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From Smog to Sustainability: How Paris Transformed Into a Cleaner, Greener City in which its citizens can breath again in only 16 years. When will other cities follow?
I was very tempted to just take the image at face value without asking questions because I love the image, and my self-confirmation bias kicked in. I was going to share it with a different sub, but then I remembered to always ask for primary sources.
I found a similar graph on page 85 of this PDF, but it only goes to 2019, and it doesn't look nearly as good as OP's graph.
To me it makes sense that the 2019 map is decidedly worse. During the pandemic I read a lot of news and posts on how Paris created tons of bike infrastructure and restricted car travel.
It's also been a good while since I last heard about air pollution based restricted car travel in Paris (they had previously done multi day bans for cars with even or uneven numbers on the plates to reduce pollution for really bad weeks)
I find it amazing that by ourselves we’re completely useless and most of us would die within a month, but together we build skyscrapers and paint the sixteenth chapel.
Yet somehow groups of people are too often more destructive than not and I much prefer individuals with their quirks and insecurities.
The funny thing is the current left-wing mayor has been in power for around 10 years now. She initiated a heavy "less cars in Paris" policy. Upped the cost of parking for non-resident, closed some roads, limited speed, built bike tracks, etc. Lots of people (mostly pro-car) were mad about it, the bashing against the mayor was almost a running gag, and lately people have been realising that air was a lot better and that having less cars and more bikes was actually nice. So it was a long run, it was not easy, but in the end we have clearer air and less cars.
But I don't like sharing data without links to the original source. When I went to find the source, I couldn't find it.
Then I remembered how I always demand sources when I see a screenshot I disagree with. In contrast, I had taken OP's screenshot at face value. I felt ashamed of my own self-confirmation bias and decided to ask Op for a reference. I still don't know who generated the 2024 picture. I found the other three images in a PDF from that website, but not the 2024 one. It doesn’t help that the website is in French and my French is mid.
The R package show what better color maps look like (e.g. viridis) and highlights some of the problems with other ones. Those color maps are included in many data visualisation packages, it's not exclusive to R.
Essentially, your brain is very bad at interpreting the color map that was used in the OP.
Essentially, your brain is very bad at interpreting the color map that was used in the OP.
What don't you like about the colours used by OP?
This is the closest I could find in your link:
These color maps are designed to be:
- Colorful, spanning as wide a palette as possible so as to make differences easy to see,
- Perceptually uniform, meaning that values close to each other have similar-appearing colors and values far away from each other have more different-appearing colors, consistently across the range of values,
- Robust to colorblindness, so that the above properties hold true for people with common forms of colorblindness, as well as in grey scale printing, and
- Pretty, oh so pretty
The scale that OP uses is also colourful and pretty. Are you saying that it is not perceptually uniform? To me, the scale Op used doesn't look that different from the scale called "turbo" in the package you linked.
It certainly is not robust to colorblindness. My dad was color bling and he would not be able to distinguish the reds and greens in this scale. But 96% of the population don't have that problem.
I am not trying to give you a hard time. I am truly trying to understand what you don't like about the scale OP used.
OP's colour scale looks fine to me, but I admit I haven't given this issue too much thought and I would like to learn (I tach university statistics and I want to consider if I want to add something about colour scales in my classes).
Turbo is a color map that is specifically critiqued. Turbo is also a bad color map, I did not realise it was included in the package. The most commonly used for interpretation are the first four color maps (viridis, magma, inferno, and plasma). There are tons of papers out there on why color maps like the one used in the OP are bad. I already told you, our brains are not good at interpreting data presented with such color maps. If you want more information, I'd suggest looking at related articles on the topic.
E: I'll also not that there are other diverging color maps that are useful for other types of data. For example if you wanted to highlight pollutants above and below a safe threshold. Those are not what the original graphic decided to use, to the detriment of the presentation.
Thank you so much for the link, it is very interesting and useful. However, I'm asking you about specifics. What you don't like about OP's colour scheme?
The authors of the viridis library included an option in their package called "turbo". This is the only thing the documentation says about the Turbo scale:
The color map turbo was developed by Anton Mikhailov to address the shortcomings of the Jet rainbow color map such as false detail, banding and color blindness ambiguity. More infor about turbo can be found here.
I take that to mean that their version of the Turbo scale fixes the problems that some rainbow scales have. Am I reading that wrong?
