Paris to go completely car-free this Sunday...well almost


READ MORE



The anti-pollution initiative was given the green light by Anne Hidalgo, the Paris mayor, banning cars, motorcycles and mopeds from the city from 11am to 6pm on October 1st. 



This marks the first time the whole of the French capital will be closed off to traffic – taking part in the global Car Free Day.



Pedestrians, cyclists, and rollerbladers will be the only people allowed to travel around the city (with the exception of workers and some residents – more on this later). 



Only the Peripherique ring road and the main routes around the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes will remain open to traffic, as drivers are encouraged to ditch their polluting cars and enjoy the tranquil city instead. 





Mairie de Paris 



“It will be educational, fun, and congenial,” said Christophe Najdovski, deputy mayor responsible for transport. 



However, there will be a few notable exceptions to the initiative. 



Taxis, emergency service and delivery vehicles, and RATP public transport, will all be allowed to drive around Paris. 



A 30km/h speed limit will be put in place for other vehicles permitted to drive around the city, including tourist buses, coaches, and any Paris residents with a proof of address who promise to take the quickest possible route. 



Hidalgo has made it her mission to reduce pollution in the French capital, and earlier this year she pedestrianized the right bank of the river Seine. 



Although Sunday will be the first time the whole of the city is closed off to traffic, there have been other attempts at closing Paris off from cars. 



The famous Champs Elysées avenue that runs from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde is among the roads that are closed on the first Sunday of every month.



And the past two years have seen certain areas of Paris without traffic: in 2015, only the very heart of Paris went car-free, and last year the area was extended to stretch from the Champs-Elysées in the west to Père-Lachaise cemetery in the east and from the Sacre-Coeur in the north to Montparnasse tower in the south. 



Mayor Hidalgo has also banned the most polluting cars from the streets of Paris, and plans to ban all diesel cars from the city’s roads by 2025.



Going car-free for the day will also help researchers uncover the effects of a day without traffic. 



Air quality and noise monitoring organisations Airparif and Bruitparif will be on hand to note the changes. 



Bruitparif has set up a special website to follow its results of noise testing throughout the day, while Airparif will release the air quality statistics at the end of the day. 



Last year’s smaller scale car-free day in Paris, Airparif said it had seen a 20-35 perfect reduction of the air pollutant nitrogen dioxide. 



By Anna Schaverien

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Canadian expected to be aboard Russia's 1st manned space mission since rocket failure

READ MORE The first manned mission to the International Space Station since a Russian rocket failed to launch successfully earlier this month may take off on Dec. 3, space agency Roscosmos said on Wednesday. And the crew is expected to include Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques, Agence France-Press reported. A Russian cosmonaut and U.S. astronaut were forced to abort their mission on Oct. 11 and perform an emergency landing after a launch accident that Roscomos said was caused by a faulty sensor. The accident was the first serious launch problem experienced by a manned Soyuz space mission since 1983, when a crew narrowly escaped before a launch pad explosion. Sergei Krikalyov, a senior Roscosmos official, was quoted by state news agency Tass as saying the next manned launch had been planned for mid-December, but that Russia was trying to bring the date forward so that the ISS is not briefly left without a crew. “The industry is making significant efforts to move the launch t...
Read more

Getting the dope on pot stocks is becoming easier as media groups invest in content: Don Pittis

Image
READ MORE “What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s happening,” goes the ’70s rock anthem. Part of the catchiness of the lyric — from the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar  — was that in that era the term “buzz” had developed a second spicy meaning. It described the high that people got from smoking cannabis. In the 1970s, the magazine High Times was a brand new title keeping an eye on the illegal but growing business of marijuana pricing and sales. It ran centrefolds of glistening pot plants and of an apartment filled to the windows with what the magazine insisted was an entire ton of cannabis. Now some of Canada’s most staid media voices are looking for ways to go toe to toe with High Times and its U.S. competitors, hoping to profit from Canada’s global head start in legal recreational cannabis. But when it comes to making a killing from spreading the buzz on the cannabis biz, to q...
Read more

Toronto man denies conspiring with Marvel CEO in alleged hate mail scheme

Image
READ MORE A Toronto man accused of conspiring with the head of Marvel Entertainment in a bizarre hate mail campaign against his wealthy former employer has denied any role in the alleged scheme. David Smith, along with Marvel CEO Isaac (Ike) Perlmutter, is the target of a slander lawsuit launched earlier this year by Canadian businessman Harold Peerenboom. Now Smith — a former employee of Peerenboom’s Toronto-based executive search firm, Mandrake Management — has filed a motion to dismiss the U.S. civil suit. It’s the latest development in the years-long legal battle between Peerenboom and Perlmutter, a notoriously reclusive American billionaire and personal friend of U.S. President Donald Trump. The hate mail campaign, which ran   between 2012 to 2015, saw anonymous letters falsely accusing Peerenboom of being a child molester, murderer and anti-Semite...
Read more