Thursday’s Headlines: Lessons From Paris Edition

Transforming traffic-choked Paris into a cycling haven required pushing ahead regardless of complainers and critics, Paris’s former head of cycling Charlotte Guth said during an appearance state-side on Wednesday.

“A lot of people often ask me, when I’m showing [them around] Paris, and all the bike lanes that we built, ‘Oh, but didn’t people complain?’ Yeah, of course, doesn’t mean that you should not do it,” Guth said at a Vision Zero Cities conference panel discussion dubbed “building the Next Bike City” at Transportation.

“Actually, it means that you’re going in a good direction. Nobody will talk if you were not changing things,” she added. “That would probably mean that you’re not doing a big [enough] change.”

Guth worked for trailblazing mayor Anne Hidalgo, who quickly deployed safe cycling infrastructure across the French capital, which drew such widespread “Hidalgo-bashing” that French newspaper Le Monde wrote she had made and “art of making enemies.”

The city focused on designing safe intersections, where most crash injuries happen, and spreading the bike network out to cover a large areas.

“The cycle lane is only a tool, it’s a tool to attract cyclists, but we try to do it as fast as possible,” she said. “The speed is a decision to make.”

Any time a road closed for months for construction, that provided a proof of concept that it could do without cars.

“Every small road construction that you can have that would block the streets for cars for eight months. Oh, perfect! We never open it to cars anymore,” Guth said. “They could live with that for eight months, they can live with that forever.”

The results speak for themselves.

Paris now has an 11 percent biking mode share, higher than eight percent of people who drive in the city, Guth said, and studies have shown drops in pollution. New York City’s bike share is just 3 percent, according to Department of Transportation data from 2022.

If Mayor Mamdani really wants to make the streets the “envy of the world,” he should take note.

— Kevin Duggan

In other news:

• Gov. Hochul’s team never authorized Janno Lieber’s June letter accusing Andy Byford of “gamesmanship,” which led President Trump to suggest she fire him. (NY Times)
• Meanwhile, Bruce Blakeman says he wants to shut down congestion pricing. (City & State)
• Drugged driving is the new drunk driving. (S.F. Chronicle)
• NYPD seeks three suspects in a hit-and-run collision that injured a 76-year-old pedestrian. (Daily News)
• A e-bike lithium-ion battery fire killed an 11-year-old in the Bronx, amid a rise in battery blazes. (Gothamist)
• The MTA’s EAGLE team investigation is almost ready to wrap up, NYCT President Demetrius Crichlow said. (amNY)
• A wrong-way drunk driving cop was sentenced to four to 12 years for the January vehicular killing of Manhattan doorman Manuel Boitel. (Daily News)
• The MTA is adding more crash detection tech to its buses. (The City Reporter)
• NY1 followed a Staten Island eighth grader on his “routinely” two-and-a-half or three-hour school bus ride to work.
• Bicycle foe Frank Morano opposes Ballot Question #3 to reduce the administrative burdens on the city’s bike lane implementation process. (Daily News)
• The City Reporter cataloged all 68 shuttered NYC Parks bathrooms.
• Phil Wong wants the city to do something about Amazon workers taking up parking spots as distribution hubs, but doesn’t mention loading zones. (QNS)
• Mayor Mamdani wants the city to compensate the horse carriage drivers it’s putting out of work. (City & State)