How to become a bike-friendly city? Lessons from a Paris revolution | The Take

Smog once choked Paris streets. Now, cleaner air, grassroots pressure and a bold city agenda are reshaping how the city breathes and moves. From bottom-up activism to political pushback, Paris’s transformation reveals a success story in the fight to reclaim public space.

In this episode:
– Natacha Butler, Al Jazeera Correspondent
– Daniel Grajales, Member of Paris en Selle

Episode credits:
This episode was produced by Marcos Bartolomé and Sarí el-Khalili, with Kylene Kiang, Phillip Lanos, Spencer Cline, Mariana Navarrete, Remas Alhawari, Kisaa Zehra, and our host, Manuel Rápalo. It was edited by Alexandra Locke.

The Take production team is Marcos Bartolomé, Sonia Bhagat, Sarí el-Khalili, Tamara Khandaker, Phillip Lanos, Chloe K. Li, Kylene Kiang, Ashish Malhotra, Khaled Soltan, Amy Walters, and Noor Wazwaz. Our editorial interns are Remas Alhawari, Kingwell Ma, Mariana Navarrete, and Kisaa Zehra. Our guest host is Kevin Hirten. Our engagement producers are Adam Abou-Gad and Vienna Maglio. Aya Elmileik is lead of audience engagement.

Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editors are Hisham Abu Salah and Mohannad al-Melhem. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s head of audio.

