Paris Mayor: It's Time for a '15-Minute City'
citylab.com
citylab.com
Paris has always had this very dense city core where 99% of daily life is 5-10’ away. It’s a great concept for dense metropoles, but it only works because the city is so small: 100 square kilometers in an ocean of much lesser density. 80% of “Greater Parisians” live outside Paris itself.
Unfortunately there is no actual representations for 80% of those “outside Parisians” since they are split between hundreds of small cities with individual political dynamics. Pure game theory as local governance.
There is a survey at the municipal level called the “Budget Participatif”, where inhabitants can suggest and vote for projects that’ll then be executed by the city. These projects represent 5% of the annual city budget. There have been so many projects about pedestrian areas in 2018 that they decided to remove the whole category in 2019 not to be overwhelm by the quantity of new projects and have time to do the previous ones. If that shows one thing, it’s that the walkability of the city is a main priority.
From 3 months ago:
Paris migrant camps cleared — again — in immigration crackdown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttf5j5SVrFs
Thousands of asylum seekers waiting in streets, makeshift camps around Paris
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2htRQwzI5jY
Paris authorities clear large migrant camps on edge of city
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5PegltCkmw
From an year ago:
Migrants moved to wealthy Paris neighbourhood, what do locals think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59lEtxjFK5A
From nearly 4 years ago:
Mass Immigration Ruins The Streets Of France
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqopPs5Tp-I
edit:formatting
[1]: https://www.la-croix.com/France/qualite-lair-sameliore-Paris...
Some of the places where it got worse are far away from Paris… so who cares about the poor people who live in a far-away suburb near the freeway. It's not like they vote for Paris' mayor.
Why is this sentiment suddenly acceptable when it’s couched in terms of the real estate people can afford instead of their incomes directly?
Paris is TINY. Paris is SMALLER than the borough of Brooklyn in NYC.
Paris is 3x smaller than just the inner boroughs of London and 16x smaller than London.
The Paris business district (La Défense) is actually located OUTSIDE Paris. The business district spreads across 4 different municipalities!
Even if Paris fused with all the neighboring counties (92, 93 and 94) it would still be smaller than London.
Because of political concerns any project that would benefit commuters just takes forever.
This not even a bit like that. The right to vote is restricted to the people who live there, whether they are rich or poor. Also, it’s far from a minority: with 2M+ inhabitants, that’s the largest city in France: 2x Marseille, 4x Lyon, it has the same population as the four next most populated cities (Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, and Nice) combined. If e.g. the 11th arrondissement would be a city it‘d be in the top 10 in France by population.
Yes. If you’re rich enough and can afford to live in Paris everything is about 15mins away.
If you leave “outside” then be ready for commutes that get proportionally cheaper as travel distance increase. A commute time of one hour or less is considered good. It’s not rare for people to commute for 2 hours or more, for each trip.
The problem is that the mayor of Paris is elected to represent the wishes of the privileged few that live in the center and cares little about commuters.
The anti-car attitude of the current Mayor (Mrs Hidalgo) reflects this. And if you look carefully at the data it looks like air pollution has reduced in areas where cars were removed but has increased elsewhere. It’s hardly a win for air pollution, but if you live in Paris the river side is now for pedestrians and not cars. So yeah. Real nice, if you can afford to live there.
Are you trying to imply some sort of causation here? Because I can't see how decreasing car use in the city centre would increase usage outside it.
> It’s hardly a win for air pollution
Decreasing the use of (internal combustion) cars in city centres is a huge win for air pollution as that is generally where traffic is most concentrated and thus air pollution levels are highest.
Basically the river side used to be like a highway where you could travel from West to East and vice versa. This is essentially gone now. But all the traffic has moved more inland. So the pollution has reduced near the river, but increases on the East/West boulevards. It’s possible that traffic overall may have decreased, but the boulevards are full of intersection and traffic lights, whereas the river side highway was basically devoid of them. So overall for pollution, it’s really hard to see a win.
But if you're one of these commuters who has to drive, and use that specific east/west route, then it's an every day annoyance. You're reminded at every traffic light that your commute has increased by X minutes.
