How Paris redesigned itself to be a city of bikes—not cars

It’s 8:45am on a rainy weekday morning in Paris, and I’m standing in what used to be a traffic lane in a busy neighborhood near the city’s largest train stations. Less than a block away, cars are streaming by in the rush hour commute. But here, workers have torn up the pavement and replaced it with a newly-planted park with trees, a protected bike lane, and a wide gravel path for pedestrians. Where cars once drove, someone is walking his dog.

It’s one of hundreds of streets in Paris that have been redesigned over the past decade as the city radically transformed to reduce pollution and make neighborhoods more livable. In front of elementary schools, around 300 streets have been closed to cars. Last year, voters approved a plan to close another 500 streets to traffic. Thousands of parking spots have been swapped for trees. More than 900 miles of bike lanes now thread through the city. On the Rue de Rivoli, a major road that at one point had seven lanes dedicated to traffic and parking, the city flipped the street: most of it now belongs to bikes, with only a single lane left for cars.

As I walked around the new park, a crowd of city officials gathered for an opening ceremony. I asked someone nearby what the area had looked like before, and he pulled blueprints out of his briefcase to show me. A traffic island had been surrounded by a sprawling roundabout. On the western side of the intersection, there were multiple lanes of traffic and rows of parked cars on each side. The new park replaced that entire part of the street.

It was the last official event for Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, a few days before the next mayoral election. Over two terms in office, from 2014 to 2026, Hidalgo led one of the fastest and most comprehensive street redesign campaigns ever attempted in a major global city.

“This project is symbolic of what we’ve done over the last 12 years, reshaping the streets and the city,” Christophe Najovski, the city’s deputy mayor in charge of green spaces and biodiversity, told me. “This used to be a roundabout where cars were turning around. Now it’s a real square. Pedestrians can enjoy the space that was formerly given to cars. We’ve planted a little urban forest with more than 100 trees. This is what we’re trying to make: a city for the people, and also a city that will be adapted to climate change.”

In other cities known for their commitment to cycling, like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, bike and pedestrian infrastructure evolved incrementally over decades. Hidalgo pushed major changes forward despite opposition from drivers and some residents. At the event, she listed some of the city’s related projects, like the Place du Catalogne, where another sprawling concrete roundabout is now filled with hundreds of trees. “There are many people who would tell you that this was not possible,” Hidalgo said in her remarks. “But we persevered.”

This is the story of how urban innovation can happen quickly at a large scale, and how a leader used political risk-taking and moments of crisis to force change in a legacy system dominated by cars. For other car-centric cities, it’s an example of how streets can begin to be reclaimed for people.

Making the case for fewer cars

When Hidalgo first ran for mayor, air quality was at the heart of her campaign. She recognized that pollution from diesel cars was a public health crisis—Parisians were dying prematurely because of the city’s smog, which was among the worst in Europe. She argued that pollution wasn’t something that citizens should have to live with, and that leaders had a moral obligation to change it. The answer, she said, was to have fewer cars on the road.

“Unparalleled challenges like air pollution require unprecedented action,” she told me in 2017. “These policies are based on the urgency of both the health crisis and the climate crisis we are facing.”

From the beginning, Hidalgo faced pushback as she began remaking Paris’s streets in her fight for cleaner air. One of her first moves was immediately controversial: she closed a highway along the Seine that was used by around 40,000 cars each day and opened the road to pedestrians instead. Critics warned it would make it harder for commuters to reach the city and worsen congestion elsewhere. (Overall, studies have found that the project didn’t end up making traffic worse.)

“She was totally unpopular,” says Carlos Moreno, the Sorbonne professor who has worked with Hidalgo on the idea of the 15-minute city—the idea that cities should be designed in a way that everyone is a short walk or bike ride from work, stores, and whatever else they might need in daily life. Opponents challenged the road’s closure in court, though ultimately lost.

