The proposal is already inflaming social networks, but apparently it came precisely because "it was the citizens and traders who asked me". Anne Hidalgo, the socialist mayor of Paris, wants to close the center of the Ville Lumiere to cars every Sunday of the year, starting from 2019. A revolutionary decision, which came after the success of the experimental phase, which envisaged the closure to traffic in the four districts most central of the French capital (I, II, III and IV) once a month, on the first Sunday of each month. The initiative is so popular, it seems, that Hidalgo, whose mandate expires next spring, is apparently thinking even bigger: bequeath a city center without cars, seven days a week, all year round. “There are already 20 other Parisian districts closed to Sunday traffic – explains the mayor on her social profiles -; within six years the center could become permanent”.
As? With a merger project of the four districts which make up the historic core of Paris (they are all on the Left Bank and include the Ile de la Cité, where the Notre Dame cathedral stands, the Marais, the Louvre Museum, the Tuileries garden and the Pompidou Center), which provides a shuttle service, called the Mobile Centre, which connects the four municipalities and their places of greatest tourist interest. "The councilors of the third and fourth municipalities made me this proposal and I decided to accept it, also counting on the strong support of the inhabitants," says Hidalgo. The only councilor against is that of the XNUMXst arrondissement (the one in the Louvre area), which unlike the other three does not belong to the centre-left majority coalition but is a republican and therefore declares that “the project denotes a lack of global vision. A study shows that closing traffic in the center increases it in other neighborhoods and does not solve the pollution problem. It is a populist and demagogic measure”.