I think the solution is obviously to improve the public transport situation especially for far-away suburbs. But it's hard. It costs a lot, there are political animosities at play, and fundamentally Paris citizens do not really suffer from car commute issues since they don't need cars.
They need vehicles to reach the public transports, not to move around in Paris.
Is somewhere like Westminster technically London? It's definitely what people consider to be London, and it's within Greater London, but as a political entity, it is its own city.
I also lived in Paris for more than 3 years and it also has great walkability, more so than Berlin even because the city center is much more compact (you can cross it by bike from North to south in 30-40 minutes I'd say). The metro is also super efficient, you can get everywhere "intra muros" in 30-40 minutes.
If you live outside of the center of Paris (which I also did for a while) it's less ideal though, as the public transportation quickly becomes much more sparse and you will need a car to get around easily. As most people in the Paris region actually live in those areas I'd say there's still much work to be done there.
Yes. Both times I was there visiting, we didn't bother with even the buses. The Metro was usually a short walk, and a short wait.
That doesn't seem to be something that most people spend a lot of thought on. E.g. in Germany less than 10% of children attend a private school, and with public schools you basically have to send them to your closest one (which isn't a big problem, as the quality of schools inside a city generally doesn't vary too much).
In Canada, you send your kid to the closest public school. Done.
In the US, determining which school your kid goes to is a strategic decision that impacts where you live. This is even true if you live in an area with great schools - you need to find the best.
https://www.societedugrandparis.fr/gpe/carte
Looked at that with envy when i first saw that, being stuck with an only half ready rail transit system in my town since the 70ies. But hey, supposedly i'll get an extension about 2032 too! Juhuu!
This is the main problem of Paris and of Hidalgo. For most practical purposes Paris is a 10 million inhabitants city, yet only 2 get to vote for the 'real' mayor, those who live outside the historic center are fragmented into a bunch of smaller counties and are also generally poorer than 'real' Parisians.
When Hidalgo banned cars on the quays, Parisians were very happy, while commuters from other counties had to add some time to their commute and were furious.
Look at this [0] plot, see how the green line stopped tracking the blue one? That's your problem...
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Croissan...
"Paris" is defined as Paris intra-muros + the Boulogne and Vincenne parks, which are limited in space and was saturated long time ago. You are a "Paris resident" if you live inside of the City of Paris (the green line of the plot).
The chart is showing "Aire urbaine" and "Unité urbaine" which are another way to draw geographical limits and are only used for statistical purposes, and they include the "Region of Paris", or "Ile de France". Obviously, the region is expanding like any other capital's region in the world, so that plot exactly shows nothing.
The sentence "For most practical purposes Paris is a 10 million inhabitants city" is fake news. People living inside of the City of Paris are asking to be able to use bikes or other transport means, but all the cars coming from outside of Paris everyday are making it difficult.
Stop confusing the Region of Paris and the City of Paris. People living inside the City of Paris (the Parisians) have right to elect a mayor who will defend them. If you live in one of the adjacent cities, go elect a mayor that will locally improve your quality of life, but (real) Parisians are sick of the traffic inside their city and no other city has right to decide for them.
> the region is expanding like any other capital's region in the world
Why are new people coming there though? Are they coming to tie their lives to the City of Paris, but they must settle for the larger region because of the saturation? Or are they coming to join the Region of Paris because of its merits excluding the City?
If it's for the former, then they deserve some democratic influence on the place that brought them there, and the chart shows that the division into City of Paris and the rest denies the newcomers that influence.
Edit : Idea : at each new presidential term, move all institutions and the french "white house" to Lyon or Marseilles, second biggest city of France. At the next presidential term, move everything again to Paris.
But that leaves the question of whether Toulouse will get a TGV before nuclear fusion is invented, Thomas Pesquet walks on Mars, or anyone actually start working on an Hyperloop instead of faking it [2].)
[1] https://actu.fr/occitanie/toulouse_31555/pourquoi-projet-lgv...
