This spring, as U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy threatened to cancel congestion pricing in New York City, and to rip out urban bike lanes, Parisians voted to remove cars from 500 streets and restore 10 percent of the city’s parking spaces to public space.

This new initiative will transform five to eight roads in each neighborhood, an effort that comes after Mayor Anne Hidalgo has already calmed 300 busy streets in the past five years. Key design elements include widespread use of bollards to protect pedestrians, innovative slip lane layouts that slow traffic and create buffers for bikes, and secure and accessible bike storage facilities at major transit hubs. Paris excels at intuitive subway signage, making navigation easy with color-coded directions and clear station information. It also experiments with creative turnstile designs, including those that generate electricity from passenger movement.

Public toilets are prevalent and modernized, offering self-cleaning features, external hand-washing stations, and live availability apps. And in response to climate change and extreme heat, Paris has expanded tree cover, added water mist stations to public plazas, and created swimming pools in the Seine for relief and recreation. Tell me again why we don't want to make our cities pleasant places to be?

‍ARTICLE: We’ll Never Have Paris … Unless We Start Rebuilding Our City Like The French Did