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Paris, the capital city of France, boasts the most popular tourist attraction in the world in the guise of the Eiffel Tower. It’s a beautiful city to boot, albeit a little too populated as well (as in more than 11 million people).
La Ville Lumière also happens to be a nightmare in terms of personal transportation because parking is a hurdle pretty much everywhere and traffic is unbelievably bad on most days. To promote the vast public transportation network of the city, Paris will impose a 30-kph speed limit on August 30th on most streets and boulevards. The most notable exception is the ring road.
Can you imagine commuting from outside the ring road to somewhere near the center at 19 miles per hour? That’s living hell, alright, yet the Parisians appear to be masochists. Out of 5,736 people who accepted to give their opinion on the snail-slow speed limit, 50 percent gave a favorable answer to the reduction and exactly 31 percent are completely in favor of it.
In addition to public transport, Paris’ 30-kph limit aims to improve road safety and reduce noise pollution. Reducing the speed by 20 kilometers per hour also reduces the number of serious and fatal accidents by more than 40 percent, and the noise reduction is irrelevant because Paris is always loud.
Somewhat related, mayor Anne Hidalgo pushes ahead with plans to remove a whopping 60,000 of 140,000 street-level parking spaces. The socialist mayor, who is seriously weighing a presidential run in 2022, has also made it clear that motorcycles and scooters will be charged for parking from 2022.
Based on this latest decision, Paris will become purgatory for manual-equipped car owners on August 30th. I can’t imagine getting out of second gear into third even in the case of an econobox such as the Peugeot 208. Why? Because third gear at 30 clicks per hour would take its toll on the particulate filter of the vehicle and the engine as well. An electric vehicle would be much better under the upcoming speed limit, but frankly speaking, a metro or a bicycle would be much faster to get from point A to point B.
Can you imagine commuting from outside the ring road to somewhere near the center at 19 miles per hour? That’s living hell, alright, yet the Parisians appear to be masochists. Out of 5,736 people who accepted to give their opinion on the snail-slow speed limit, 50 percent gave a favorable answer to the reduction and exactly 31 percent are completely in favor of it.
In addition to public transport, Paris’ 30-kph limit aims to improve road safety and reduce noise pollution. Reducing the speed by 20 kilometers per hour also reduces the number of serious and fatal accidents by more than 40 percent, and the noise reduction is irrelevant because Paris is always loud.
Somewhat related, mayor Anne Hidalgo pushes ahead with plans to remove a whopping 60,000 of 140,000 street-level parking spaces. The socialist mayor, who is seriously weighing a presidential run in 2022, has also made it clear that motorcycles and scooters will be charged for parking from 2022.
Based on this latest decision, Paris will become purgatory for manual-equipped car owners on August 30th. I can’t imagine getting out of second gear into third even in the case of an econobox such as the Peugeot 208. Why? Because third gear at 30 clicks per hour would take its toll on the particulate filter of the vehicle and the engine as well. An electric vehicle would be much better under the upcoming speed limit, but frankly speaking, a metro or a bicycle would be much faster to get from point A to point B.
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