Business owners have also pushed back against bike lanes, pedestrianization projects, and the loss of parking spaces, saying that they’d lose customers. (Evidence shows that bike lanes and pedestrianization can actually help local businesses.) Others have called Hidalgo authoritarian, arguing that she forces projects forward without enough input from residents and businesses. Drivers have complained about every project, including the newest park. The media continually criticized her, saying that her plans were unrealistic and impractical. In surveys, citizens often opposed her work to reduce cars.

She pushed ahead anyway. “It takes a certain personality type to put yourself through that, but those are the transformational leaders,” says Chris Bruntlett from the Dutch Cycling Embassy, a nonprofit that studies bike-friendly cities. “When you get to the other side of the controversy, inevitably, it’s a better place for everybody.”

Hidalgo has always been a fighter. Her working-class family immigrated to France from Spain when Hidalgo was two years old. When a teacher told her that little Spanish girls couldn’t make it to the top of the class, that motivated her to prove the teacher wrong. Later, after studying labor law, she worked as a labor inspector, building a successful career in a field dominated by men.

By 2001, she became deputy mayor in Paris under Bertrand Delanoë, focused on urban planning, including climate and mobility policies that later became part of her own campaign. When she was elected in 2014, she became the city’s first female mayor, with a platform that included affordable housing and equality along with sustainable development and air quality.

As part of the transformation on streets, Hidalgo has been adept at choosing her messages carefully. “She’s not talking about bicycle lanes,” says Stein van Oosteren, a local bike advocate. “She’s talking about making sure that 10-year-old children can go to school safely without bothering their parents. She’s talking about a different city. She has the intelligence not to talk about technical things. She’s talking about livability.”

She’s also motivated by climate change, but has talked more about the health benefits of reducing air pollution, a more obvious issue for residents. The lesson: “Pick your message and stick to it as a leader,” says Mike Lydon, principal at the New York-based urban design agency Street Plans. “I think that’s what this administration did so well. If you want to make transformative changes, stick to the why and hammer that message over and over.”

When Hidalgo ran for reelection in 2020, she doubled down on her work to reduce driving, running on a platform focused on Moreno’s 15-minute city. That involves not just improving bike lanes, but making sure that amenities are spread throughout the city, including green space. (Her work eventually also included boosting neighborhood businesses, so people could more easily access stores and services without traveling long distances.) In a field with multiple candidates, she won around 50% of the vote, with an 18% margin over the closest rival.

“When I was re-elected, many people said, ‘Oh, what a surprise,’ but it wasn’t a surprise for me,” she said in Women Changing Cities, a book by Bruntlett and his wife Melissa Bruntlett. “Why? Because I know we have two parallel levels at work. The lobbies of men who were very angry at me because of the removal of cars from Paris, and the people. It was this latter level, the women and young people, who voted for me. So, I can say, ‘Okay, the future is with us.’” Last year, when the city held a referendum asking whether another 500 streets to be pedestrianized, it passed with a 60% vote.

In the latest election on March 22, her former deputy Emmanuel Grégoire won, suggesting Parisians still support Hidalgo’s policies. The work she started is likely to continue growing. “This bodes incredibly well for a range of the city’s programs under Hidalgo, including bike lanes and school streets,” says Marcel Moran, an urban planning professor at San Jose State University who has studied the transformation in Paris.

Even the most conservative candidate, who argued for drivers’ rights in the past, said during the campaign that she no longer wanted to take bike lanes away. “That’s more proof of the change that’s been happening,” says Corentin Roudaut, a volunteer with Paris en Selle (“Paris in the Saddle”), a large local bike advocacy group.

When we met at the park, it was clear that Hidalgo thought the years of fighting were worth it. ”It’s very hard when you want to change lives and change people’s habits—you have to convince people, and respect their opinions. We need time if we want to change very deeply,” Hidalgo said, then turned to look at the park. “But in the end, you can see how beautiful it is.” (Her schedule as she prepared to leave office allowed only a brief interview, so this article relies on conversations with city officials and those who have tracked the city’s transformation, along with visits to neighborhoods where the changes are most apparent.)