al Jazera podcasts Today Paris is waging a war on cars 100% of the capital streets will be bike friendly So can the French capital keep the momentum without losing the public I’m Natasha Del Toro and this is the take [Music] I would say that biking around Paris is one of life’s pleasures I mean it’s it’s fabulous and and you know treelined along the banks of the river sen uh my personal commute I go past the Eiffel Tower because I actually don’t live too far from it I go along the river past the Lou I mean it’s tremendous I’m so lucky to live in a city like this and exploring it on a bike like any city Many cities actually is one of the best ways to do it and it’s one of the fastest because you’re going to beat the traffic You’re not stuck in the metro and you’ve got your own freedom So I mean I really love biking and I always have So I’m Natasha Butler I am Paris correspondent for Alazer English and I’m based in Paris where I’ve lived for well more than 20 years You’re making me so jealous being in the US I mean like these are car cities right Not always um do they have safe lanes for bikers As I was researching for this story I was actually surprised to learn that more people in Paris now use their bikes than cars which you know I just never thought that would be the case in Paris You know I was actually in Paris in the ‘9s and it was a glorious summer But back then Natasha it was also one of the most polluted traffic clocked cities Um so there’s this independent group um that tracks air quality in Paris called Air Par and they’ve produced maps of air pollution in the city over the years dating from 2007 to uh 2024 So maybe around the time that you you moved to to Paris that they started doing these maps Virtually every neighborhood was in red in 2007 which indicated a very high level of air pollution Um you know on smoggy days I understand you could barely see the Eiffel Tower Now you’re on the ground there Have you noticed a difference in in 20 years ago when I moved to Paris uh the office for Alazer is actually in in a very high skyscraper one of the only ones in central Paris and you used to look out over the cityscape and you would see this thick black line of smoke and it was so noticeable And uh you just don’t see that anymore You really don’t see that anymore And it’s something that we’ve all noticed You don’t feel it either You don’t feel like you’re breathing in pollution like you used to Uh and as a biker as somebody who has biked for for 20 years I know that when I first arrived you used to be on the roads and quite often it wouldn’t necessarily be pleasant because there was so much pollution so much traffic uh car traffic and it’s definitely a different experience I’m not saying the air is clean but it’s definitely much more pleasant and you do breathe more easily I’m sure Yeah I know that the city must have gotten healthier because when you have such high concentrations of car emissions this is going to increase um you know heart attacks lung cancer bronchitis asthma So it seems like this has been a very positive change then that that probably has also improved the air quality but also probably made people quite a bit healthier Yes I mean there’s there’s no doubt about it I know that one of the aims of the city council when they started looking at ways they could make Paris gle green greener and cleaner uh over for the future generations one of the concerns was health because the health of people is obviously going to be impacted if they’re living in a polluted city and there’s no doubt that that’s had a positive impact on people’s lives right the mayor um of Paris an hidalgo said that 2500 people die in the city every year because of air pollution I mean she’s really one of the people that’s pushed for this for this great change you know um making uh like fewer cars having more bike lanes improving air quality Natasha what measures has Adalgo put in place Yeah I mean making Paris a greener city has certainly been one of an Idalgo’s uh main aims in office She wants to make it her thing She likes to go around the world and talk to mayors in other cities about what they can do to make their city greener So uh the sort of things that she’s put in place in the last few years I mean one of the main things are the bike lanes Uh over a thousand km worth of bike lanes in the city which is pretty remarkable She has uh increased the number of green spaces She wants the city to have 50% of green spaces by 2050 She wants to reduce local emissions by uh 100% So she’s put in all these different uh measures in order to try and make Paris a real kind of global leader when it comes to urban living uh in a greener and cleaner way And you know we don’t always think about how much urban planning and policy shape the way that we move through a city Um I am talking to you right now from Los Angeles which is famous for gridlock and for poor public transportation Um it was this was a city that was largely built after World War II which you see um a lot of cities in the United States are So they’re built around the car But surprisingly when it uh talking about LA something that I don’t think people know as much is it once had the largest street car network in the United States I know that Paris has changed a lot too in recent years It wasn’t always this big biking city So Natasha maybe you could tell me when did this shift to a greener city begin Yeah I I I’ll certainly pick up on that And funny enough I actually used to live in Los Angeles for a few years and I remember so you know you know the traffic Yeah but I remember as somebody coming from Europe how shocked I was that you needed to take a car to go everywhere Even even to go and get some milk I had to take the car I mean maybe it’s changed but I remember finding that so different culturally Uh it was such a different way to lead your life Um so of course it wasn’t always a biking city in Paris And I think there were two main points where things really changed The first was at the end of 2019 when there were um seemingly unlin to our topic huge pension protests People were really angry about pension reform that the government wanted to push through Nationwide strikes have France at a standstill Millions of workers have taken to the streets to protest a controversial pension plan And there were lots of strikes and some of the strikers were transportation workers So suddenly you’re in a city where there were no metros no trains the buses weren’t working and everyone had to walk And it was this incredible time actually because it was a few uh it was a few weeks where suddenly you really had to walk everywhere in the city I I’d be walking for like an hour and a half to the other side of the city to go and do something and it became every day suddenly everybody’s in the street Um and that was a time as well a lot of people decided to buy bic buy a bicycle Uh you know there were lots of stories and news reports about you know shops running out of bikes because suddenly everybody’s trying to buy a bicycle So that was a real point where people started to go okay hang on we we’re so fed up of all these transport strikes we need alternative uh transportation Um but you still had a problem that there were no real bike lanes But then CO struck lifted and Parisians returned to their offices Many have shunned the bus and the metro in favor of two wheels Cycle lanes have never been so busy New cycle lanes are also being introduced Riy one of the capital’s central arteries and normally bustling with traffic is now entirely reserved for cyclists With COVID the city of Paris decided to turn a whole bunch of roads into what they called Corona lanes basically uh bike lanes uh cutting traffic And they did that all across the city And