Jimmy Thomson, Editor-In-Chief of Canada’s National Observer, was obviously in Paris recently and impressed with how the city has transitioned to improve its sustainability. The city’s efforts to transform its downtown into an active-transportation Mecca had attracted me on a pilgrimage across the world to see what it looks and feels like. You can tell he was impressed: “The city’s efforts to transform its downtown into an active-transportation Mecca had attracted me on a pilgrimage across the world to see what it looks and feels like.”
Paris paved the parking lot, and put up the pyramids
It’s hard to imagine, standing in front of the massive glass pyramid that dominates the inner courtyard of Paris’s Musée du Louvre, that just a generation ago it was a parking lot.
Old pictures from the time of I.M. Pei’s pyramids’ construction show cars lining the central 16th-century building and its later additions. Cars also jam up the roads leading past the courtyard — five lanes in all.
The parking and the traffic are all gone now. Early in the morning when I visited on a recent vacation, the courtyard was silent and peaceful, before the crowds of tourists arrived, but even once they’re there, there’s no din of engine noise and tires, no cars to dodge, no exhaust to breathe.
It’s a human-oriented place, befitting of the intensely human nature of the collection of some of history’s greatest artistic works contained within the museum. Or at least, I think they’re in there. I didn’t go inside. I wasn’t there to see works of art — I was there to ride my bike. The city’s efforts to transform its downtown into an active-transportation Mecca had attracted me on a pilgrimage across the world to see what it looks and feels like.
From the Louvre, we took off across the Seine and turned east, quickly encountering another example of human-oriented infrastructure wrested from the clutches of car-centric design. Roads that once hemmed in the river were liberated during the pandemic as temporary bike roads. Once people saw how great it can feel, they never went back. The paths became part of Le Plan vélo de Paris, Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s $650 million two-part plan over 10 years to increase bike infrastructure.
To say Hidalgo’s plans have been a wild success would be an understatement. During rush hour, there are more bikes than cars on Parisian streets for the first time ever. In 2001, Paris had 200 kilometres of bike paths. By 2021, it had 1,094 kilometres. The plan through to 2026 adds yet another several hundred, plus more infrastructure like bike racks. According to French newspaper Le Monde, bike trips doubled between 2022 and 2023 as the plan’s second phase was taking effect.
Continuing down the Seine toward the Eiffel Tower, we cycle through a crowd on bikes, walking and running along the river. It feels like everyone in Paris is outside and active. People sit on the walls of the built-up river, enjoying a coffee with a friend. Kids ride on the backs of e-bikes on their way to school. No one seems stressed by the “traffic” of active transportation; the entire time I’m in Paris, I see one confrontation between cyclists, and it’s over in seconds after a few angry words.
It seems so fitting, as though bikes and walking have always dominated the European cities that are today known for their scenic, quiet walkways, treed streets, fast transit and safe cycling. But they were once just as jammed with cars as the worst day on downtown Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway. The transformation of the Louvre courtyard and the Seine bikeway weren’t just part of the inevitable arc of history — they were choices, and it doesn’t take much imagination to picture the outrage that must have arisen in response. One has only to look at what happens any time a single lane of road is removed to make space for a bike lane, or a parking lot is reduced to allow more space for people: at least in Canada and the US, the response is that drivers lose their minds.
And yet it’s outrage that drove things in the opposite direction in Europe. Historic pictures of Amsterdam from the 1970s show the now idyllic canal-side streets falling prey to bigger and bigger highways, setting off soul-searching about what the city wanted to be and who it was for. Ditto for Vienna, where the demolition of a beloved historic church for “traffic reasons” inspired a wave of anti-car sentiment that eventually led to a revolution in transportation.
The cities that enacted those changes were led by populations and leaders who had the vision and courage to imagine a future that didn’t depend on an ever-increasing commitment to more cars and more roads for them and them alone. We’ve seen where that approach has gotten us in our sprawling and traffic-choked cities. Now, Canadian leaders can choose: the pyramid or the parking lot.
External link
Energy in Demand - Sustainable Energy - Rod Janssen 