The Automotive Liberation of Paris

The city has waged a remarkably successful effort to get cars off its streets and reclaim walkable space. But it didn’t happen overnight.

For all the attention Paris gets for its transportation woes—awful smog, endless strikes, traffic jams—the city’s remarkable shift away from the car arguably deserves more.Wrap your head around this: in terms of mode share, driving within Paris city limits has dropped about 45 percent since 1990, according to a recent paper in the French journal Les Cahiers Scientifiques du Transport. Meanwhile, the share of cyclists has increased tenfold over the same timeframe. Transit’s mode share has risen by 30 percent.

Vehicle-kilometers per hour, between 7 am and 9 pm, in “intramural” Paris, since 1990. (Fréderic Héran)

For comparison’s sake, the share of trips made by car in New York City has shrunk since the 1990s, too. But about twice as many trips still take place inside a car. Check out the graph below, from the New York City Department of Transportation, to see how the cities’ mode share shifts stack up over time.

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