Paris keeps closing its streets, and counting
Five years into the rolling reduction of car space, the second-order effects are becoming visible, in air, in noise, in property prices and in who is showing up to the neighbourhood meetings.

Transit, active mobility, freight — how people and goods move.
// 4 stories · last updated July 2026
Five years into the rolling reduction of car space, the second-order effects are becoming visible, in air, in noise, in property prices and in who is showing up to the neighbourhood meetings.
At twenty past eight on a Tuesday morning, the cycle path on the Eerste Constantijn Huygensstraat in Amsterdam West is doing something that the people who built it never planned for: it is queuing. Not gridlocked, exa…
At rush hour on the Dronning Louises Bro, the bridge over the lakes that separates the city centre from Nørrebro, the bicycles arrive in waves timed to the lights. There are more of them than there are cars on …
On a bright February morning in 2026, a tram slides into the new terminus at La Doua–Gaston Berger, on the northern edge of Villeurbanne, and disgorges a carriage-full of students into a campus that, for the first tim…