Every summer in Paris, the city closes an almost two-mile stretch of road along the Right Bank of the Seine and turns it into a beach, complete with sand, beach huts, deckchairs, and parasols. This year, Paris decided not to re-open the road at all, turning the riverside into a permanently pedestrianized area.
The first traffic figures for the "non-re-opening" are in, with detailed numbers for the amount of cars displaced onto nearby roads. And while the traffic on these roads has jumped quite alarmingly during the morning rush-hour, the figures are way lower than Paris’ mayor Anne Hidalgo expected. Better still, evening rush-hour traffic has seen little to no effect. It’s as if those cars just disappeared. In fact, many of them have.