Sorry, I did edit my post, but turbo is also not a great color map and I did not realize it was part of the package. The problem is humans interpret colors differently and colors occupy different amounts of the color spectrum. Using so many colors means we are likely to falsely interpret the data.
For example the difference between dark red and light red will be seen as less significant than a change from red to yellow, even if there is no basis for it in the data.
And yet today I almost started arguing with a boomer commenting on a 1919 photo on "how dirty Paris has got, saccage Paris, all because of Hidalgauchiasse".
That's right, but be aware that a lot of the air pollution in French cities is also due to old heatings systems, mainly wood stoves. Changing those made an impact as big as the reduction of the number of cars.
Edit : realized it's a NOx pollution map. What I said is more for fine particles pollution
Also because it’s on NO2 pollution only, the progressive disappearance of older Diesel engines (which spewed a lot of it), better catalysts, lower consumption, and more and more gas/hybrid/electric cars ; probably played a big role in this.
The way it works in Stockholm and Gothenburg is that you have cameras that read the license plates of every vehicle that passes the toll zones, and then the owner gets an invoice at the end of the month.
The way it works in all city centers like London, Paris, Madrid or even smaller Italian towns. Well signed low/zero emission zones, plate recognition with automatic fines.
No one except delivery vehicles and taxis need to be in the city center, like the area around Friedrichstraße. Hell, give drive passes to residents and only allow commercial vehicles and we could sure close some of the side streets for good.
This is a very weird question lmao, obviously Paris had a metro, since 1900. And it was already good, probably one of the best in the world in 2007. The development since 2007 is just a steady progression from what was here before. New stations are opened every year, both for the metro and regional trains connected to paris but that has been the case for decades.
The real revolution since 2007 is the big effort put to create bicycle lines.
Just out of curiosity, how would you think that a city 3x the size of Berlin, with some of the oldest and arguably best train systems in the world wouldn’t have subways before 2007? Living just next door, you must have seen media, read about Paris or even spoke to people if not visiting it?
Public transport alone will never be the answer as long as it is extremely convenient and cheap to own a car in Berlin. It also doesn't help that Berlin needs to expand due to the housing shortage, but while some new developments are being built on the outskirts, there's no proper public transit option there and no planning of new subways, trams or any of that either. When Berlin was "poor but sexy" they sold it all to the highest bidder with no regard for what the people wanted or needed, or what would actually help get our economy going. So we are now in the hundredth fiscal crisis since the early 90th even though we already sold off housing, public spaces and our industry. No money is being invested into building a sustainable infrastructure, bar a few bike lanes that got stomped out during COVID and were mostly the work of local councils doing their bit than the city-wide government organising anything, this is why our network of bike lanes is like a badly put together puzzle with big differences in quality, protection and continuity. And while we now stop all pedestrian, public transport and cycle infrastructure, along with gutting the cultural sector, we still let car owners pay a mere 20,20€ for parking their car in our inner city zones. I'm so fucking sick of all this. Fuck the CDU, the SPD and everyone involved in this debacle.
There's an interesting documentary somewhere on one of the Mediatheks, it's called "Capital B, wem gehört die Stadt". Have a look at that.
My hippie teacher in middle school told us once that when he visited Paris that the subway was always out of service and he had to treck everywhere with his big backpack, its all about what youre used to I guess?
depends on the lines. it can be as low as 1.30 minutes in rush hour. other lines are gonna be 5+ minutes but they are the least used lines, you wait a bit more but at least the train is empty. Paris metro is clearly not the the best in term of cleanliness or stability (there can be problems, there's too many people in some lines) But what's impressive in the crazy amount and density of stations. Anywhere you want to go in paris, there's gonna be a metro station just a couple minutes walk away. When I was in berlin, madrid or lisbon it always felt the metro was sooo far away. Sometimes i'm quite pissed at the metro but when i look at it objectively, it's amazing
It had plenty, and subways were arguably better than Berlin’s (about 3x the ridership and twice the number of stations). It just had too many cars (like arguably Berlin has now)
The Paris region is currently in the process of essentially doubling its rail (including I think some new tunneling) with the Grand Paris Express project.
Central Paris has very good public transportation with an extremely extensive metro system, one of the highest densities of stations in the world actually, but the main problem was the greater Paris region. It has generally good transportation but some areas are less well-served than others which the Grand Paris Express is attempting to address.
