Paris: Cars to be banned from 500 extra streets after referendum | EUROtoday

Parisians have voted in favour of pedestrianising 500 extra streets within the French capital, bolstering City Hall’s ongoing marketing campaign to cut back automobile utilization and improve air high quality.

A referendum held on Sunday noticed practically 66 per cent of voters approve the measure to create extra car-free zones.

However, turnout was low at simply over 4 per cent, in accordance with official outcomes.

This newest vote marks the third such referendum lately, following a 2023 choice to ban e-scooters and a 2024 transfer to considerably improve parking charges for big SUVs.

The initiative will see the elimination of 10,000 parking areas, including to the ten,000 already eradicated since 2020.

City officers plan to seek the advice of with Paris’s two million residents to find out which 500 streets might be reworked into pedestrian areas.

It will broaden the community of “green lungs” to just about 700 – over 10 per cent of town’s streets.

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Data from Paris City Hall reveals that automobile visitors has decreased by greater than half for the reason that flip of the century when the Socialists took workplace, highlighting a long-term pattern in direction of prioritising pedestrians and different types of transport.

Under Mayor Anne Hidalgo, the streets of Paris have been reworked, with 84km of cycle lanes created since 2020 and a 71 per cent bounce in bike utilization between the tip of the Covid-19 lockdowns and 2023.

The 2024 referendum noticed parking charges for vehicles of 1.6 tonnes and extra triple to €18 an hour in a bid to discourage “bulky, polluting” vehicles.

Despite latest adjustments, Paris lags different European capitals by way of inexperienced infrastructure, which embody personal gardens, parks, tree-lined streets, water and wetlands.

These make up solely 26 per cent of town space versus a European capital’s common of 41 per cent, in accordance with the European Environment Agency.