In Lima next Wednesday, the International Olympic Committee will rubber-stamp Paris as host of the 2024 Games. By the time the Games begin, Paris will be transformed. “Vehicles with combustion engines driven by private individuals” could well be banned from the city by then, says Jean-Louis Missika, the deputy mayor, whose responsibilities include urban planning. He gestures out of his office window in Paris’s city hall at the busy rue de Rivoli. By 2024, driverless shuttle buses should be going up and down the road all day. Olympic visitors will see a vision of the post-car city.
Anyone watching lorries calmly unload on pedestrian crossings in today’s Paris will struggle to believe this. Paris is now dirty, chaotic, years behind the transport frontrunners Amsterdam and Copenhagen and, according to its mayor, Anne Hidalgo, suffers 6,500 deaths a year from pollution. But that’s largely because Paris was built pre-car, and never had the space for the 20th-century technology. Now, as private cars start fading out, pre-car cities will come into their own. Paris, capital of the 19th century, could be the capital of the 21st.
The city is already unrolling the future: raising the price of parking, adding bike lanes and planning to ban diesel cars by 2020. Paris has all the qualities to become the world’s first post-car metropolis. First of all, it’s too dense for cars and, as ever more tourists pile in, it keeps getting denser. “Every inch of that road surface has to be maximised,” says Ross Douglas, who runs Autonomy, an annual urban-mobility conference in Paris. “The first thing the city will want to do is reduce the 150,000 cars parked on the street doing nothing. Why should you occupy 12 square metres to move yourself? Why should you use a big diesel engine to pollute me and my family?”