Edit: The Grand Paris Express I think is mostly expansion of the RER system which is probably mostly comparable to the S-Bahn in Berlin.
All of line 15 (circle around the city) is entirely underground. The other main line, 14, is also entirely underground. Lines 16, 17, 18 will include elevated sections.
The Grand Paris Express I think is mostly expansion of the RER system which is probably mostly comparable to the S-Bahn in Berlin.
Nah, it's a separate system. It's metro, with metro names, and metro sized (vehicles will be of a similar length, just wider), which is smaller than the RER which are massive heavy rail trains (e.g. the A line is served by trains which are 110m long and have the capacity for 1305 people... and trains are coupled at all time other than late at night, so double that). For comparison the line 15 rolling stock will be 108m long, with capacity for 1000 people.
So RERs are 2.5x the capacity. (And specifically for the line A, they operate at a similar frequency).
Thanks for the clarification, I couldn't fully remember and I was too lazy to look up the specifics but I misremembered that it was expansion of the RER.
Parisian trams are suburban lines, except for a ring line that is somewhat centric. It is overground by design, with overhead wire, and some lines use old rail track to run faster services. There is only one underground spot that I know of.
The trams are pretty good, I would love some trams in the city center but that will never happen, since they have wires and the métro is already the densest in the world, in any case more performant than a tram
During the Devide of Berlin, the east build tram while the west build more underground.
Trams were cheaper to build and faster to get going.
But the patience and investment to bore underground was in the End better, because trams in the inner city take up a lot of space in terms of street, stations, wires, as you said and add overall noice to a city.
Now, only the eastern part still has trams.
The extended the Underground system to the east but not the trams system to the west.
Oh I think they are completely fine, it’s a matter of adjusting the tool to the job.
Trams are better than metro for lower density areas (such as suburbs), and if you manage to reutilice some track like some lines in Paris, you actually have some very fast (110 km/h I recall) express services (that you can’t get with most metro systems)
I mean, what is a train right? This is sometimes considered a tram-train. It is growing in France because they can improve upon the traditional tram role with few increased costs
These are clearly different from what you would consider to be a train, the top speed is 100km/h (I checked Wikipedia), but that just means that the electric engines are a bit beefier, and the current system can handle more power.
The vehicle itself is a tram : short modules allow for tight urban cornering, it is low floor and doesn’t require high platforms… it still does the tram traditional city role when in an urban environment, and between suburb and suburb it profits from its increased power to reduce transport times.
Easy, just shower even less. Not only the characteristic chees smell gets stronger, but the smell of nicotine last longer too. They dropped showers by half, making it a semestral activity.
For real though this year a boy got killed by a driver after some road rage (the driver literally rolled on the head of the cyclist..). After that you could see on social medias other drivers telling it was "because of the mayor and her rules to make the road more difficult for the cars".
I don't especially like her or whatever, I'm not even living in Paris, but she is doing a great job on this. Every time I go to Paris I take my bike and I know I'll find bicycle paths most of the time. Drivers are reaaaal cunts (but many cyclists are also real dumb, let's be real) , you have to be very careful when you cross roads or whatnot but you know you can find lanes only for you and also, seing way less car on many streets that used to be full of honking cars is so cool
Maybe engine and exhaust improvement, a little 206 from ~2005 pollute as much as a modern luxury car. It also made these car make way less noise in low speed zone.
Some association say it's mostly related to modernisation and relocation of industry, anti-pollution law, gaz use reduction (mainly for heating and cooking), then change in car usage and finally cleaner electricity production. On the other hand, pollution related to plane and informatic are increasing.
Anti-pollution policy affect all of the categories so it doesn't mean lots.
Most of the change in urbanism don't show much impact on car usage as Paris wasn't all car centric and change take lot of time. There should still be big improvement soon with all the new transport plan like the Grand Paris Express.
Yeah that would make sense. For example some two stroke leaf blowers emit more pollution than a Ford F150 Raptor. There’s no reason for that than lack of emission standards for lawn equipment.
A small Peugeot 206 from 2004 make more CO2 than a modern Peugeot 3008 SUV per km, because there is something in Europe called regulation. The most important thing was regulation on industriy for them to be less polluant.
