The consultation online on the future of the Parisian ring road, where the town hall of Paris intends to reserve a lane for carpooling, taxis and public transport, begins Monday, April 17, a few days before the fiftieth anniversary of the road ring.
Until May 28, the general public, and not just Parisians or Ile-de-France residents, is invited to comment on this project as part of public participation by electronic means (PPVE), organized under the aegis of the National Commission for Public Debate (CNDP).
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Wanted by PS mayor Anne Hidalgo for 2030, this project is part of the “legacy” program of the 2024 Summer Olympics. During the Olympic Games, the reserved lane will allow athletes and the “Olympic family” to make hosting sites to those of competition in a safe and fast way.
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Two similar reserved lanes, provided by the State, are planned on the A1 (in Seine-Saint-Denis) and A13 (Yvelines and Hauts-de-Seine) motorways. The government organized a PPVE at the start of the year, and their post-Olympic opening is scheduled for early 2025.
As for the ring road, a public meeting to launch the consultation will take place Monday evening at the Hôtel de Ville, with 600 participants, almost fifty years after its inauguration on April 25, 1973.
Participants can give their opinion on the “methods for implementing this lane dedicated to carpooling” and to ” collective transportation “explains the town hall on the consultation website.
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One million vehicles per day
If the town hall does not intend that its project be called into question, it remains “open to discussion”in particular because “the list of beneficiaries is not fixed”, explained at the beginning of April to AFP David Belliard, ecologist assistant for mobility of Anne Hidalgo. He ensures that the opponents of the project “will be able to express themselves”.
Among these adversaries is the president (LR) of the Ile-de-France region, Valérie Pécresse (LR), who estimated during a previous debate at the Hôtel de Ville that it was not “not possible to close a lane on the ring road (…) given the traffic”.
In 2019, the 35 km ring was, according to the research institute Forum Vies Mobiles, the busiest road in Europe.
Hidalgo wants to make the ring road a “green belt” of Paris
Used every day by a million vehicles, the ring road “has less than 20% Parisian users and 40% of journeys are from suburb to suburb”regularly underlines Valérie Pécresse, for whom the mayor of Paris does not care about suburbanites.
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At the end of 2021, the region had organized an online consultation in which 90% of the 79,000 voters had said they were opposed to the “removal” of a lane on the ring road.
For the town hall, it will not be “removed” more “transformed” in order to make it “a faster way” for this less polluting transport. This reserved lane must allow “reduce the expenses of Ile-de-France residents who travel by car and reduce the environmental footprint of motorized journeys”explains the town hall on its site.
According to the town hall, this transformation should also make it possible to “to reduce congestion” traffic, while for Valérie Pécresse, it will lead on the contrary to a “Ile-de-France thrombosis”.
