthma.
Paris has been led since 2014 by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, a Socialist who has pushed for many of the green policies and has described her wish for a “Paris that breathes, a Paris that is more agreeable to live in.”
Her proposals have faced pushback — from right-leaning politicians, a car owners’ association and suburban commuters, who say that targeting cars makes their lives more difficult.
But last month, Parisians voted in a referendum to turn an additional 500 streets over to pedestrians. A year earlier, Paris had moved to sharply increase parking fees for SUVs, forcing drivers to pay three times more than they would for smaller cars. The city has also turned a bank of the Seine from a busy artery into a pedestrian zone and banned most car traffic from the shopping boulevard of Rue de Rivoli.
Carlos Moreno, a professor at Paris’s Sorbonne University and a former adviser to the city, said Paris has developed “an urban policy based on well-being.”
https://english.elpais.com/lifestyle/2024-04-24/the-cycling-revolution-in-paris-continues-bicycle-use-now-exceeds-car-use.html
:ecoterrorist-wholesome:
I think some US states are halfway there with subsidising ebikes, up to like $1000 in Colorado's programme which drops the effective cost to $300-500, but universal provision of a standardised open source model would do so much for radically transforming cities fast. When people use the infrastructure they want more and better infrastructure. That cycling infrastructure is better for every aspect of the urban ecosystem and grows a pedestrian-friendly city around it.
Like for the E-Bikes or for the infrastructure?
For the ebikes. I want an electric buffalo bike in commuter/trike/cargo models with the goal of making it as personisable and durable as possible. These would either be owned by the municipality and distributed through a library model, heavily subsidised for consumer purchase, or outright provided by the state as universal basic transport.
I think the XYZ Cargo Project would be right up your alley, it kind of goes in that direction albeit with basically zero state support. Most of the more interesting vehicles are commercial DIY-products but it does feel very much "a man's gotta eat" in a sense and given they do just hand you an entire build manual for a one seater recumbent on the XYZ Plattform, re-engineering all their other models would not be hard.