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Paris to bring 50km/h speed limit to congested ring road

Drivers on Paris' vital, congested ring road will be limited to speeds of 50 kilometres per hour from October, the French capital's mayor Anne Hidalgo said on Monday, triggering outrage among opponents.

Published: 9 September 2024 12:57 CEST
Paris to bring 50km/h speed limit to congested ring road
Traffic circulating on Paris' "peripherique" ring-road (Photo by AFP)

As well as raising hackles among drivers and conservatives, the Socialist mayor also faces an uphill battle for approval from the national government and police.

That showdown is in suspense for now, as freshly-installed Prime Minister Michel Barnier selects his ministers.

Crucial for road travel throughout the wider Ile-de-France region, Paris’s Boulevard Peripherique — known familiarly as the ‘Periph’ — is under the authority of the capital’s city hall.

READ MORE: Why the Paris périphérique is more than just a ringroad

“The 50 kph (limit) is my decision. It will happen on October 1st. We’ve been working on it for 18 years, this isn’t a new topic,” Hidalgo told broadcaster RTL.

A lower speed limit has been on the cards since January, when city hall said it would come in after the July-September Olympic and Paralympic Games that ended Sunday.

Hidalgo has also argued the reduction in the speed limit – which would decrease pollution – would also help to achieve climate goals and better public health.

Who can actually change the speed limit?

As a result of a decentralisation law passed in 2017, French law has allowed for the town hall to have power over the speed limit on its ring road, attorney Rémy Josseaume explained to BFMTV.

This means that the mayor of Paris does have the authority to pass a decree that changes the speed limit of the péripherique.

That said, there have been disagreements on this, and Josseaume noted that it would be possible for the measure to be challenged in court.

READ MORE: The key post-Olympics Paris transport changes you need to know

The transport ministry has insisted that only the government can officially change the speed limit by issuing a decree, as the city’s power does not extend to the nationwide rules of the road.

In November 2023, when the plans were initially being discussed, then-transport minister Clément Beaune promised he would not validate Hidalgo’s speed limit measure.

Meanwhile, Paris’s government-appointed police chief Laurent Nunez has also said he has a role to play. Nunez would need to organise the enforcement of the new limit, via speed cameras.

Hidalgo’s plans were decided “unilaterally” and “do not respect any of the recommendations” of a past report on the Peripherique, Conservative Republicans on the Paris city council wrote on X Monday.

Valérie Pécresse, former Les Républicains presidential candidate and the head of the Ile-de-France region called the plans to bring the speed limit down a ‘denial of democracy’, citing a survey that had found 90 percent of participants opposed to the change.

Pécresse also expressed concerns that the change would lead to an increase in traffic and pollution on other roads in the capital region.

The mayor’s Green party deputy David Belliard said in January that the lower speed limit was “in the common interest”.

A previous reduction, from 80 to 70 kph, had reduced noise pollution for residents living near the road as well as accidents, he said, citing figures from environment agency Ademe.

“Lowering the maximum speed means limiting stop-start driving (and) acceleration and deceleration effects, which makes traffic move more smoothly,” Belliard said.

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PARIS

Paris and Milan: Closest in the world to becoming ’15-minute cities’

Paris and Milan are among the cities closest to reaching the urban planning goal of being a "15-minute city," while car-dependent metropolises in the United States and elsewhere lag behind, a worldwide analysis said on Monday.

Published: 16 September 2024 17:29 CEST
Paris and Milan: Closest in the world to becoming '15-minute cities'

In fact, the central areas of many cities already meet the definition of a 15 minute-city, which means that residents are within a quarter-hour walk or bike ride from everything they need to a lead a good life, the analysis found.

But even within a city, there are often stark differences between the wealthy inner cities and the urban sprawl on their outskirts, according to the Italian researchers behind the new study.

The concept of the 15-minute city gained traction during the Covid pandemic, when lockdowns put more focus on local neighbourhoods.

It has since been embraced by dozens of mayors around the world — and become the target of conspiracy theorists online.

For the new study, published in the journal Nature Cities, the researchers built an online database looking at roughly 10,000 cities globally.

They used open source data to map out how far of a walk or cycle residents were from different services, including shops, restaurants, education, exercise and healthcare.

“A lot of people already live in a 15-minute city,” study co-author Hygor Piaget Monteiro Melo told AFP.

But it depends on where you look within a city, he said, because of the inequality in access to services between the centre and periphery.

No ‘utopia’

What is clear, the researchers noted, is that population density is a crucial factor — if enough people are living close enough to each other, it is much easier for them to have easy access to services.

This meant that somewhat smaller yet relatively dense cities such as Italy’s Milan or Spain’s Barcelona scored well on their map, which was made available online.

When it came to the biggest cities, “Paris is an outlier,” lead study author Matteo Bruno told AFP.

The mayor of Paris embraced the concept in 2020, and a “considerable fraction” of the city is below the 15-minute mark, the study said.

Some European cities have a head start because they were built centuries ago at a time before cars — when basically all towns had to be 15-minute cities, the researchers said.

Cities built more recently with cars specifically in mind — particularly in the United States — fared far less well on the map.

Atlanta in particular stood out as being a long way from being a 15-minute city. Future Olympic host Los Angeles also lagged behind most others for walkability, as did several Chinese cities including Chongqing.

But when it comes to cities, there are always trade-offs — and there is no single right answer, the researchers said.

“The 15-minute city is often presented as a utopia — it’s not,” Bruno said.

Americans in sprawled-out cities usually have their own houses and backyards, while Europeans in densely populated cities tend to live in apartments, illustrating the important role played by culture, Bruno said.

And central parts of US cities such as New York, San Francisco and Milwaukee were under the 15-minute threshold.

“Manhattan is definitely one of the most 15-minute places ever in the world,” said Bruno, a researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Rome.

‘Conspiracy mongers’

There has been confusion about the concept in the past, the researchers lamented.

For example, “traffic has nothing to do with the 15-minute city,” Bruno said.

In fact, slow traffic could indicate an area is more pedestrian friendly, he added.

Yet it was new “low-traffic zones” in the UK that turned the ire of conspiracy theorists towards 15-minute city proponents.

Confusing the two ideas, online groups including vaccine and climate sceptics falsely claimed that 15-minute cities were part of a secret plot to restrict the movement of citizens.

The Italian researchers, who have themselves been targeted by “Twitter haters,” emphasised that nothing about the 15-minute city concept involves confining anyone.

Researcher Carlos Moreno, a high-profile proponent of 15-minute cities who has advised Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, was also “attacked by the worldwide conspiracy mongers,” he told AFP.

Moreno welcomed the new study, praising how the idea had swiftly become a topic of interest for researchers around the world.

Just last week, Valerie Pecresse, the right-wing head of the greater Paris Ile-de-France area, presented a plan for a 20-minute region, he pointed out.

Bruno said that the 15-minute metric is just one element in the “recipe” that makes a good city.

Other parts of the recipe include tackling inequality and segregation, improving public transport, reducing traffic and so on, he said.

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