Interesting article in the FT yesterday about Paris trying to get rid of cars by 2024.
It's behind a paywall, but here are a few highlights:
- “Vehicles with combustion engines driven by private individuals” could well be banned from the city by then, says Jean-Louis Missika, the deputy mayor.
- The city is already unrolling the future: raising the price of parking, adding bike lanes and planning to ban diesel cars by 2020.
- “Every inch of that road surface has to be maximised,” says Ross Douglas, who runs Autonomy, an annual urban-mobility conference in Paris. “The first thing the city will want to do is reduce the 150,000 cars parked on the street doing nothing. Why should you occupy 12 square metres to move yourself? Why should you use a big diesel engine to pollute me and my family?”
- Paris’s parking spaces will become bike or scooter paths, café terraces or playgrounds.
- Paris doesn’t need private cars because it already has the best public transport of any international city
- Already, nearly two-thirds of the 2.2 million Parisians don’t own cars
I don't know how realistic this stuff is, but it's a hell of a lot more ambitious than the Scottish government's plans - which don't appear to involve anything that would restrict car use.
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