[2] https://actu.fr/occitanie/toulouse_31555/hyperloop-piste-ess...
That's nonsense though. You could argue that the influence of Parisian politics go way beyond the city and by your logic the whole of France should be voting for stuff that concerns Paris. That's just not how representation works.
I am saying that for many around Paris, Paris is like their very own city center, and they cannot move anywhere or do anything without going intra-muros, every single day. And essentially, out of two equally concerned people, the one who’s richest can afford intra-muros and is the only one who has a voice.
Also, people who live in suburbs and commute to a city centre every day may object to being called "transient workers"!
- those who have a say
- those who have no say but should
- those who have no say but who don’t fill the conditions to have it
I am advocating for the second group
And it is not a spectrum, the third group’s condition is often orthogonal to the second group’s condition
Said an other way, "Paris" should be defined as a greater area, because the center has extreme day to day and structural influence over those, but there is a point where it stops being the case, of course there is a degree of ambiguity regarding where to stop, but it is definitive and unambiguous that the current state of affair is unfair
Yet up until 1860 the growth was being tracked by an expanding political entity. Walk across the périphérique to Montrouge, to Vincennes and tell me whether you see a clear boundary. Go talk to someone who lives in Anthony and see how many have to commute to or through center to go to work. It's all a giant economical and social unit!
Remember when they tried to expand Vélib past the city boundaries: 2 years of delay, tribunals having to chime in...all that just because the official city boundaries don't match how people live.
There is also another big problem, also because of this a lot of people are just being priced out of Paris proper, there is a sharp decline in price (even in nice surrounding counties) as soon as you cross the city limits.
I'm all for reducing cars, but you can't possibly deny there is a ton of people who would just love to cycle or take the Métro to work, but can't afford to live in a place where that is a possibility, yet their job and most of their working hours are spent in a city where they can't elect the mayor!
This is an unfortunate over-generalization. As an inhabitant of the banlieue, I was very happy for this development, and I'm pushing for the mayor of my commune to ban cars as well. Hoping that the whole urban area is wholly served by public transportation and biking. I hate cars, noise and pollution!
Commuting by car to Paris is mostly for near counties (with real estate prices not that far from Paris. Puteaux or Boulogne people are in average well set) or people living very far but are paid enough to spend an hour and half in their car.
The general population takes buses and trains to commute, as parking in Paris is also a PITA. I was mildly amused to hear that our company in the middle of Paris only provides underground parking places to high level managers, and I can’t imagine renting a parking place somewhere else is any cheap.
In Ireland, a country of under 5 million, all of the local authority decisions for the central bit of Dublin are made by Dublin City Council, which covers half a million people. But that’s largely an arbitrary distinction; the metropolitan area mostly covers three other local authorities and leaks into some others, and contains 1.5 million people. The only sign you have that you’ve wandered outside DCC in any direction is that the traffic lights are a bit different. And ‘greater Dublin’, which encompasses the adjacent local authorities, contains over 2 million. And that’s not the end of it; lots of people outside Greater Dublin commute in.
So, DCC makes decisions that impact at least 2 million people, but is elected by a population of 500k. I think there’s actually an argument for merging the four Dublin local authorities, but even that would be a political nightmare. Extending DCC to cover half the country is clearly not viable, and would not be accepted. But given that, it’s natural for DCC to care more about making the city work for people who live in its area and who vote for it than those commuting in from far away.
The beach is 45 minutes away. It’s 45 minutes to work. Your friends are each about 45 minutes away, in different directions, and the downtown bar you meet at on Friday night is 45 minutes away. You can even get out into the mountains on angel crest highway in about 45 minutes.
But unless you want a CVS pharmacy or a Starbucks, nothing is close by. Ever.
My mom who still lives there said she was on the freeway for 5 hours (2in, 3out) from Temecula to Pasadena and back. With no traffic it would have been 1hr each way.
As someone that has spent a lot of time living in Paris, this is already pretty much true, at least within the Périphérique. The main issue in my experience is the lack of green space; there are surprisingly few parks in Paris.
