A busy expressway on the right bank is being pedestrianised for a six-month trial – and socialist city hall hopes to keep it car-free for good. The issue has bitterly divided Parisians, with some saying the closure will bring traffic to a standstill

It is 8.30am on a weekday rush hour and the Voie Georges-Pompidou along the right bank of the Seine, normally one of the busiest highways in Paris, is eerily quiet.

Around 43,000 vehicles a day used this expressway, built in 1967, to cross central Paris from west to east, but they are nowhere to be seen. Instead, teams of workers are there, planning playgrounds, wooden terraces, waterside gardens restaurants and rectangular terrains for playing boules.



The drone from traffic on the parallel Quai des Celestins, higher up the river bank, suggests traffic there is moving along at a respectable pace – confounding those doomsayers who suggested the controversial scheme to pedestrianise two miles of city centre highway would bring neighbouring roads to a standstill.



While this section of the Seine closes every summer to host the Paris Plages – in which temporary artificial beaches are created along the right bank of the river – this time the expressway has not been reopened.

Instead Paris’s prefect of police – the state representative – this week approved the closure of the riverside route for a six-month trial. Socialist-run city hall says it intends to keep the highway closed to vehicles for good.

The Conseil de Paris, led by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who has a comfortable majority, will vote on a proposal for a permanent closure on 26 September – but such a move also needs the approval of the prefect, who has so far only agreed to a trial period. That trial will officially start after the vote is taken.

Opponents, who have organised petitions and threatened legal action, say the scheme hits those from the city suburbs whose daily journeys in and out of Paris will now take up to 20 minutes longer. They insist the closure will do nothing to reduce traffic and thus air and noise pollution, but simply push the problem elsewhere.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Seine-side holiday: Paris Plages lasts for four weeks during the summer. Photograph: Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty Images

Few issues have so bitterly divided Parisians than the closure of Voie Georges-Pompidou. The move, one of the pillars of Hidalgo’s 2014 election campaign, has pitted city hall against the regional council, right against left, motorists against pedestrians, in increasingly bad tempered exchanges.



In a Huffington Post article at the end of August entitled “Yes to the pedestrianisation of the riverbanks”, a high-profile group of ecologists, including former government ministers, MEP José Bové and photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, regretted the “aggressive” tone of the debate, “… as is often the case when it concerns cars. Remember the violent arguments about the creation of bus lanes and pedestrian streets – today mostly appreciated?”

The traffic closure would, they wrote, make Paris “more beautiful, more warm, more modern, more green and more human”, and described the use of the riverside autoroutes as “anachronistic … The idea of building a motorway right in the heart of the city might have seemed a good one in the 60s … but as is often the case, yesterday’s solutions are today’s problems.”

A public consultation set up by the city authorities to examine the permanent closure of the Voie Georges-Pompidou, which would free up 4.5 hectares of river bank space for pedestrians, advised against the closure of the highway in its report of 22 August.

The stretch of highway being closed – along which an estimated 2,700 cars pass each hour at peak times – runs from the Tuileries tunnel in the first arrondissement to the Henri IV tunnel near Bastille in the fourth. The plan allows for the highway to be reopened in emergencies.

Three years ago, plans to close a mile-and-a-half stretch of the left bank between the Orsay Museum and the Alma Bridge running through the city east to west, was also vehemently opposed by motoring groups. The highway closed; life went on.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest How the car-free road could look. Illustration: Luxigon

Christophe Najdovski, Paris deputy mayor responsible for transport and public spaces, and a member of the Ecology Green party, said the new project is all about changing attitudes. “The first few weeks will be difficult and then it will become normal. As we have seen with this type of project across the whole world, including places like New York and Rio, is that when an urban highway is transformed or closed, there is an evaporation of traffic. Either people modify their route, or they use their car less and take other forms of transport.

“Behaviour will change. Habits will change. And our objective, to reduce traffic and thus pollution, will be achieved.”



Najdovski added: “We have done all studies necessary for this project and we’re convinced that after six months, a year, everything will be fine and nobody will be talking about this any more. That’s what happened with the right bank three years ago.”



If Anne Hidalgo wants to ride a bicycle then that’s up to her, but why should motorists suffer Pierre Chasseray

But Pierre Chasseray of the organisation 40 Millions d’automobilistes (40 Million Motorists), which has 320,000 members, said Najdovski’s arguments are “utter rubbish”.



“If you close a major road, it’s obvious the cars aren’t just going to disappear. Anne Hidalgo isn’t David Copperfield. They’re going to turn up elsewhere and there will be traffic jams elsewhere,” Chasseray told the Guardian.



“If Anne Hidalgo wants to ride a bicycle then that’s up to her, but why should motorists suffer? Let’s make no mistake, her goal is purely electoral and this stupid idea will please two or three bobos (bourgeois-bohemians) and upset 10 million others. She doesn’t care about the people in the banlieues [suburbs] because they don’t vote for her.”



He added: “City hall wants to change people’s habits by force, but we’re not a dictatorship. Instead of closing the highways, they should find a way for cars and pedestrians to coexist.”



The Ile-de-France regional president Valérie Pécresse, of the opposition centre-right Les Republicains (LR) party, said the trial should last a year to take account of “spikes in pollution” in summer months. She said the pedestrianisation project was “seductive” but added: “It all comes down to how it’s done.”

“Paris cannot take brutal decision without real consultation and without taking into account the impact on the banlieue,” Pecresse told Le Monde.

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Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, who leads the opposition LR group at city hall, declared it was considering legal moves to stop the pedestrianisation project.

Announcing the six-month trial closure, Paris’s police prefect, Michel Cadot, said he would be watching closely its impact on traffic and pollution, and warned the highway would be reopened if it caused “a major traffic problem”. Chasseray said he was confident the Voie Georges Pompidou would be reopened “for the good of Paris and the banlieues”.

But Najdovski disagrees: “The pedestrianisation of the riverbank was a political promise made by a mayor elected by universal suffrage. The riverbanks are being pedestrianised and they will remain pedestrianised,” he said.

“Paris is the last great metropole of its kind to reconquer its city centre; to recognise that it’s an outdated idea that to get across town you have to cross the centre. London has introduced its congestion charge, Madrid had pushed traffic out of the centre. In doing this, we are taking Paris into the 21st century.”



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