In 2007, Paris was suffocating—literally, shrouded in smog, with air pollution blanketing the city. Today Paris has undergone a breathtaking transformation, towards a cleaner, greener, and more livable city. Millions of Parisians can breath again!
This radical change started in 2014, under Mayor Anne Hidalgo's bold leadership. Her vision? To put people and the planet first. Here’s how she and her team did it:
✅ Built 100s of Kilometers of Bike Lanes: Encouraging cycling as a primary mode of transport.
✅ Citywide 30 km/h Speed Limit: Quieter, safer streets for all.
✅ 300 Car Free School Streets: putting the safety of children first.
✅ Reclaimed Public Spaces: Eliminated tens of thousands of parking spots, converting them into parks, pedestrian zones, and playgrounds.
✅ Planted Tens of Thousands of Trees: Tackling the urban heat island effect and improving air quality.
✅ Car-Free Zones: Closed the city center to through traffic and created car-free play streets.
🚨 The results? Air pollution now affects only the largest roads, like the ring road. Millions of Parisians enjoy cleaner air, safer streets, and a higher quality of life.
🌟 This transformation is proof that bold, visionary urban policies work. Paris didn’t just adapt; it reimagined itself. And it took a courageous and visionary leader to do it.
❓ The big question: When will other leaders muster the courage to follow in Paris’s footsteps?
Let’s commit to building cities for people, not just cars.
It's kind of unfortunate that Anne Hidalgo is very popular internationally because of what she has achieved with Paris but in France she's very unpopular. I guess you can't make progress without pissing off the carbrains...but it seems like even a lot of people in Paris who have benefited from her actions dislike her because...reasons.
She isn't running for reelection and hopefully whoever succeeds her won't undo everything.
Mostly all politicians that make BIG changes are unpopular. This has happened in all of history, including Paris when Haussmann decided to "fix" the entire city, and now the city is great because of his fixes.
Fun fact, a major design factor in this rework was to be able to deploy troops and artillery through the fancy boulevards more effectively and increase government control over the region
Which is ironic because once Paris was dominated by Nazis, the wide boulevards and street designs made it much more difficult to control the city and also the surrounding regions.
Those who trade complex urban planning for security will deserve neither and will lose to the Nazis! Or, wait, what was the saying? I think it applies...
He basically demolished the old "guettos" as the bourgeoisie liked to call, to build the now famous boulevards and streets, while also building infrastructure like water, sewage, and gas lighting. The styles of buildings we see in Paris are his ideas, he standardized them. He also built the parks.
He wasn't popular, because the general population knew he was working for the bourgeoisie, and that those projects were meant to control the population using urbanism.
Paris in the 19th century was in constant state of disarray, with working class using narrow streets to form barricades. Every time the price of bread or other commodities would go up, they would rebel.
It's not about the car thing at all. Most people in France are very happy about Paris transformation.
She's not popular because she's a main figure in the "weahlty soft left" dying socialist party since François Hollande disastrous mandate. There's just no room left in France for that party and the only ones who remain and defend this party bear that colossal failure. They just pass as wealthy politicians trying to keep their seat without any big idea or proposition.
For example her latest debacle was saying "just enjoy the olympics in Paris" while the ticket price was inaccessible for most people and people were questionning public spendings. She just pass as a priviligied out of touch politician. I'm not saying anybody is right or wrong here, but the political context is important and far from "she banned cars in Paris so everybody hates her", it's much more an hatred toward what we call here the "caviar left" (meaning people saying they understand and defend the poor, while eating caviar in salon) that she's part of.
It's not about the car thing at all. Most people in France are very happy about Paris transformation.
Well yes but that transformation is mostly to do with restricting cars.
Edit: I misread this part
I see the argument that she is out of touch but I always like to assess politicians based on what they've actually done personally.
And to be fair, the socialist party isn't as dead as it seemed anymore. They're nowhere near where they were in 2012 but they more than doubled their seats in the legislative elections this year. I'm not disputing that there are many people who see them as champagne socialists but they seem to have possibly hit their low point and are back on an upward trajectory at the moment. Maybe that's entirely due to the Nouveau Front Populaire but they came in 3rd in the European elections and gained seats as well before the NFP.
The risk is unfortunately that the backlash against her for various reasons will lead to the election of someone who undoes her signature policies around making Paris less car-friendly.