suddenly it made it much easier for people on bikes to get around And the idea was that if people are on bikes they’re obviously not coming into contact with each other in public transport And it was going to be healthier and safer for all of us to be to be outdoors And uh after COVID um after the pandemic the city of Paris decided basically to keep most of these bike lanes You’ve now got about a thousand kilometers worth of bike lanes across the city as a result Uh most of them pretty safe with proper demar demarcations and uh it’s really transformed the city because in those last Yeah So 2019 so what are we talking six seven years you have just seen six years you’ve seen a city go from a few bikers to suddenly now like a situation where as you describe you are often seeing more people on bikes than in cars in Paris and it’s remarkable after the break we hear from an insider on Paris’s biking revolution is anyone staying behind the transformation in Paris has many actors to share their credit beyond the city government We spoke to Daniel Graales He’s a member of Paransel or Paris in the Saddle I’m a volunteer in the association and Paransel is uh the largest cycling association in Paris in the Paris region We’ve been active for over 10 years I’ve been living in Paris for over 7 years now Uh and I’ve always had an interest for cycling but when I moved to Paris it kind of moved to the next level He says the biking revolution started off in the corridors of city hall with the idea of a bike network and even in the maps it was very it was very similar to a metro network and so that includes a notion of continuity So basically if you build a bicycle lane here what are you connecting it to And that creates first an expectation like if you build a new bicycle lane here then you have to build an one in the in the street after and then in the street after Uh it increases the the feeling of safety for cyclist But despite the huge strides made the transformation is not complete We don’t have a full network yet There are still parts of the network that are unbuilt Therefore if you don’t know the city well you can still find unpleasant surprises you can be in a beautiful bicycle lane 100 m later be in the middle of very heavy traffic Uh so it’s still a it’s still a project in the making We’re not we’re not Amsterdam yet We’re not Copenhagen yet But if you compared to where we were 10 years ago the transformation has been incredible And now Parisians have started leading the way forward starting at the ground level We started noticing that they were falling behind in the actual application of the projects Our primary line of work is tracking what is happening in the city and kind of bringing attention to where further work is needed and also in informing citizens about what is the current state of cycling infrastructure We also participate on public meetings where for example we discuss technical issues such as like what is the appropriate uh size for a bicycle lane Should it be unidirectional Should it be birectional What kind of traffic lights should you implement for bicycles How to avoid the conflict between pedestrians and bicycles How to better manage cars turning to the left or to the right Part of what Paganell has observed is how these changes are made First this bicycle revolution is more visible within Paris proper than in the suburbs And within the city it has not happened evenly First there is a strong east west divide The east is traditionally the more workingclass part of Paris That part has moved much faster There are more bicycle lanes There is less space devoted to cars There are more green spaces being created And the west traditionally has been a much more privileged a much wealthier part of Paris where the urban transformation has happened really slowly or simply not happen at all They are more reticent But in practice what is happening at the moment is that the demand for cycling infrastructure is so overwhelming that even some of the neighborhoods that didn’t want to move before they are kind of being overwhelmed by the demand Regardless of these issues the numbers behind the transformation have been sweeping At the moment in Paris cycling takes up around 11% or of all trips within Paris while cars only take around 4% This means that there are more than double the number of trips by bike done by car within Paris per day that first shows that there is a lot of enthusiasm about cycling and about uh there is a real perception of safety in using bicycles as a mode of transportation and just like any major change not everyone’s thrilled about it I think that any time that you start to have a large scale urban transformation and every time you discuss something as sensitive as the sharing of public space you’re going to have a push back of course such a large scale urban transformation in such a short time frame because it’s really been within a framework of uh less than 10 years uh it does create push back uh some drivers understand uh what is happening and some drivers I think uh understand that even if they choose to use the car they should not have all the space uh devoted to them but there are some drivers that certainly do not understand and do not take it kindly to have some of the public space uh removed to them In any case I think that for the citizen initiatives such as ours it’s been very clear to say there is no discussion about removing cars out of Paris Like that’s not really a realistic objective is just a matter of rebalancing public space for public to have for for for cars to have a fair amount of space devoted to them but allowing other modes of transportation uh to also to also take public space and to be done in a safe and comfortable way As Daniel says this is not just about making Paris bike friendly It’s about transforming public space for everyone and the city hall is trying to get citizens involved During an Idalgo’s second term as Paris mayor there have been three referendums in the city The first one was about whether to allow free floating scooters the ones you can just pick up anywhere in the street using an app This had become uh an issue in the city because there were no dedicated parking spaces for them So they would often be left on the sidewalks They would uh be uncomfortable for pedestrians The second one was about the price of parking for SUVs If a pedestrian or a cyclist is struck by this type of superized vehicle they’ll be 44% more likely to get killed than if hit by a passenger car So Paris wanted to reduce SUV presence in the city And then there was a third referendum this time about creating 500 new so-called garden streets So basically continuing their policy of removing the space uh of cars and increasing the amount of um of green spaces All of it spelling a new era for commuters like our correspondent Natasha to find a new way to enjoy their city It would be hard not to have a love affair with Paris It’s a city that’s international but is still on a human scale It’s a place where you can walk to your shops where your kids can go to a school on foot And biking obviously makes it 100 times better because biking is fun anyway So if you’re kind of gliding around the city and looking at these wonderful monuments as you go by and sort of you know throwing your bike and locking it up in front of a cafe what is there not to like [Music] And that’s the take We’re always listening to what you think of the show so let us know what kind of episodes you’d like to hear more of and what you thought of this one And if you want to catch more episodes like this make sure you’re following our YouTube playlist And while you’re at it hit that subscribe button so you stay in the loop with all things Alazer English We’ll be back [Music]