Carless utopia – Paris sans Voiture

Carless utopia for one day

A cynic might argue that the car free day is little more than PR ahead of a United Nations climate change conference being hosted in Paris later this year, but rising pollution has forced the city to act. In March, air pollution briefly made Paris the most polluted city in the world. Smog became so bad that the Eiffel Tower was completely obscured.

It’s a problem that blights many European cities. Research by King’s College last year found nitrogen dioxide levels on London’s Oxford Street to be the worst on Earth – a shocking revelation that is prompting new restrictions on the type of vehicles permitted to enter the city. Dr David Carslaw, Environmental Research Group, was quoted in relation to air pollution levels on Oxford Street. He said: ‘To my knowledge this [level] is the highest in the world in terms of both hourly and annual mean. NO2 concentrations [in Oxford Street] are as high as they have ever been in the long history of air pollution.’
About 80 per cent of French motorists drive diesel-powered cars. By contrast, in Britain the proportion is 50 per cent.

The dire pollution affecting the French capital prompted a collective called Paris sans Voiture to lobby the mayor for a car free day.

The timing of the car free day last week, coming as it did after the Volkswagen scandal over emissions-rigging, could not have been better.
Following the success of the event, Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo has pledged to eradicate diesel use in the city by 2020 and plans to extend car-free areas: “we are not obliged to move around in a personal car, there are other ways to approach mobility in a city”.

https://vimeo.com/user38628446/psvescadron

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