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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Paris Cut Vehicle Traffic by 50%
What does a city feel like after it cuts car traffic in half and gives the streets back to people? We take you onto Paris’ bike lanes, into its buses and metros, and through the policies that turned a car-choked capital into a place where movement feels easy, human, and fast.
We break down how temporary “COVID paths” grew into a citywide Plan Vélo, backed by a major budget and an audacious goal: make every neighborhood bike-accessible. That meant building more than 1,000 kilometers of bikeways, re-striping streets, adding protection, and coordinating signals so cycling works at all ages and abilities. Pair that with bus-only lanes, filtered residential streets, and the removal of 50,000 parking spaces, and the result is a network that moves more people with less noise and danger.
Ready to rethink your city’s playbook? Listen, share with a friend who bikes or rides the bus, and subscribe to support more people-first urban stories.
Paris has reduced its vehicle traffic by 50% in the last 20 years.
SPEAKER_02:And while we've been here, we have seen some traffic around, but for the most part, for a city of its size, the streets are mostly filled with people and bikes versus cars sitting in traffic.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. One thing we've noticed, again, like you said, city of its size, but being such a large capital city, everyone's out on the street biking and running and using the metro. We've been in the metro uh a lot over the times. Yes. And there's been several times where we've had to just like cram into the door uh to make sure that everybody had space to get on to be wild.
SPEAKER_02:And that's with high frequencies and all that sort of stuff. So today we're gonna kind of talk about what Paris has done to sort of reduce traffic, and we can make some comparisons to cities in the US and around the world that have had that have implemented similar policies to try to reduce traffic and make cities better places for people, not necessarily just for cars.
SPEAKER_01:So a 50% reduction in vehicles over 20 years sounds absolutely unbelievable.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you would think hearing those numbers that there was a mass exodus of people leaving Paris and that the city was in decline and shops are closing and there's boarded up buildings everywhere. And after having been here for the last few days, I can tell you that that is not the case. Population of the actual city of Paris has largely remained flat. It peaked a few years ago and has kind of dwindled down by just a little bit. But the metro area overall, which includes some of the further out suburbs of Paris, have actually grown. So the number has gone up by over a million people in the metro. And you would think that that would make traffic worse. You've got people further out needing to commute into the city.
SPEAKER_01:Um that we've learned in the US is that sprawling cities are always going to equal more traffic.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Yes. Great examples that we have seen and are, you know, in a day using only public transit episodes in Dallas and Houston. I mean, these are cities that are very well known for traffic. And it's in many cases because of that sprawl outwards that has continued to happen.
SPEAKER_01:So if the population is not really changing, but the numbers are still going down, what is explaining that? And when we look back, some of that comes from introducing emission standards in the cities. So suddenly some vehicles aren't really allowed to come back into the city. It also uh is impacted by the way streets have sort of changed over time. But probably one of the biggest changes that's happened really started in 2020 through the current mayor and hidalgo's plan velo.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and a lot of this was inspired by COVID. Uh, you had a lot of kind of temporary bike lanes that were put in uh to help give people options to get around the city while staying outdoors.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, they were literally called like COVID paths.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. And it started small and then grew and then grew and then grew. And I know, you know, after this time period, I was starting to hear, oh, Paris is doing all this around biking. I think we even talked about it a little bit when we did an episode about the Olympics. And the city has seemingly continued to just double down on this. With some of the early successes of these sort of COVID bike lanes, the mayor and Hidalgo had a goal of making the city of Paris 100% bike accessible, which sounds like a very lofty goal.
