Paris After the Car

TL;DR;

• Since 2018, cycling traffic in Paris has surged by roughly 240%, while car traffic and pollution keep falling.¹²³
• On some boulevards, bikes now outnumber cars and even experience “bike-lane traffic jams” at rush hour—arguably the nicest kind of congestion.⁴⁵
• Paris got here by reallocating space: pop-up “corona pistes,” permanent protected lanes, parking removal, slower speeds, and low-traffic zones.⁶²⁷
• The result is cleaner air, quieter streets, and more trips made by bike than by car in the city proper.⁵³
• As infrastructure improves, the perceived need for emergency-level bike horns drops—Loud Bicycle orders from Paris have fallen sharply during this transition, echoing what we already see in cities like Copenhagen.
• For gridlocked, car-dominated cities, the lesson is simple: if Paris can do this in a decade, you can, too—start with space, safety, and short, practical trips.

“Il faut reprendre la ville aux voitures.” — Anne Hidalgo (often paraphrased as: We must take the city back from cars.)

From Car City to Bike City in One Decade

For most of the 20th century, Paris was the archetypal traffic-choked European capital: multi-lane boulevards stuffed with cars, chronic congestion on the périphérique ring road, and air pollution so bad that driving bans were occasionally imposed during smog episodes.³⁷

That story has flipped—fast.

A recent data-rich study of bicycle counters across the Paris region found that cycling volumes rose by more than 240% between 2018 and 2023, with growth resuming quickly after the early COVID lockdowns.¹ Paris’s urban planning agency (APUR) estimates that the metropolitan cycle network has grown from about 2,600 km in 2019 to over 4,000 km in 2023, a 50%+ jump in just four years.⁶

Mode share has followed. Surveys now find that within the city of Paris:

• Bikes account for roughly 11–12% of all trips,
• While cars are down around 4–5% of trips,
• With walking and public transport still dominating overall.⁵

Some analyses focused on local residents go even further, suggesting that around 30% of trips by Parisians themselves are now taken by bike, up from under 5% in 2019.⁵ However you slice it, that’s a massive cultural pivot.

Meanwhile, inside the city, car traffic has dropped on the order of 50% between the early 2000s and 2022, as lanes and parking spaces are repurposed for cycling, walking, transit, and trees.² Air quality has improved in lockstep: long-term monitoring shows nitrogen dioxide and fine-particle pollution down by roughly half since 2005.³

What you feel on the street is not just “less traffic.” It’s a different city.

The Nicest Kind of Gridlock: Bike-Lane “Traffic Jams”

If you stand on Boulevard de Sébastopol at rush hour today, you still see congestion—but it’s mostly wheel-to-wheel bikes, not bumper-to-bumper SUVs.

Reporters from AP described morning peaks where cyclists jostle for space in broad protected lanes, ringing bells and occasionally grumbling as the green wave forces them to bunch up.⁴ PBS and other outlets ran with the same story: bike-lane traffic jams in a city long synonymous with car jams.⁴ On several key axes from the outskirts to the center, recent analyses find that bikes now outnumber cars at peak times, sometimes by a wide margin.⁴⁵

Is that a problem?

It’s certainly a signal—just not the one critics think. In transport planning, congestion simply means demand exceeds capacity. When that demand is for cheap, clean, space-efficient travel, “too many bikes” is exactly the kind of problem you want to have.

Paris’s bike-lane gridlock is telling you:

• People trust the infrastructure enough to use it every day.
• The latent demand for safe, short trips was far higher than anyone guessed.
• Even rapidly built facilities can fill up almost overnight.

The answer is not to roll back bike lanes; it’s to build more, better-connected ones.

How Paris Rewired Its Streets

The Paris story isn’t magic. It’s a stack of boring, very intentional decisions that other cities can copy.