That said - Buttes-Chaumont and Le Jardin du Palais Royale are some of my favorite urban parks in the world.
It does have two fantastic huge parks on the outskirts though, Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes.
1. Dad ran into undercover cop who on subway who told him to watch his stuff better :o
2. Got his phone stolen next day on subway, I guess cop was right
3. I witnessed the typical distract, grab and run.. good thing someone threw trip and got the runner to drop his prize
4. Had to deal with 3-4 typical: “please sign this petition while my partner tries to come up from behind and snatch your crap thing”. The East European scowl and choice mat solved it
Everyone I knew across different parts of Tokyo lived within a 10 min walk of a supermarket, school, nursery, doctor, train station etc. It worked really well.
I'd still be ecstatic if I can get food within a 30 minute walk. I went so far as to try to run a startup around this. It's possibly why there's so many food delivery startups; this is a big hit to quality of life.
But the things you occasionally need are getting harder to get. Plumbers, electricians don’t want to come to the city anymore. They will facture in the awful traffic and the fines they get for the lack of parking space. Basically no one will come to your apartment for less than 500€. There potentially are business opportunities there.
No
But the issue is not that but lack of parking space. A permit only allows them to park in actual parking spaces. Most of the time there aren't any available...
i.e. drive to their nearest train station and then catch the train in to the city centre.
That’s quite the opposite. Car traffic generates pollution and takes unnecessary space on the street: some sidewalks are so narrow you can’t have two people walking next to each other. Reduced traffic is a benefit, not something the large majority of Parisians will suffer of.
> Plumbers, electricians don’t want to come to the city anymore.
A plumber or an electrician doesn’t necessarily need a car to move their stuff. There are already a bunch of cargo-bike plumbers in Paris.
Zone 1 and most parts of Zone 2 London close to stations are like this.
I've just looked it up out of interest and it makes me feel fairly privileged!
My flat has supermarkets, restaurants, a pharmacy, a bookshop, banks, a library, museums, one of the biggest parks in London, a hospital, schools, multiple tube stations, a GP, a dentist, etc etc within 15 minutes walk (actually I think 10 minutes).
But not everyone (in fact, barely anyone) can afford to live in those areas. Even if they could afford it in the sense of having the income to spend a ton of people choose to live further out and have such things as freehold homes, gardens, etc.
Dense urban living is fun when you are energetic (and probably young and probably single and probably with lots of like-minded friends) and you spend 95% of your time working and socializing, and you basically just use your home as somewhere to sleep and get washed in between the office and the bars/restaurants/gyms/etc
However, this is not the same for everyone. I dream of the day when I can live in a house with its own garden and where I am not physically sharing walls with other people's homes. At least in London you won't get that anywhere near your work unless you are absurdly wealthy.
I didn't enjoy it as much when I wasn't self employed. I've been working on the other side of the city for many years, about 1 hour either by car or by public transport. Where one works makes all the difference but (this is a tangent) also how one works. I've been working at 10 minutes from my home for a couple of years and it didn't feel much different. I was confined in my office all the day long. It's the normal experience for most of us but it would feel like living in a prison now.
Working to have all of our expectations for a good life walkable, scootable, or bikeable is the way we should be designing our cities.
I would also ask if new cities (China, India) what their planning / zoning priorities are?
I was quite surprised that I ended up still in greater Paris on the first evening. Between stopping to eat, taking photos, and navigating (pre-GPS), I was still in Paris the first night. Paris is a huge, and lovely, city.
As an aside, it was a great trip. I simply drove south for around 8 days and picked a different route to drive north back to Paris to fly home. I stumbled across so many interesting places, the prehistoric caves of the Dordogne, the dramatic village of Rocamadour located on a cliff, and many other memorable places.
At the national level, Parisians are an average really rich population and living inside Paris will continue to grow more and more difficult because living in Paris is nowadays a luxury. And nothing will change this situation in a close future.
On the plus side, you'd have more convenience and less need for vehicle transit. On the potentially negative side, how many of these jobs would realistically pay a living wage?
https://www.thelocal.fr/20160418/parisians-spend-23-days-a-y...
