Mapping the Post-Car City: Paris's Reclaimed Urban Landscape
Over the last two decades Paris has dramatically decentered cars from its transportation mix, favoring instead to fund walking, cycling and public transit.
While it can be difficult to pinpoint an exact start to this trend, former Paris mayors Bertrand Delanoë and Anne Hidalgo played significant roles in this recent shift.
Bertrand Delanoë while running for election in 2001 stated that private cars took up 94% of road surface, despite only making up a quarter of road users. In Paris, the densest European city and 7th densest in the world, urban space is of great importance.
In the early 2000s Delanoë oversaw the construction of the tramway around the city periphery, dedicated bus and bike lanes and a removal of 55,000 street parking spots per year. He also proposed the bike share service Vélib, which today has become the largest bikeshare service in Europe.
Delanoë also sought to turn the Seine into a public park, which had an expressway built alongside in the 1960s. This eventually was carried out by Delanoë‘s successor Anne Hidalgo. Anne Hidalgo was mayor from 2014-2026, during which she further changed Paris’s urban space by planting 155,000 trees, adding hundreds of kilometers of bike lanes, pedestrianizing 300 school streets.
The city has systematically been reducing numbers of lanes or closing roads off to cars altogether, and then repurposing the space once dedicated to cars to other uses, including pedestrian walkways, parks, bike paths, apartment buildings and offices.
The result of this over the last two decades is a 50% reduction in air pollutants including fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxide, a 54% reduction in traffic, safety improvements and noise reductions, as well as huge amounts of urban space that can now be repurposed for parks, public spaces, offices, apartments and other uses.
Beyond the direct closure of roads and parking spaces, another way that urban space is being reclaimed is through the conversion of former parking structures in the city. Driven by the lack of demand for car parking in rather than direct policy, car park owners are systematically selling or renovating garages into offices and apartment buildings, further increasing density within the city and finding a rare opportunity for “new” development in the extremely urban and developed environment of Paris.
This interactive map shows a few examples of these projects, with background information on each one to help communicate the timeline and scale of this change happening throughout the city. While the car was once seen as a symbol of modernity and quickly embraced around the world, cities are rapidly realizing the safety, environmental and quality of life benefits of decentering cars. Paris has gone further than many cities in the world and can serve as a global example in creating a new kind of transportation system.
June 2026 / ARC 499 / Instructor Beth Weinstein References