The city’s air is also measurably cleaner. One 2025 study found that the city’s pollution levels have dropped by 50%. On my visit, my weather app said that the air was clear, with an AQI of 3 out of 500. Instead of the smell of diesel exhaust, I smelled crepes.

A “100% cyclable” city

In 2010, only around 3% of residents biked. That’s about half the current cycling rate in Portland, Oregon. For decades, the rates in Paris were even lower, with less than 1% of residents regularly biking in the 1990s. But by 2023, bikes outnumbered cars on city streets. Now, four out of 10 Parisians bike at least once a week. If you visited Paris in the past, some parts of it might be unrecognizable now.

It’s a classic case of people showing up after a city builds the infrastructure. On the Rue de Rivoli, there are now more than 20,000 cyclists each day, from parents picking up children from preschool to businesspeople in suits and heels. As I stood around the corner on the Rue de Sebastopol one afternoon next to an adjacent bike lane, I counted 30 cyclists pass by in 30 seconds.

“Even some people who used to say, ‘I will never ride a bike in Paris,’ are doing it now,” says Roudaut. “It’s a huge change. I think we all know at least one person who used to drive a car or a motorbike and has switched to a bicycle.”

Some of the shift began before Hidalgo. The previous mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, launched the city’s pioneering bikeshare program in 2007—one of the first large-scale systems of its kind in the world—and added some bike lanes. But Hidalgo went farther and faster. Part of the motivation came directly from voters. Before she was elected in 2015, Hidalgo used a participatory budgeting process to let citizens rank urban projects, and bike lanes ended up as the top priority.

The city rolled out a bike plan, though the new administration moved more slowly at first. A couple of years in to Hidalgo’s first term, only a small fraction of planned lanes had been built. Bike advocates at Paris en Selle started publicly mapping where new lanes were added to put pressure on the city, and the city ramped up its work.

When the pandemic hit, the city used the crisis to roll out a network of “coronapistes” or COVID bike lanes. Other cities did similar things, but Paris did more. “Paris was the boldest and bravest,” says Bruntlett. “The pandemic was an opportunity to take plans off the shelf and implement them very quickly. It was a way to challenge car-dominated thinking.” In a single year, the city built nearly as many bike lanes as it had in the previous five years, Moran says.

The Rue de Rivoli was the most audacious design. In a typical city, planners squeeze a new bike lane into the space at the side of the road. Instead, Hidalgo gave the majority of the wide street to a massive, bidirectional bike lane. Each direction covers the width of a typical car lane, not a standard narrow bike path. The usual incremental city response “is understandable, because that’s what human nature is like,” says Parisian bike advocate Stein van Oosteren. “But you have some people who look a little bit further and know that if they do not take big steps, they will go back to zero.”

When COVID hit, traffic disappeared from the street. “I spoke to her staff and they told me that when she’d seen that this huge highway was suddenly empty, she knew that she would never be able to make it empty again,” van Oosteren says. “So she said, ‘We’re going to keep it empty.’ And that is a brave decision.”

The city used temporary barriers at first. But when the pandemic ended, new bike lanes on Rivoli and throughout the city stayed in place. Paris invested more than 250 million euros to make dozens of kilometers of lanes permanent, expand the network, and add more bike parking.

The changes became a successful proof of concept. “It’s easier to make the argument when you have 25,000 to 35,000 cyclists a day on a street, and the numbers pop up almost overnight,” says Bruntlett. The shift in street design changed habits. A year after the first “corona” paths were built, 60% of users were new to cycling.

Paris’s bike plan called for the city to become “100% cyclable” by this year. Whether it’s gotten there is debatable—it’s not yet like Dutch cities that have comprehensive networks of protected bike lanes everywhere. Though the number of cars on city streets has dropped, traffic is still heavy in places, and intersections often feel unsafe. Three cyclists were recently killed. There’s less infrastructure in wealthier neighborhoods on the city’s western side, where making changes was more politically difficult. Still, it’s now possible to get almost anywhere on a bike. Even the suburbs, outside of Hidalgo’s control, have made major changes, like the two-way separated bike lane below in the town of Montreuil.

