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Opinions divided over Paris city hall's pro-bycicle drive

As Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and her council majority continue to roll out measures to restrict motor traffic and encourage cycling in the French capital, the latest being a ban on through-traffic in the city centre, opinions are divided. 

La rédaction de Mediapart

This article is freely available.

It sent a shock through Paris, a city striving to transform itself into one of the great cycling metropolises in the world: a bicycle rider, crushed under the wheels of an SUV in a bike lane just a few yards from La Madeleine, the landmark neoclassical church, in what prosecutors suspect was a deliberate act of road rage, reports The New York Times.

A murder investigation has been opened, and last week, Mayor Anne Hidalgo led the Paris City Council in a minute of silence for the cyclist, Paul Varry, a 27-year-old who was also a cycling advocate. Ms. Hidalgo, a member of the Socialist Party, delivered an emotional speech in which she signaled she would continue to roll out her famously aggressive policies that aim to drastically reduce the role of the automobile in Parisian life.

“I am truly angry,” she said. “The future does not belong to cars.”

An outpouring of emotion over Mr. Varry’s October 15 death has put a spotlight on the dangers facing cyclists in a city that has seen an explosion in bikes and cycling lanes in recent years. But it has also underscored the frustrations that motorists increasingly feel in a place that has chosen to limit the movement, speed and parking options of cars.

In recent weeks, as cycling organizations, spurred by the death of Mr. Varry, have demanded more protections from aggressive drivers, others have complained about Parisian bikers themselves, some of whom have earned a reputation as dangerous risk-takers.

Ratcheting up tensions this month is a new policy banning motorists from driving through the four arrondissements, or districts, in the heart of the city, rekindling the argument that Ms. Hidalgo’s anti-car stance is impractical, bad for business, and caters mostly to wealthy liberals who can afford to live in the city center.

“She is putting a garrote around Paris,” Patrick Aboukrat, a boutique owner in the fashionable Marais neighborhood, said this week, placing his hands on his neck for effect.

The debate in the French capital reflects the challenges facing policymakers around the world as they ask constituents to alter ingrained life habits in the fight against climate change. Ms. Hidalgo’s experiment — which has turned many Parisian streets into whooshing parades of pedaling commuters — is also unfolding in a city that has long harbored an innate tension between the big-city need for speed and the more languorous pleasures of “la belle vie.”

If the rest of France thinks of the stereotypical Parisian as eternally in a hurry, and perhaps a little rude along the way, it is also the place that gave rise to the 19th Century concept of the flâneur, the strolling, poetically minded observer of city life, who required time to adequately savor it. The German cultural critic Walter Benjamin even asserted, in what may be an urban myth, that some flâneurs slowed their roll by walking with a turtle on a leash.

Read more of this report from The New York Times.