SPEAKER_01:And that involved dividing the city into sort of 80 neighborhoods, and each of those neighborhoods had like a percentage of how accessible they were by bikes, and they really started checking off the list one at a time and making all these major changes in order to get to 100% cycle cyclability across the city. Uh, Anhill Doggers administration committed to spending$250 million on bike infrastructure through 2026.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and that has led to over a thousand kilometers of bike infrastructure here in the city of Paris. We've had a chance to see quite a bit of it, and it definitely varies. I mean, you still do see some just you know painted bike lanes, but we've seen quite a few full separated bike lanes with kind of cement barriers as protection. We've seen parking protected ones. You see all sorts of really interesting infrastructure there when it comes to stoplights for bikes and different signage, um, as well as a massive bike care system.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And what's really nice about some of the bike paths in the city, even if they're not protected, the streets really don't have that many vehicles on them, and you're really sharing lanes with a lot of other cyclists and maybe a bus. So, in some of the cases where we were uh riding through town yesterday, we were sort of like weaving through traffic, but it really didn't seem dangerous, it didn't seem overwhelming.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it was very different than weaving through traffic in cities in the US that we've done this even on the shot. I'm remembering biking in New Orleans. Oh, and we were like crossing three lanes of traffic because the bike lane was kind of in the middle and then it just was on the other side of the road. And I remember just being like, we gotta go. That was like, you know, very wide car car roads. And uh that's picking one specific thing. Even in Austin, where I actually think the city has done a good job with bike infrastructure, you're still often riding on roads where the speed limits are fairly high. And even if the speed limit's not high, cars drive fast because the streets are wide. Um, here the streets are narrow, and any cars that are there are generally moving pretty slow.
SPEAKER_01:And where any chaos is introduced, it's really introduced by pedestrians who are on the street who aren't necessarily abiding by their own crosswalk signal. Uh, as I've learned from friends here in Paris, the pedestrian is king.
SPEAKER_02:Uh it's it's kind of funny. They uh hear that, yeah, pedestrians are crossing against the light all the time. In Germany, uh, that would be a big no-no. We've been we've been crossing against the light a couple times here, and I'm I'm uh I'm I've been I've becoming more of a rule follower there. Uh part uh my husband Jerry's rubbing off me. He used to he used to yell at me for crossing the street against the light all the time, and and now I'm finally been integrating into the German culture and it it's reversing here.
SPEAKER_01:I'm convinced I will die one day by getting hit by a car trying to follow Brent across the street because he also just pays no attention to to street lights. Yep. In addition to a massive amount of investment in bike infrastructure, we've also seen the street designs change quite a bit. And what that looks like is increased bus lanes. So we had a lot of bus-only lanes that sort of crisscross the city and allow buses to flow largely outside of regular traffic in a lot of areas.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Not every bus route, but but uh select bus routes have that ability. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um, some of the streets have also just been changed. We have seen the traffic patterns change in some neighborhoods. You're actually not allowed to pass all the way through the neighborhood. It's only uh open to local traffic, which has really reduced the ability for cars to easily traverse from neighborhood to neighborhood in the city.
SPEAKER_02:In addition to that, on the streets, the city has removed a ton of parking. So uh the city has removed literally 50,000 parking spaces in central Paris. Now that was for a variety of reasons, including including some of the things that Chris has mentioned, pedestrian accessibility, all this sort of stuff, but also to make room for a lot of these bike lanes as well. And it's really clear when you're kind of going around the city, there's some streets we saw today and yesterday where it's a quite a wide road and there will be one lane of car traffic, not one in each direction, but like one lane of car traffic, and then there will be a whole lane for a bike, a whole lane for bikes going the other way with a barrier in the middle separating the bike traffic and then a bus lane or something like that. And it's really allocated the space in a way that is, again, more focused on like the human scale versus cars. They're moving way more people, and it's so clear you're moving way more people on these bike lanes in smaller vehicles. And if all of those people were in cars instead, it would be a massive traffic sewer and it would be loud and it would be dangerous for people living on these streets.
SPEAKER_01:But that's exactly what Paris was before a lot of these changes were really implemented, and definitely before you started to see car traffic dropping over the last two decades. I mean, Paris used to be known as a really congested car-filled city, and now what we've experienced is so against that narrative, so opposite of that narrative that I grew up hearing about Paris.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Yeah, I mean the the really the only section we saw today that felt like that was an area where there's a lot of construction going on. And a fairly main thoroughfare that we were riding a bus on kind of went down into one lane for a big construction site. But that's not a normal situation. Like if you're seeing, of course, you're gonna see traffic when something like that's going on. Elsewhere, it's even on roads that feel like major thoroughfares, you're you're seeing accessibility for people regardless of how they're traveling, and you're not seeing the massive traffic backups.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Also through some of the street changes now around some parks and some schools, vehicles aren't really allowed to be near those facilities. So it makes the areas a lot safer for families and for kids. And with the streetscape changes, there's been a ton of new trees planted in Paris, which is only going to continue to make the city just a better place to be.
