You’re missing the point: tourists are good for the city. If Paris gets a reputation of being polluted, tourism will decline.

Europeans don't drive Suburbans. They drive crossovers that are, if anything, shorter than the equivalent sedan or wagon.

It frees space for people (wider sidewalks...), reduce the risks of navigating the streets, and for the ones that have to use a car, there's less traffic and less people stealing dedicated parking spots.

Less cars also means less mobility impaired people. Cars create them through crashes and a lifetime of sedentariness.

Finally, it should be noted that most of the time when someone says "what about mobility impaired people?", when debating reallocating public space to people instead of cars, they are not mobility impaired themselves and don't actually care about them. They just try to guilt shame their opponents to win.

Car-dependent sprawl creates mobility impaired people where there were previously none. Many people are too old, too young, too intoxicated, too vision impaired or too poor to drive. Lack of viable transportation options is the greatest barrier to upward economic mobility for Americans today.

The vast majority of obese people are not meaningfully mobility impaired.

There are a lot of things that “only rich people get to do”. Reducing the number of people who engage in destructive activities is a good thing, even if it means only rich people can still do it.

- Enrique Peñalosa Londoño

Driving is for plebes

Citation needed.

Pedestrian and cyclist friendly cities have more vibrant street life, and are more attractive places to live. I've never heard of car restrictions leading to more suburbanization.

Say what you mean to say.

I don't know about London, but in Spain there is no disguise: you can find pro-clean air and pro-human strategies. Pro-clean limits, or straight ban, the access of ICE vehicles to some zones. Pro-human/anti-car limit or ban circulation or park for any car in certain zones.

Putting cars in cities was also deeply ideological. It was about segregation and as a way to extract as much resources from people as possible. The imposition of cars was about turning people into consumers who only point was to purchase goods and services.

We didn’t choose cars- they were pushed on societies through a decades long propaganda campaign.

But the main gain, as someone paying taxes there: is the reclaim of public space for human to enjoy.

Its a cliché to say that Paris is pretty and its so much more enjoyable on a stroll along the bank of the seine that on a freeway at 20 miles/h. ( that freeway was permajamed )

They're also still tonnes of metal hurtling along the streets of a city shared by pedestrians, which is inherently dangerous. (Less so than a bus, but there are also more cars than buses: you'd have to check the statistics to see how that evens out.) As for actually damaging the road (producing road dust, potholes, etc, requiring a resurface that off-gases for weeks afterwards): cars damage the road more than bikes, though that's not significant compared to lorries, since the wear is something ludicrous like the fourth power of the weight-per-axle.

Particles from tyre wear are a big contributor to local air pollution from cars - while they don't travel as far as CO2 to cause the larger scale problems, it's still going to be a local problem from electric cars, and since electric cars are generally heavier than equivalent petrol cars, that does mean they give off more tyre dust.

Large car thoroughfares also didn't do much for the soul of cities and neighbourhoods.

- EV share in greater Paris area is only 3%, far from being high enough to impact air quality. Overall, the effect of removing cars on air quality has been noticed and celebrated.

- parisians are overwhelmingly in favor of banning cars. Unlike big american cities, car has never been a dominant transportation tool. Paris subway was already built when the first massed produced cars made their way in the capital. Cars have never been part of the soul of any neighbourhood people wanted to live in.

- paris has one of the highest population density in the world: 20k hab/km^2, ranking 31th in the workd. As consequence, parking space has always been crazy expensive, on top of high rents. Similarly for travel time between two locations: I can’t imagine a car being faster (except late at night, for night club and bars), and I try to avoid Uber/taxis intra-muros. Furthermore, a single noisy vehicle is estimated to be able to wake-up up to 150k (!!) people at night.

- a large part of vehicles are actually… taxis and uber for wealthy tourists than don’t want to bother with public transportation. In that regard, pushing away cars frees space for housing, parcs, shops, making the city easier to live in.

For the majority of journeys in London, you're sitting at a red light, or transitioning to the next red light. Not a lot of opportunity for sustained 30mph travel. Accelerating up to 30mph so that you can travel the 300 meters, and then stop for 3 minutes serves no benefit to you (because your journey is still predominantly waiting at traffic lights), but reduces safety for you & everyone around you.

It's about the many other objective problems caused by cars besides the fuel use. Most obviously: they cause terribly inefficient land use (demand for parking + the roads themselves being congested), and are a physical threat to pedestrians and cyclists.

> but, if that was the truly the objective, then I should be able to drive faster with an EV.

That would be fundamentally incompatible with how traffic works and a nightmare to enforce.

1. https://content.tfl.gov.uk/the-impact-20mph-limits-and-zones...

Making the city safer and more pleasant to be in is now communist?

>Or maybe the angle they're trying to go for is another very European problem: cities are no longer designed for the people who live there, but for the people who visit them.

It seems a reasonable conclusion that the people who elect the people putting these policies in place live in these cities.

to cut short lengthy arguments, just compare urbanism rules in the US and in the EU. the 4, 5, or idk 8 lanes roads you can find in some parts of the US with the at mot 3 lane (paid) highways.

it all comes down to "if you make more room for cars, there will be more cars". if you refuse to cave in for this and you actually provide alternative ways of transportation (bus, bikes, subway if realistic, etc etc), then the overall traffic becomes much smoother. only complaints never cease, but that isn't specific to "moving people around".

> Local parks and generally streets are so dirty that you have to wash your children from head to toe as soon as they have set foot outside.

Maybe it is a newborn and you do not bring the stroller nor any clothes on rainy days it is that bad. Don't get me wrong, Paris is not a clean city, there are empty nitrogen tanks, puffs and cigarettes lying on the ground pretty much in every arrondissement, but syringes, even on the colline du crack I can hardly remember having seen even one (but it is very dirty there! with packaging, paper, cardboard, bottles).

I still think there should be a higher priority on sanitation but I also think you are exaggerating a bit.

A week with a double stroller in Paris will make you appreciate ADA wheelchair ramps, kerb cuts, and elevators.

If “done well” neighborhoods preserve their character somewhat because the replacement people are basically the same, but in other cases the neighborhoods change drastically every ten years.

Also complaining is easy, I could do it right now here on HN from any bathroom in the world; voting is comparatively much harder.

Instead of encouraging motorists to make better choices, they just end up feeling part of a money grab