Car-free streets, under the radar

To begin to quickly pedestrianize the city, Hidalgo turned to schools—both because children are especially vulnerable to air pollution and because limiting cars near schools is something that people are less likely to oppose. When the city creates a “school street,” it typically closes off traffic just for the block in front of each elementary school. Because Paris is dense—with around twice the population density of New York City—there are public schools everywhere. It’s a somewhat stealthy way to pedestrianize an area that, taken together, is large.

“If you compare it to cities that have done similar schemes, like the low-traffic neighborhoods in London, it seems like Paris received less opposition,” says Valentin Carraud, a local cyclist and a doctoral student in urban planning. “It’s easier to justify. Okay, you’re closing some streets to cars, but if you can frame it as something for kids’ health and wellbeing, that’s easier.”

The projects are popular enough that some parents started asking for them. On a small street called the Rue de Providence, I met a mother who’d started pushing the city to close the street to traffic during the pandemic. Until then, there was a narrow sidewalk in front of the school, separated from the street with a metal barrier, and parents and kids crowded into the tiny space before and after school. The city didn’t have the resources to immediately shut down the street, but parents volunteered to set up temporary barriers during the morning pickup and drop-off hours.

“A friend said, ‘When we do this, we can show them the street isn’t that useful,’” said the parent, Zusanna Prekowska. “This was a proof of concept that demonstrated feasibility.”

The temporary closures worked, with only minor complaints from parents who wanted to drop off their kids by car, and the city later installed metal gates to permanently shut down the block. One former traffic lane is now completely filled with plants. The other lane is painted with games like hopscotch. I was there when school let out, and kids ran into the former street, playing and talking with friends.

Fire trucks and delivery vehicles can still access the painted part of the road if needed, using a key to open the gates at the end of the street. (While passing another school street, I watched a garbage truck drive inside and the driver quickly get out to lock up behind himself.)

It’s a place for kids to play, but also accessible to anyone in the neighborhood. I arrived before school ended, and two friends were sitting on a bench talking. An elderly woman rode through on a bike. “When you have children go to these schools, of course, as parents, you are happier, you feel much less stressed for your children,” says Hiba Debouk, head of urban planning at AREP, a firm that has designed multiple school streets for the city. “But people who live on these streets also talk about a net improvement of the quality of life because it’s much calmer, it’s much less polluted.” When she visits projects under construction, she says, neighbors call out from their balconies to tell her that they’re happy to see the street changing.

Beyond school streets, the city also blocked cars in a few other areas. I walked down Rue Mouffetard, a narrow, winding cobblestone lane lined with stores that had originally been a Roman road. Parts of it had already been closed to traffic, but I spoke with a woman working in a bookstore who told me that the section near her store had been fully pedestrianized in 2023, with a planter added nearby in the middle of the street. It hadn’t affected business, she said, but customers were safer. Deliveries were a little more challenging, but vehicles were still allowed during certain hours in the morning. It reminded me of something else I’d seen throughout the city: cargo bikes making deliveries instead of trucks, for everything from FedEx to local grocery stores.

Greening the city

Hidalgo’s changes to the city are not just about bikes. In every corner possible, Paris is replacing pavement with green space. That includes not just bigger projects, like redesigned squares, but smaller interventions. Until recently, a nondescript block on a street called Rue de la Croix Nivert, near a plumber and a hairdresser, was lined with parked cars. Then the city tore out the pavement, and last month, a crane carefully lowered trees into the former parking spaces.

The same thing has happened throughout the city. So far, Paris has replaced around 25,000 parking spaces. (The original goal was more ambitious—converting 60,000 spaces. It remains to be seen how far the next mayor will go.)

In one sense, the projects are mundane—walking down a block with street trees doesn’t seem unusual. But making the judgment that trees have more value to a city than storage for cars is a radical decision.

Paved squares have also been converted. In front of City Hall, an area about half the size of a football field is now what the city calls an “urban forest,” sitting on top of an underground parking lot. Instead of a conventional park, around 150 trees were planted in dense, somewhat messy-looking groves. Some of the trees were 30 feet tall when they were planted last year, giving the planting an immediate visual impact. Another urban forest at the Place de Catalogne added even more trees—270 larger trees, and 200 saplings.