SPEAKER_02:If you were deciding that you still wanted to drive a car in Paris, uh, there are a few other things to consider because of the massive reduction in parking and the city wanting people to use other modes traveling in downtown again so that it can be more people focused versus vehicle focused. The parking fees have actually gone up quite a bit. And they're even higher depending on what type of vehicle you're in. So if you're in a big SUV, you're gonna pay a higher fee for parking than if you were in a smaller vehicle, uh, which is just kind of another deterrent to driving. And oh go ahead.
SPEAKER_01:Well, and something that we don't see in the US at all. I don't know any, I don't know any system that adjusts its parking rate based on the type of vehicle that is parking, which is actually really smart and a system that a lot of US cities could adopt. You do see this with toll roads. Toll roads adjust the pricing based on the type of vehicle, usually it's the weights, the number of axles. That's really common. And a lot of people don't know that that exists either. But for parking, I've never seen that.
SPEAKER_02:Right. And it does make some sense for parking too, because if you have a bunch of people in little compact cars, you can park them closer together and fit fit more vehicles in the space. Uh, and then it also is just a lighter vehicle, is putting less wear and tear on the roads, on the parking lots, all this sort of stuff as well.
SPEAKER_01:I don't know that it would work as well in the US.
SPEAKER_02:I think there are some everyone drives a giant SUVs, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Right. I think there's some options where this could work in some cities for cities who are trying to achieve a certain goal. But I do think in the US, we also, because we are predominantly a uh a car culture, we do try to encourage ride share. And I think that is a path forward that we really need to push more in the US. So maybe uh a reduced rate for SUVs.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, like a reduced rate for SUVs as long as more than like four people get out or something.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm gonna get negative comments or this. Yeah. One of the last benefits we're gonna talk about with this reduction of vehicle traffic in the city of Paris is the amount of pollution that has been reduced. The smog and particulate matter in the air, these are monitored through hundreds and hundreds of sensors in the city every day. And you can see that there is a downward trend of airborne pollutants throughout the entire city, and it continues to trend downward. You can tell. You can tell. You can tell instead of car emissions, you just smell crits and coffee.
SPEAKER_02:In addition to the increase in cycling in the city, you also have a full recovery now of metro ridership in the city of Paris. Uh, I think in time that is going to begin to exceed those levels of pre-COVID very quickly. Uh, and you're also seeing a lot of investment into the system. So uh today, and an episode that will be coming out in a few weeks after you're watching this, we just spent essentially all day doing Paris using only public transit, riding all sorts of different modes.
SPEAKER_01:We've got to ride This is our 15th city, by the way.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, yeah, 15th cities doing using only public transit. There is a playlist on YouTube, and you can go watch them all if you want to. Um, that would take quite a while to watch them all, but it is a lot of fun content there. So uh, but we got to ride their newest Metro Line 14. It's one of the fully automated lines in the system. Really beautiful, and uh you can just tell that there's a ton of potential. There's gonna be another line 15 that connects to it uh in southern Paris that is more of a circuitous east-west route. Um, so there's a decent investment in the public transportation area. I also know that there are lots of investments in new trams that have opened over the last few years and plans for more in the future as well, which will all kind of help add to the ridership and help give people more options that isn't having to rely on getting into a car.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. What we're seeing in Paris has been really exciting, and to finally experience it firsthand was really awesome. So thank you to everybody that we've talked to on this trip who's given us um their opinions on this. In fact, we did a transit tangents poll here in Paris, and a hundred percent of the Parisians we spoke to think that everything that's happened with the the bike lanes and bus lanes and reductions in cars has been uh really, really great.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, pretty small sample size there, but uh but yes, it's about four people, but uh that's how statistics work. Yes, yes. Uh yeah, and it is exciting to think that uh it's very limited, but we are seeing some attempts at things like this in the U.S. Uh New York is like the main place where this comes to mind. We've got, you know, at first it was Kathy Hokel being against, and then forward and against and forward again. Congestion pricing. She's been very forward again now. She's pushing for uh subway extensions in New York City. Uh with the election of Zoran Mamdani in New York, you're also seeing uh someone who's willing to try to put some uh effort into improving public transportation in the city. Uh, I know that he fixed the uh there was a specific I'm not from New York and I haven't spent enough time there. There was a specific bump coming off of a bridge that people have been complaining about for years. I've seen it on Twitter for a really long time. Zoron fixed it already. They smoothed it out. He actually took two shovels and added to the to the asphalt to smooth out the bump. And I know that uh there has been a concerted effort uh at doing these sorts of policies in New York. And I think that we could see it happen in other cities and have it be a major benefit as well.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_02:I I'm excited to see. The Zor Ramp. That's what they're calling it. The Zor Ramp. They they smoothed it out with this. I was like, what is it? The Zor Ramp.