At the end of the day the only real solution to commutes / crowding is going to be spreading the load out on more communes and cities.
It's amazingly cheap. Down from 3.5% ten years ago.
The downside of low rates is house prices correspondingly very high.
Repossession is especially difficult here, which raises the risk for the lender, and the banks unwisely gave out ECB trackers (as opposed to the EURIBOR trackers more common elsewhere) back in the day; some of these can be as low as 0.5%, so everyone else has to pay for that legacy.
Edit: put another way, if you pay 1k/mo on a 1.2mm loan, you'll finish making payments in 530 years. The Jeanne Calment loan!
Interest only loan will have lower monthly payments, but you will need to make an additional monthly contribution to an investment product, such as an endowment policy, in the hope that the investment product will be worth at least the outstanding capital at loan maturity.
Probably because parent is cherry-picking and has no source. The average flat in Paris is at €10k/m2, so 30m2 would be around €300k, not €1.2M.
Not to derail the conversation, byt why the 'even'? 24h-stores seem like an inherently american concept to me (I'm german, so France is right around the corner)
Well, you might notice that even though you put two different sets of quotation marks on it, the text you're attributing to me isn't what I wrote. It's "even" because I'm contrasting an urban environment, where 24-hour stores are a baseline expectation, with a suburban environment, where they aren't but we have them anyway.
I understand that most stores would see little traffic at night, but on the other hand they'd also not need full staff, and they absolutely could do all the maintenance work at night. It annoys me similarly as "everybody must have the same two days off". So inefficient.
Knowing families where people have different working hours or working days, it really takes a toll on interpersonal relations.
That's not our current reality, the percentage of singles and childless couples is growing and they don't need to be timed with school hours.
Adding flexibility would make everything run more smoothly. Right now we're having all the commercial traffic on 5/7 days and all the leisure time traffic on 2/7 days. Offices are empty 2/7 days.
Distributing that more evenly would benefit everyone. Less traffic during rush hour, less overrun parks on your day off, less crowded super markets and packages wouldn't need to be considered lost if they're diverted to the local branch where queues are usually longer than those in front of apple stores when new iphones get released.
That would be fine, but what is going to happen is that many workers will have to work night shifts unwillingly. It's bad for their physical and mental health.
Suppose you have a town with two stores. First store is willing to open 24 hours. Second store may have to do the same to compensate the loss of customers, and the workers there may have to work night shift even if they don't want to (I actually witnessed it first hand in my neighbourhood).
This is called a negative externality, and it is a well-known defect of free market. Even though you would think that opening a store 24h only impacts you and your customers, it negatively impacts other people.
This is a subjective opinion, but I would argue that the convenience of having 24h stores isn't worth the cost for the workers. Unfortunately, I think that I'm in the minority and that eventually we'll cross that line in Europe too, and it'll be hard to go back.
I named them because they're open 24 hours and they seem like the closest fit to a convenience store. CVS is a "drug store", selling products in three basic categories: (1) grooming supplies (hairbrushes / fingernail clippers / makeup... this kind of thing); (2) a very stripped-down grocery inventory, including only prepackaged food (cereal / milk / poptarts / cookies / candy, but no fruit or meat); (3) health products ("nutritional supplements" / vitamins / aspirin / tums / cough drops / etc.).
A Family Mart in Shanghai is much smaller and offers different staples: food (including fruit, but largely prepackaged stuff), electronics cables, the machine that lets you pay your mobile phone bill (it's possible I'm out of date here). It's mostly food. Very much unlike CVS, they also offer a space in the store where you can sit and eat what you just bought, and if you bought instant noodles they'll give you boiling water for them.
There are American stores closer to that model, like 7-11, but I don't know that they stay open 24 hours. 7-11 is historically named after its operating hours. But I don't really see why that's important; if the mostly-prepackaged-food store is closed, but the prepackaged-food-and-also-cosmetics-and-pills store is open, you can meet your prepackaged food needs there.
