PFor two months, the eyes of the entire world have been turning towards the capital, which has become France’s showcase for the international media. The governance of the Olympic Games (OG), which welcomed 10 million visitors, was unanimously praised. Whether it is the organization of competitions, the operation of public transport or accommodation capacities, the event made Greater Paris shine, from Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines to Vaires-sur-Marne, from La Défense to Saint- Denis, with Paris and its river in the center.
After the holidays, the city returned to normal, as did its political leaders. As the question of the Olympics’ legacy arises, controversies resurface over the future of the Ring Road, Europe’s busiest urban highway and an infrastructure symptomatic of an overheated metropolis.
On the one hand, the Paris City Council wants to continue its bioclimatic plan by limiting the speed on the ring road to 50 kilometers per hour, compared to the current 70, and reserving one lane for public transport and car sharing. Reducing speeds would reduce noise and pollution, it claims, and make daily life easier for 500,000 local residents, especially at night. On the other hand, the region and the State are concerned about the consequences of these decisions on the mobility of residents of the inner and outer suburbs, while the ring road is currently used by more than 1 million vehicles a day, including 80 % of drivers live outside Paris, according to the Paris Region Institute.
These debates highlight the political difficulties that France faces in taking charge of an important urban planning issue: the necessary transformation of the facilities inherited from the thermo-industrial era. Started in 1956, the bypass project was not completed until 1973, a year after the publication of the Meadows report on “The Limits to Growth.”
power struggles
Even before its completion, the infrastructure is already becoming obsolete. Because, meanwhile, the car has become a mass commodity. Once the first sections are finished, the highway is already congested, a victim of its success. The equipment plays the role of “air draft”, absorbing more and more traffic, causing greater congestion on the roads and a deterioration in service.
Source of multiple nuisances (pollution, noise, fine particles), the ring road crystallizes both the evils of the century and the difficulties of metropolitan governance. In fact, it is a Parisian municipal road, where the municipality can decide on its own the maximum authorized speed. But it also delimits the border between the capital and the periphery, in the heart of an urban area of 10 million inhabitants, and represents a strategic regional traffic axis, linked to a departmental and national network.
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