Opinion: Stuck in traffic, I wonder if this European city’s car-free vision is working

Editor’s Note: David A. Andelman, a contributor to CNN, twice winner of the Deadline Club Award, is a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, creator of “A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen” and blogs at SubStack’s Andelman Unleashed. He previously was a international correspondent and bureau chief for The New York Times in Europe and Asia and for CBS News in Paris. The views expressed in this commentary are his personal. View more opinion at CNN.

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Imagine this: no new gas-powered vehicles on the market 11 years from now. Zero carbon emissions 15 years after that. That’s not information from one other planet. That’s what Europeans are going through as of this second, chiseled into law by European Union nations.

On Sunday, Parisians voted underwhelmingly (barely 78,000 out of 1 million eligible residents forged their ballots) to triple parking fees on gas guzzling SUVs on Sundays in their beloved metropolis.

It’s one small step on a continent that’s poised to show a really completely different form of nook in comparison with that of the US.

The truth is that gasoline vehicles aren’t being weaponized on many of the continent the way in which they’re in America. They are fairly merely disappearing, or about to take action. Those vehicles which might be left in Europe are being confined to ever narrower corridors.

By the center of this 12 months, personal vehicles might be gone totally from the middle of Milan, Italy’s second largest metropolis and its monetary capital. “We’ll start with the center, but then we will expand,” Mayor Giuseppe Sala said late last year.

Likewise, in the Swedish capital Stockholm, gasoline and diesel vehicles will be banned from 20 blocks of its most fascinating internal metropolis purchasing and workplace space from subsequent 12 months. And already in Austria’s capital in October, our taxi couldn’t get closer than a block from our hotel on the Stephansplatz sq. in central Vienna.

Other European cities have been banning vehicles for many years. In Pontevedra, northwestern Spain, there hasn’t been a single personal automobile in many of the metropolis since 1999. The final highway fatality got here 13 years in the past when a delivery van ran over an 81-year-old pedestrian.

In Paris, all heck is prone to break free this summer time. That’s when the Olympics descend on the French capital, and a lot of the middle metropolis will turn out to be inaccessible to most motorized site visitors. “We are not saying that people should leave Paris,” the city’s police chief Laurent Nunez told a press conference in November, including that there could be exemptions for emergency automobiles and residents. “Pedestrians are allowed everywhere,” he stated.

But then, there’s the aftermath. Oh expensive.

Take the Place de la Concorde. King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been guillotined there during the French Revolution. Now, after the Olympics, “The place given to the car in this emblematic place will have been only a parenthesis in history,” stated Mayor Anne Hidalgo earlier this 12 months. In different phrases: half of the floor space of the Place “will not be returned to motorists after the Olympic Games,” she said.

For years, Hidalgo has made it her mission to deal with Paris’s site visitors air pollution – banning vehicles from the banks of the River Seine and increasing pedestrian and bike lanes on a bunch of different thoroughfares. But doing so has additionally scrunched vehicles into ever narrower stretches, compacting the city’s already congested streets.

None of this is to counsel, in fact, that decreasing auto emissions worldwide is not a central element of controlling the global warming that is inflicting havoc to our planet. I’m all in favor of the commendable finish to gasoline vehicles that Europe has now embraced – a decade or extra therefore. But in actuality, doing this in dribs and drabs appears to be making it longer, harder, or dearer, to get round than it was in an entire lot of cities the place infrastructure has did not maintain tempo with innovation.

Try attending to one among my favourite eating places, Bofinger, off the Bastille from my condo across the nook from the Musée d’Orsay at lunch time. Forever. And watching that taxi meter tick up and up and up. Or sit in the bus, not often with air con, in 90 diploma warmth. (Hidalgo doesn’t even need the Olympic village for athletes to have AC, in an effort to be environmentally pleasant).

Of course, that’s just one nook of what’s occurred to Paris site visitors below the Hidalgo regime. I nonetheless bear in mind the nice outdated days in Paris, when it was attainable to take the quick routes alongside the quays by the Seine – restricted entry, restricted exits – to race throughout the town at 60 miles an hour from the Maison de Radio far out in the 16th arrondissement previous the islands of the Seine and on nearly to the Bastille in the 4th in minutes even on the height of rush hour. Ditto alongside the “left” financial institution of the Seine. No longer.

Now, all vehicles are crammed into close by metropolis streets. Taxis, buses, supply vans and the remaining personal vehicles jostle for house. Many of them are about to go up in a puff of smoke as nicely. Hidalgo plans on new restrictions on much of central Paris from Notre Dame to the islands of the Seine, by some estimates taking 100,000 cars off the road daily.

It’s going, it might appear, so much slower throughout the pond. In the identical 12 months that the EU plans to finish gross sales of all new gas-powered vehicles – 2035 – the US authorities alone, below an order from President Joe Biden, plans to cease shopping for them. (The US authorities owns more than 650,000 vehicles and purchases around 50,000 each year).

And that’s three years sooner than some US cities. Last October, New York Mayor Eric Adams signed into regulation a requirement that beginning in 2038, all city-owned vehicles would have to be electric. No finish in sight for gas-powered vehicles in America, not less than not in the close to future. The nation’s love affair with the car is ineluctable.

Are my critically asthmatic lungs prone to be respiratory any higher throughout the months I spend as of late in Paris? Not in your life, or mine. The identical poisonous, planet-warming emissions are being generated, particularly with all that idling in place in countless site visitors jams.

A Sunday parking payment for gasoline guzzlers is an ephemera. Perhaps a few a long time from now when all these gasoline guzzling vehicles might be gone totally? Of course, by then I’ll be pushing 100.