My favorite city in the world is a favorite of many others as well, holding the number-one spot on the global Top 100 City Destinations Index. Paris, in 2024, hosted the summer Olympics, reopened the fire-damaged Notre Dame Cathedral, and was selected as the most attractive city in the world. However, 2024 was not unique, since Paris has topped the Index for the previous four years as well as welcoming more than 70 million visitors annually.
Starting in 2021, Paris has been following a long-term plan to become a greener, cleaner, and more walkable city. It has an agenda for remodeling the entire city into a place where residents can more easily access local jobs, retail, health, and cultural services within a short distance of their homes. Central to this transformation is challenging the dominance of private cars. In 2016, the right bank of the Seine ceased being a freeway that handled 40,000 vehicles per day, leading to a big drop in congestion, pollution, and noise.
The city invests heavily in mixed-use neighborhoods and quality of life initiatives. Early on, it started the first bike share program, Vélib’, followed by an ever-growing network of urban bike routes (621 miles in 2024). Since the turn of the century, car trips in Paris have dropped by more than 50 percent while public transit ridership has grown by more than 40 percent.
Last month, March 2025, Parisians voted 66 percent in favor of pedestrianizing an additional 500 streets, an overwhelming mandate to continue the broader campaign of reducing car use. Car parking on city streets has shrunk by more than 50 percent in the past two decades; this recent vote will remove an additional10,000 street parking spaces.
A component of this recent vote is that city residents will be consulted on which additional streets become car-free. These new areas, referred to as “green lungs,” allow people to gather free from traffic and noise. This expansion will bring the total to 700 pedestrian streets, more than 10 percent of all city streets. In 2021, City Hall created an $84 million “participatory budget” that residents can allocate for neighborhood projects. One initiative is to transform educational establishments into community hubs, opening schools after hours and on weekends to neighborhood residents while turning “school streets” into safe non-motorized routes.
Despite the progress, Paris trails other European capitals in green infrastructure. According to the European Environmental Agency, green spaces (public parks, private gardens, wetlands, and tree-lined streets) make up only 26 percent of Paris’s urban area, well below the European average of 41 percent.
Maybe Santa Barbara can learn from Paris by adopting policies to reduce reliance on private cars while prioritizing walking, cycling, and neighborhood engagement