The combination of products is basically "everything you might find at a 'supermarket' in another country, except for the food", and I assume it's that way because grocery stores are primarily dedicated to food. If you took the food out of a Carrefour, what would it be selling?
(We also have stores on the "full supermarket" model, Walmart and Target.)
Not just “Yes, they close at night”, even.
The entire American mentality revolves around everything being available all the time, so it’s really jarring to come over here and see the equivalent of a 7-Eleven closing for two hours at lunchtime, half of Saturday and all of Sunday and Monday, and calling it a night at 7 on other days. And the local versions of Ralph’s, CVS, and Walmart doing the same.
So no, essentially nothing is open at night here. And it has been this way for forever, so it’s built into the culture at the DNA level. You would never consider going grocery shopping at 9pm. One should do such things at the appropriate time.
It used to be that shops closed for lunch. Some still do and then complain that customers shop in shopping centres.
People want what is convenient. Evenings and weekends are convenient because people are busy during weekdays and stay-at-home wives is no longer a thing in many cases.
It's like McDonald's. The 'correct' thing to do is to complain about them and to look down on them, but McDonald's is actually very, very successful in France...
They are starting to go around this restriction by switching to self-checkout during those periods because, despite what other commenters have said, people do want longer opening hours.
No, not really.
According to [0], 61% of Frenchpeople consider this a step backward for workers, while 31% think it is necessary. Though the article implies the latter might be much higher in Paris.
http://www.leparisien.fr/societe/ouverture-nocturne-des-maga...
If 23%+ of people end up shopping during those time periods (since 77% say they don't outside Paris) then that's more than enough do say that people want longer opening hours.
Personally I think that shops open 7 days a week is very useful.
Let the market decides. The legal restrictions are paternalistic.
When I grew up, many years ago, in the East Village in NYC, you had specialty stores. Bread shop, milk and butter and eggs shop, butcher shop, fish shop, fruit and vegetable stand, pharmacy. All separate establishments.
Unfortunately that concept has gone by the wayside. But there was so much more variety than found in modern convenience stores. This was a lower-middle-class neighborhood, nothing fancy. And forget 20 minutes, everything was a less than 10 minute walk.
Now I live in suburbia and the closest stores are about 2 miles away. So of course everybody drives.
Btw... Elysium and Elysée - the Palace of the French President... in Paris - have the same root. If it can help to understand...
I live 100m from Paris, in the suburb, so I'm a bit concerned (and knowledgable) about this subject. And the current - and maybe next - Paris mayor is only working for her own electorate (logical).
Problem is: Paris is a central city/region. You can't just "live around it". So basically when Hidalgo close the "quais de seine", it's fine for people living in Paris or tourists but it's a PITA for people from one suburb to the other one. When Hidalgo wants to shutdown the "periphique", it won't matter to parisians and tourists in Paris, but will make a really big difference for people working and living outside Paris for whom crossing Paris is the shortest way.
BTW, 90min from work to home is not really unusual in Paris suburb, and I would be the happiest man on earth if I could had just 30 min between work and home.
Moreover, Paris is becoming more and more a car-adverse city (nowhere to park, except for a lot of money) but public transportation are far from compensating this (for example: still no public transportation all night long... except one saturday night every month on a few lines... as an experiment).
So: no cars, not enough public transportations, and a central town (by design and history).
That doesn't meet anybodies "needs". This is all just dressing up ways to reduce the costs of humans. Governments are just a collection of large companies (their controllers), who run the world the same as if it is a business. The citizens of the city are a cost, and these are marketing campaigns to get them to accept cost reduction measures.
Also, as I am getting downvoted, I may as well point out that Paris itself is an especially terrible place to live. In fact, I don't know many parisians that live there, and I have never met anybody that likes it. HN obsession with density and walking is hilarious.
Edinburgh has, less than a mile from its centre, Holyrood Park [0], 650 acres of wild highland landscape, including gorse, glens, ridges, hills, cliffs, two natural springs, three lochs, and an 800-foot high extinct volcano.
Mind you, this is a city of 1.5 million people; mega cities like Paris have their own challenges.