SPEAKER_01:I'm excited to see what other cities do with congestion pricing. I know that it is on the agenda for a couple of other cities to look at and see if it's feasible. The one that comes to mind most quickly is San Francisco. It just geographically seems like the ideal place to do it, but you also have cities like Boston and Philadelphia and others that that would make a lot of sense. So hopefully we we do see some policy start changing in other cities in the U.S. Uh, I would also like to call out Austin. Austin was the first major US city to reduce their parking minimums for businesses. So maybe not quite as far as Paris did by taking away 50,000 parking spaces, but setting up the future to where we're not as reliant on businesses having parking spaces and we find other modes of transit.
SPEAKER_02:Shout out to Austin's Zoe for doing that. He really spearheaded the uh parking minimums uh the discussion at City Hall and making sure that that actually became a reality.
SPEAKER_01:Another good sign in the US is that we are seeing that cycling is becoming more popular as a mode of transportation. A great example city of that is the city of Austin. Now, that's gonna be my first reference because I lived there, you lived there, you saw a lot of the great improvements, and they continue to improve biking in Austin. One thing that we've noticed a lot being out here is that people do have interactions on the transit. Uh people are traveling together as groups on transit and having a great time. Yes.
SPEAKER_02:We watched you people almost get separated on the wrong side of the door, but they reopened and they got they got in.
SPEAKER_01:Um but it it does give you a better sense of community and connection with your city, and I think that more Americans could really use that and would really benefit from it.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. I mean, I lived in a part of town where it was uh cross one ugly street and then you're just really smooth sailing to bike into downtown, bike to UT. Uh my partner bikes to work every single day, and it was busy. Like the bike lanes he was riding down every day were busy. And to your point of community and whatnot, he used to see people daily on the commute. He used to stop at a local coffee shop on the way where the person would know who he was and knew what he was getting. And those are interactions that you get when you are doing these things at human scale that improve the neighborhood, improve just the community aspect of all these places.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and if it's happening in Texas, it's not just happening in Austin. We're also seeing it happening in San Antonio. Um, we're seeing it happening in Dallas. Like there's all these new bike lanes that are opening up.
SPEAKER_02:Um, and I I also think it's important to point out here, too, that it's like the reason to do this isn't to attack cars, it's to like provide multiple options, right? Like right now in a lot of US cities, the only option is car or taking way more time using unreliable public transit that is underinvested and not ideal. Now, that is not everywhere. There are cities in the US with robust public transit systems, but here in Paris and what we're seeing in so many other places is like you can navigate this city well on public transit, probably much faster than you could in a car. And it's reliable, it's fast, it's fairly clean, I will say. Like the whole time we've been here. I I was like, Paris has been a very clean city. And yeah, it's not, it's not just like uh we're doing all this to just get rid of cars. No, it's we're doing it all this so that more people who live here can have a little bit more dignity when they're traveling and you know, being on the streets walking around versus just being bombarded by constant car noise, being put in harm's way of people driving radically and all these sorts of things. Thank you for bearing with us on this uh sitting on the ground edition of Transit Tangents, Eiffel Tower in the background. We are actually gonna go walk up the stairs right after this. Uh and that will probably be included in the episode that's coming out in a few weeks, so stay tuned to that. If you're not subscribed already, please consider doing so. It helps us out quite a bit. If you want to support the show directly, the best ways to do so are via our Patreon, checking out our merch store, buy us a coffee, all that sort of stuff down below. Uh but with all of that being said, thank you all so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your Transit Engines Tuesday.