Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo To Make Good On Pledge To Remove Half Of City’s Car Parking Spaces

Before she was reelected in June, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo pledged to make more space on the streets of her adopted city for pedestrians and cyclists by removing car parking spaces.

On January 29, Hidalgo revealed that the space required to make Paris more people friendly would have to come at the expense of motoring. She told electors she would remove 72% of the on-street car parking spaces in Paris, and despite car parking being the supposed “third rail” of urbanism—touch it at your peril—she was comfortably voted in for a second term.

According to a 2019 study by Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme (Apur) there are 83,500 on-street parking spaces in Paris—Hidalgo said before the election that she planned to remove 60,000 of them. (There are 621,600 parking spaces in total in Paris, most of them are domestic ones or commercial car parks.)

According to French newspaper Les Echos, a further 10,000 spaces will be removed by the end of her four year term in office.

The City of 15 Minutes

Hidalgo wants to carry out what she calls an “ecological transformation of the city,” aiming to clean the city’s air and improve the “daily life of Parisians.”

Based on the “segmented city” ideas suggested by Carlos Moreno, a “smart city” professor at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, the “city of fifteen minutes” includes making key thoroughfares in Paris inaccessible to motor vehicles; turning currently traffic-choked intersections into pedestrian plazas, and creating “children streets” next to schools.

Green spaces, vegetable plots, and playgrounds will take the place of car parking.

Some of what Hidalgo calls the “new organization of streets” will be permanent; other elements—such as the child-friendly school streets—would operate during the start and end of school days.

The Ville Du Quart D’Heure concept is based on Moreno’s idea of “chrono-urbanism,” or having amenities, jobs, and shopping close to home. This means “changing our relationship with time, essentially time relating to mobility,” says Moreno.

Rather than building out-of-town shopping malls, the 15-minute city would feature “hyper proximity,” with accessibility to “essential living needs” always close at hand, and certainly within short walking or cycling distances.

Removing car parking spaces will, it is hoped, encourage take-up of other forms of transport.

The removal plan was confirmed on October 20 by David Belliard, the Deputy Mayor of Paris.

Parisians will be invited to have a say what they will do with parking spaces released on the roads close to their homes.

Rachida Dati, Mayor of Paris’ 7th arrondissement, said removing the parking places would lead to “paralysis.”

Use of the remaining parking spaces will be “reserved for professionals who need their cars to get around,” said Belliard, a Green politician.

He added that with the imposition of the policy “only three Parisians out of ten will still own a car.”

Hidalgo has been Mayor of Paris since 2014, the first woman to hold the office.