1. Reallocate Space, Not Just Paint

Starting in the mid-2000s and accelerating under Mayor Anne Hidalgo, the city began removing car lanes and parking and reallocating that space to bikes, buses, and people.²⁷

Key moves include:

• Corona pistes: During COVID, Paris rolled out dozens of kilometers of temporary bike lanes using cones, paint, and light separation. Many have since been made permanent.
• Flagship corridors: Rue de Rivoli, once a multi-lane car artery, now dedicates most of its width to bikes, buses, and taxis, with private cars largely banned.⁸⁹
• Parking removal: Across the city, tens of thousands of on-street parking spaces have been removed to create bike lanes, wider sidewalks, and greenery.²⁷

By 2023 the Greater Paris region had nearly 4,300 km of cycle routes.⁶ That’s not quite Dutch level, but it’s enough coverage that many short trips can be done comfortably by bike.

2. Slow Everything Down

Paris didn’t just build bike lanes; it slowed cars:

• Most streets inside the city are now 30 km/h zones,
• While the périphérique ring road has seen its speed limit cut from 70 to 50 km/h, along with the introduction of car-pool lanes.²¹⁰

Follow-up studies on the ring road found:

• 4–6% drops in NO₂ near the roadway,
• Roughly 14% fewer traffic jams,
• Noticeably lower noise levels.¹⁰

Speed reduction is unglamorous policy, but it makes cycling and walking feel dramatically safer and quieter, especially for families and older adults.

3. Build Low-Traffic Neighborhoods, Not Just Corridors

Paris is quietly doing its own version of low-traffic neighborhoods (LTNs) and “15-minute city” ideas:

• The Embellir votre quartier (“Beautify your neighborhood”) program redesigns local streets to discourage rat-running, calm traffic, and prioritize walking, biking, and buses.¹¹
• School streets have been pedestrianized or filtered so kids can arrive without dodging cars.
• Increasingly, “through traffic” is pushed to a smaller number of main roads, freeing residential streets for people.

The politics can be bumpy, but the direction is clear: fewer cars using neighborhood streets as shortcuts.

4. Back It With Money and National Policy

France’s national government has leaned into the shift, announcing a multi-year €2 billion plan to double the length of bike lanes and push cycling as everyday transport.¹² Paris itself has poured hundreds of millions of euros into its Plan Vélo and related street programs.²[^21]

This matters for other cities: transformation at Paris’s scale isn’t just a mayor’s pet project—it’s a budget line and a national policy choice.

From Smog to Seine-Breeze: The Benefits Stack

The visible payoff is the street scene: kids on cargo bikes, older adults on e-bikes, workers in office clothes cruising past cars stuck in what little congestion is left.

Under the hood, the benefits compound:

• Cleaner air and healthier lungs
  Air quality monitors show PM₂.₅ down ~55% and NO₂ down ~50% in Paris since 2005, thanks largely to traffic reduction and stricter vehicle rules.³ That translates into fewer heart attacks, strokes, asthma attacks, and premature deaths.

• Less noise, better sleep
  Lower speeds, fewer heavy vehicles, and more bikes mean less engine and tire noise—a big deal for sleep and stress in dense neighborhoods.³¹⁰

• Space for people, not parking lots
  Every removed parking lane becomes room for trees, café seating, wider sidewalks, or bike lanes. That makes daily life nicer even if you never touch a bike.

• Time regained
  For many trips within the city, bikes now beat cars on door-to-door travel time, especially when you factor in parking and congestion.⁵⁹

The punchline: Paris isn’t just “good for cyclists” now. It’s better for almost everyone who lives there.

What Car-Choked Cities Can Copy

If your city currently feels like the before photo—endless traffic, dangerous arterials, bikes as an afterthought—what can you actually borrow from Paris?

Here are the most portable lessons.

1. Start With Short, Obvious Corridors

Paris didn’t try to fix everything at once. The city focused early on:

• Direct routes to the center,
• Bridges and riverfront streets where space could be reallocated,
• And streets with clear, pent-up cycling demand.