The projects have a practical goal. As climate change progresses, Paris is experiencing more extreme heat. In a dense, heavily paved city, any green space can help reduce the urban heat island effect. Trees can provide critical shade. And in extreme rain, something that’s also becoming more common because of climate change, green spaces can help soak up flooding. They can also help bring some biodiversity back to the city.

But it’s equally a way to improve livability. The changes are more noticeable than the rollout of new bike lanes, says Carraud, one of the cyclists I spoke to. “Sometimes you walk around neighborhoods where you haven’t been for six months and you go, ‘Wow’—school streets just pop up,” he says. “And they’re usually really pleasant places.”

“I was determined to bring nature into the city and use all available spaces,” Hidalgo said at the recent opening of the new park. “We have beautified the city and improved the quality of life for residents. That’s what local elected officials are for.”

How other cities can copy Paris

Some mayors might question how feasible it is to replicate what Paris has done. The city was already walkable, with low rates of car ownership. Streets were laid out long before cars existed, unlike many streets in American cities. Still, the wide boulevards that Hausmann designed for Paris in the mid-1800s—partly to enable the easy flow of horse-drawn carriage traffic—quickly adapted to cars. By the 1970s, when then-Prime Minister Georges Pompidou opened the road next to the Seine to automobiles, he said, “France loves its cars.”

In the Netherlands, cities like Amsterdam also went through a 20th-century embrace of cars. But the anti-car shift there started long enough ago that it’s hard to remember a time when those cities weren’t biking havens.

“I think that American mayors have been told forever that they should be more like Copenhagen and Amsterdam,” says Moran. “But those are on a different planet in terms of bikability. What I like about the Paris case is these mayors have probably been to Paris at some point in their lives, and probably remember a time when it was more like their city in terms of being car-centric and noisy and all of these other things. In a short period of time, it’s changed. I think it’s more relatable.” In part, it’s more relatable because there’s still a quite a bit of car traffic left; the transition is still underway, and it’s easier to imagine the same traffic patterns superimposed on other cities.

Hidalgo had the advantage that the mayor of Paris is relatively powerful. One person told me that if Hidalgo decided she wanted to add a bike lane on a street, she could just do it. (It’s more complicated than that—the police can push back on changes on some streets, for example.) She also maintained support from a majority of the city council throughout her time in office. She was willing to make significant investments—bike infrastructure alone cost an estimated 400 million euros in the city budget. Still, other cities could choose to make similar changes.

“French cities do assign substantial power to the mayors and councils in power,” says Yonah Freemark, a researcher at the Urban Institute. “That said, her particular efforts, such as the implementation of bike lanes and the creation of pedestrian plazas, are well within the reach of most U.S. mayors with ‘strong mayor’ powers, meaning mayors in places like New York or Chicago.” There are still challenges, including the fact that some streets are owned and controlled by states, not cities. But it’s possible for American mayors to redesign streets more aggressively.

Cities could copy specific ideas like Paris’s take on school streets. In New York, for example, “you could take that temporary, interim approach with barricades and then make more permanent investments a block at a time,” says Lydon. “At the scale of all the public schools in New York, you’d make really big, lasting neighborhood change.”

Mayors could also learn from Hidalgo’s belief that meaningful change is possible, and her willingness to take risks and keep going under pressure. “I always say when I ride on a bike lane that I ride on political courage,” says van Oosteren.

“Nowadays, people come to Paris not only to see the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre but they come also to ride a bicycle on the Rue de Rivoli,” he says. “They know that when they’re riding on a bicycle there that they’re riding on a road that was a highway just a couple of years before, because it still has the profile of a highway. That is the thrill of change. People want to feel that change. They want to feel that it is possible. Once you feel that emotion, something happens to you. And then they go back to the country and then they say, well, we can actually repeat the experience that happened in Paris.”

View the full article