Trump keeps saying that they want to prevent USA becoming a dangerous place like Europe, even said that recently and the Irish president disagreed with him. As an American, would you say that EU has fallen and it has become a shithole or maybe something in between? I'm just curious if its just about differences of expectations or something.

Take the claim that the locals hate the changes. Well, the mayor was reelected. So they claim the voter turnout was low and people were complaining, so people obviously don't support it. Sorry, you can't make that conclusion. Under ordinary circumstances, 100% turnout would only tell you the overall support for a particular candidate or party, not a particular policy. A low turnout may reflect an electorate who is not particularly passionate in any of the issues presented in the election, or it may mean something else. It was probably something else in the 2020 elections because those were anything but ordinary: they fell during the peak of pandemic uncertainty (i.e. March to June). So a flimsy assertion based upon flimsy evidence.

Then there are the scanty numbers without context. A 4% increase in traffic jams since 2015 and 31% decline in bus use between 2018 and 2024. First of all, the words "bus use" sounds highly selective. It looks like the Paris metro has been expanding and modernizing rapidly in recent years, which would both take load off of busses and be disruptive to transit users. Oh, and that pandemic thing raises its head again. I don't know about Paris, but a lot of cities took a hit to transit ridership during the pandemic and some are claiming to reach pre-pandemic levels only now. Also, cyclists tend to be the whipping boy for traffic congestion. I can't speak for Paris, but the reality in my parts are that population growth and a surge in construction have been far more disruptive than cycling infrastructure.

Sorry about the rant, but I'm sick and tired of the views of one segment of the population completely overriding the views of another segment of the population ... especially when there are assertions based upon assumptions and flimsy evidence.

First impressions matter, though.

When you fly into e.g. New York and they pop the door open you get that whiff of exhaust fumes. The city reeks.

Vancouver on the other hand it smells like the ocean.

Any improvement of air quality does matter for tourists and residents.

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

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

Wikipedia says that 70% of the people voted. Is it mandatory there?

Here in Argentina it's mandatory, but weakly enforced. We get also a 70% of people voting. Anyway, the big problem are bubbles, probably all the friends of the guy don't like the current mayor and complain.

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.

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

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

> 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 if it is a newborn, and if you don't bring the stroller nor any clothes, on rainy days it can be 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.

We were gifted a big heavy modern stroller and almost never used it, when the kids were babies we wore them and now they can walk a little we just do that and take breaks. If it's going to be an all-day thing (like a theme park) we'll bring a lightweight umbrella style stroller and those are trivial to fold up and carry.

The accessibility argument makes sense for folks with disabilities but not so with children.

> 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.

That's an insane hyperbole.

> And I'm not even talking about used seringes and broken glass in certain parts of the city.

Not my experience, at all.

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

Say what you mean to say.

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.

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.

Why frame it as a fight? There’s no need to start there; you don’t need to waste time fighting against people not in your group. You just need to establish group status. If the constituency of obese people is strong, why not seek to establish policy on behalf of obese people and not everyone? As the article and others here have said, reducing traffic congestion benefits everyone in multiple ways, including benefits for the people who still have to drive. Given a choice that doesn’t affect your ability to drive, I assume you’d rather have less pollution, less noise, and fewer other drivers on the road?

The other angle missing from your comment is e-bikes. Most of those ~42% of obese people in the U.S. are still capable of riding an e-bike, and for short trips in busy areas, e-bikes are more convenient and easier to park than cars.

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

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.

- 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.

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 )

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/03/21/drunk-driver-arrested...

Complete nonsense I'm afraid. An EV is about 50% cleaner and way quieter. That's literally it. There's no other real benefits of it.

An EV is still a car:

- Still pollutes: it's a 2 ton vehicle with rubber tires - manufacturing that is very damaging to the environment and the tires constantly wear down

- Takes up a lot of space

- Incredibly dangerous to anyone not in a similar metal cage (hence 20mph limits)

- Super expensive