Pick a handful of corridors where biking is already happening—or obviously could—and make them safe, continuous, and comfortable. That visible success helps build support for the network.

2. Treat “Bike Jams” as a Success Metric

If your new bike lane is empty, something’s wrong. If it’s crowded at rush hour, that’s a win.

When Paris saw clogged bike lanes on Sébastopol and Rivoli, the response wasn’t to remove them; it was to widen, connect, and replicate them.⁴⁹

Measure:

• Bikes per hour at peak,
• Share of trips by bike in the corridor,
• Number of crashes and injuries before vs. after.

When those numbers move in the right direction, you’re allowed—indeed, obliged—to build more.

3. Make Driving Slightly Less Convenient, Not Impossible

Paris still has cars. It hasn’t banned driving; it’s just gently biased the system toward walking, biking, and transit:

• Less free, convenient parking.
• Fewer lanes for private cars on key streets.
• Lower speeds and occasional restrictions on the most polluting vehicles.²⁷[^23]

This is politically tricky, but it’s more palatable than outright bans—and it works.

4. Pair Infrastructure With a Cultural Story

One reason Paris’s changes stuck is that they came with a narrative:

• Climate action and cleaner air,
• Making streets safer for kids,
• Beautifying neighborhoods and reclaiming the Seine.

If your city only talks about “Level of Service” and “modal split,” you’ll lose people. Talk instead about quieter nights, safer crossings, and kids who can bike to school—then point at Paris as proof.

Horns, Safety, and the Endgame

What does all this mean for emergency-style bike horns like the Loud Mini?

In cities where bikes still share space with fast, inattentive drivers, a horn that sounds like a car can be life-saving. Riders in chaotic traffic—from New York to Rome to dense Asian megacities—tell us over and over that a Loud Bicycle horn gets drivers’ attention when nothing else cuts through the noise.¹³

But as infrastructure improves, something interesting happens.

Our own order data show that shipments to central Paris have dropped sharply during the same period that bike lanes and traffic-calming have exploded. We’re not sharing exact numbers, but the trend is clear enough that we talk about it internally: as Paris becomes more like Copenhagen, the “need a car-loud horn just to survive” feeling fades.

We’ve seen this pattern before. In the podcast where we first talked publicly about Loud Bicycle, we noted that we’d sold horns to almost every country in Europe—except Denmark, where cycling infrastructure is so safe and normalized that people simply don’t feel they need an emergency honk on their bikes.¹³

In other words:

• High demand for car-loud horns is a symptom of unsafe streets.
• Falling demand, as in Paris, is a sign that the system is finally doing its job.

As a company built around safety, we’re genuinely happy about that. The endgame isn’t a world where everyone needs a Loud Bicycle horn; it’s a world where, thanks to safe infrastructure for bicycles, we swap all horns for bells.

FAQ

Q1. Do Parisians still drive at all? A. Yes. Paris has reduced car dominance, not banned cars. People still drive for certain trips, but many short journeys that used to be by car are now walked, biked, or done by transit, which cuts overall traffic and pollution.⁵²³

Q2. How long did it take Paris to see results? A. The city has been nudging away from cars for about two decades, but the most dramatic cycling growth—roughly a 240% increase—happened in just five years between 2018 and 2023, especially after the COVID “corona pistes.”¹⁶

Q3. Could a very car-dependent city in North America replicate this? A. Not overnight, but yes. The tools—protected lanes, slower speeds, parking removal, low-traffic neighborhoods, and national funding—are all transferable. Paris’s example shows that political will and sustained investment matter more than urban “uniqueness.”²¹²[^20]

Q4. If safer streets reduce demand for loud bike horns, is that bad for companies like Loud Bicycle? A. In the long run, it’s a good problem to have. Horns are a safety back-up for hostile streets; when infrastructure gets as good as Copenhagen’s or modern Paris’s, needing them less means the city is doing something very right. That is more important than our story as a business.¹³

References