151–160 of 392 posts
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People keep saying Hidalgo's policies made people angry, but then voter turnout when she actually asks for confirmation of her policies is low. For example, 2024's vote on whether to triple the parking fees for big SUVs. [1] Turnout was tiny, but the measure passed. Well what does that mean? It certainly doesn't mean that there is a huge wave of enthusiasm for the measure. But conversely it also means there's not a h…
Measures like this always seem unfair to me if they aren't announced a few years in advance. A car is a large investment and people may have made different choices knowing that the rules will change. Same with the tax per mile for Electric cars in the UK. Instead of encouraging motorists to make better choices, they just end up feeling part of a money grab
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Yes it is ideological: cars kill cities, kill communities and are bad for everyone involved. They are dangerous to drivers and non drivers alike and are deeply anti social. We need less cars everywhere period. Putting cars in cities was also deeply ideological. It was about segregation and as a way to extract as much resources from people as possible. The imposition of cars was about turning people into consumers who…
>Yes it is ideological: cars kill cities, kill communities and are bad for everyone involved. They are dangerous to drivers and non drivers alike and are deeply anti social. We need less cars everywhere period. You lost me at"We need less cars everywhere period." Not everywhere is a dense city.
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I think it’s no easy task to reform a city away from being car-centric. In my home town of Ghent (in Belgium), we’ve had several iterations of a traffic plan that gradually reduces the number of parking spaces, rises taxes and car related costs, makes streets one way or deprioritises cars (e.g. a car doesn’t have priority over a bike anymore) etc. It’s not easy but the city today is a lot more liveable than it was wh…
Honest question: What is the hard part? If you took all of that stuff and did it as quickly as you could somewhere else, what's would be the biggest issue? People + resistance to change of any kind? The outcome seems so obviously good. I have never heard of anyone complaining about a city becoming less car centric, but maybe somehow it's an under-represented story?
"There was a rise in hospitalizations of pedestrians and cyclists" looks at the reason CARS.
Cyclists hitting pedestrians.
I have only been to Paris once, but the cyclists were much more sane in my experience. The bike lanes were clear, and for the most part they stopped at a red light.
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I don’t know how you’re defining “rich” but the wealthiest folks I know all go to work physically. They get in their cars, or in one case on their bike, and commute to work like everyone else.
The wealthiest people I know are philanthropist that spend their day on zoon meetings to decide who get the grant. A couple of time a week someone arrange a visit for them to check on "things are going" on the trenches. They also spend a lot of time on the phone strategizing with other folks like them. -- But that's not a contest!I'm sure your rich people are richer than my rich people. -- If we were looking at a for…
I honestly find it extremely interesting how both France and the US have similar fault lines due to the intersection of economic, social, and political culture wars, and an extremely similar manner of consolidated media ownership.
What Paris does politically speaking matters less than what Marseille, Nice, and Toulon does - everyone overindexes on the 20% at the expense of the other 80%. This is what brought Trump to office in 2016, and I see similar mistakes being made across Western Europe as well.
> where access to remote work and living in the inner city are strongly correlated with higher income
People also underestimate the number of mega-commuters in France, and how depending on the distance commuting via Intercités+TGV and a car becomes a wash.
Some people will derisively say "let's make owning a car more expensive to make them change", but that's similar to Marie Antoinette's retort "S'ils n'ont pas de pain? Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!", especially given how severe spatial inequality is in France.
> “She is constantly criticized, but still reelected: I’ve never understood it,” says Lionel Pradal, a bistro owner on the bustling Rue des Martyrs. “Parisians never go out and vote, and then after they complain. This is the problem with French people, it’s always the same.” This is somewhat of a public secret, but few people ever stay in Paris for longer than say 10 years and thus aren't that attached to the city. I…
Wikipedia says that 70% of the people voted. Is it mandatory there?
Here in Argentina it's mandatory, but weakly enforced. We get also a 70% of people voting. Anyway, the big problem are bubbles, probably all the friends of the guy don't like the current mayor and complain.
This article has such a weird framing. It keeps repeating how the cleaner air is so good for tourists. But tourists visiting Paris for a week don’t get the majority of the benefit from cleaner air. The Parisian residents living there throughout the year do. Maybe because it’s CNN, an American outlet, they’re focused on the “tourist”, but these benefits have mostly accrued to Parisians. Also, the 4% increase in traffi…
Take the claim that the locals hate the changes. Well, the mayor was reelected. So they claim the voter turnout was low and people were complaining, so people obviously don't support it. Sorry, you can't make that conclusion. Under ordinary circumstances, 100% turnout would only tell you the overall support for a particular candidate or party, not a particular policy. A low turnout may reflect an electorate who is not particularly passionate in any of the issues presented in the election, or it may mean something else. It was probably something else in the 2020 elections because those were anything but ordinary: they fell during the peak of pandemic uncertainty (i.e. March to June). So a flimsy assertion based upon flimsy evidence.
Then there are the scanty numbers without context. A 4% increase in traffic jams since 2015 and 31% decline in bus use between 2018 and 2024. First of all, the words "bus use" sounds highly selective. It looks like the Paris metro has been expanding and modernizing rapidly in recent years, which would both take load off of busses and be disruptive to transit users. Oh, and that pandemic thing raises its head again. I don't know about Paris, but a lot of cities took a hit to transit ridership during the pandemic and some are claiming to reach pre-pandemic levels only now. Also, cyclists tend to be the whipping boy for traffic congestion. I can't speak for Paris, but the reality in my parts are that population growth and a surge in construction have been far more disruptive than cycling infrastructure.
Sorry about the rant, but I'm sick and tired of the views of one segment of the population completely overriding the views of another segment of the population ... especially when there are assertions based upon assumptions and flimsy evidence.
In an American city I would bet on the mobility impaired people to win the cage match against the fewer cars people. They are tougher than they look. Edit: The responses reasonably talk about the officially mobility impaired people. I was thinking more about the unofficially mobility impaired people by obesity, like me. French obesity rates are ~16% compared to ~42% in the US. That contributes to a fierce US constitu…
Why frame it as a fight? There’s no need to start there; you don’t need to waste time fighting against people not in your group. You just need to establish group status. If the constituency of obese people is strong, why not seek to establish policy on behalf of obese people and not everyone? As the article and others here have said, reducing traffic congestion benefits everyone in multiple ways, including benefits for the people who still have to drive. Given a choice that doesn’t affect your ability to drive, I assume you’d rather have less pollution, less noise, and fewer other drivers on the road?
The other angle missing from your comment is e-bikes. Most of those ~42% of obese people in the U.S. are still capable of riding an e-bike, and for short trips in busy areas, e-bikes are more convenient and easier to park than cars.