PARIS: What Paris has done right is to make it awful to get around by car, and awfully easy to get around by public transport or by bike.
Now that Michael Moore has broken a taboo by holding up France as a model for national health care, maybe it's safe to point out other things France seems to do right without incurring a barrage of France jokes. Like how Paris is trying to manage traffic and auto pollution.
What Paris has done right is to make it awful to get around by car, and awfully easy to get around by public transportation or by bike. Any tourist in a rent-a-car who's circumnavigated the Arc de Triomphe will most likely never, ever drive in Paris again. But there are plenty of mad Parisians who do it all the time - far too many, in fact.
So Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, a Socialist, vowed on coming to office in 2001 to reduce car traffic by 40 percent by 2020.
He's serious about it. I live near the Boulevard St. Michel, and two years ago the city laid down a granite divider strip between the bus-only lane and the cars, squeezing private cars from three lanes to two. Taxis and bicycles were allowed to use the bus lane
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/...on/edserge.php