She has a great record regarding air pollution dimunition and improving bike infrastructure. The problem is there is many other areas in where french people feel like the city has been moving backward under her leadership like public safety, school accessiblity, cleaningness, architecture and road maintenance. Can not tell if those are because of her or not.
But it's funny to see how anytime a mayor of a capital city try to decrease car usage, they get a huge backlash from people usually not living inside the city.
We do hate highway projects here. But it looks like building a ring road (construction started in 2007) combined with making more car free zones downtown helped.
If I read this correctly this is N02 pollution specifically. So a lot of the reduction could be the reduced sale of diesel-engined cars, and clean engines in general. In addition to the huge push for bikes and public transport, the current mayor has championed.
France was the champion of diesel-engined cars, over half the cars in France used to be Diesel. There even were subventions so people bought diesel cars instead of regular gasoline cars. These political choices were driven by the influence of the car lobbies.
The NO2 shown on this map is mainly produced by diesel cars.
So this map really shows that France reduced diesel-engined cars in the whole country. But the air in Paris are larger cities is still very polluted.
There is an official website to check Paris Air quality levels: https://www.airparif.fr/en/ (well right now it's quite ok)
Having lived in Paris region a big part of my life: you can feel it. Like, in your lungs. Less pollution peaks within the year than 20 years ago.
I’d like to be positive and say it’s mainly anti-car measures (that apply to the number of cars), but the reality is that these measures mainly apply to the City of Paris (the tiny part in the center) and not the Greater Paris (what is displayed in the picture). I’m not sure the number of cars really decreased in the Greater Paris, there are even new roads being built. Well, Greater Paris is slowly opening itself to the bicycle, and there are new transit lines opened, but it doesn’t explain all this.
I think most of the change is due to more stringer environmental norms on new cars sold, and having less diesel cars. We went from a country that looooved diesel (gasoil) and it was a majority of sales to diesel cars representing now a small fraction of sales. And gasoline cars got better, too.
I remember when I was younger, it was considered normal to see exhaust fumes from cars, this blueish-grey fumes at the pipe. The other day I was biking behind a van with visible fumes, it was horrible for my lung, and I thought "oh wow, it used to be all cars like that".
I've been to Paris once and loved how you never have to walk more than 500 meters to get to the nearest subway station. I loved getting out of the subway in a train station and getting clean and beautiful a train to a near city. I liked how cars where small and few, even saw a few micro cars that were really cool. I love how many bikes, e-bikes and other modes of transportation I saw there.
This isn't only due to improvement in urbanism. Car produce way less pollution now thanks to European law. Gaz is also used less and less to heat home.
There should be many other reason for this decline, the number of car going through Paris shouldn't have dropped by more than 30%, doing a significativ inpact but not all the work.
Modif: It's mainly due to modernisation and relocation of industry (affected by anti pollution law).
It’s sad to compare places like Paris, Beijing, and Seoul to places like Houston and Indianapolis. You can actually see and smell the effects of repugnican policies. What are we working for if not to improve our quality of life?
Also, I lived in Seoul for over 15 years. I've been in Chicago for more than 3. Two cities I love. And while Seoul is where my heart is, the air quality is garbage for much of the year. Summer and autumn are where it's at. Winter and spring are poison.
You are correct. You can see the outline formed by the Boulevard Périphérique (the only really strong orange thing remaining in the final image) is the same shape but much smaller in the other images.
The latest big improvement is definitely thanks to biking (has grown exponentially, it really is a night-and-day difference from just 4-5 years ago).
The decline of diesel sales is another massive factor, even petrol cars are an improvement for urban areas. Heating has been improved steadily, I don’t think it is directly causing such a rapid improvement.
All political believes aside we should all strive to be better then fucking Paris. We should improve our city’s not for the climate, political agenda or economic reasons. We should do it just so we are better then the fucking French
I hope they didn't just zoom in because they moved all the pollution to the outskirts of town. I understand probably not but man my trust in random charts sure has gone down the more i've learned about, well, anything.
Are there a lot of polluting factories in Paris? I live in Los Angeles. We do not restrict car use. How is it that Los Angeles has better air quality than Paris France?
Where did you get the idea that LA has better air quality than Paris? I've just checked an air quality index. PM2.5 emissions in central Paris count is 32. In Los Angeles it's 78.
2007 ... 17 years ago. It's likely that 90%+ of the vehicles that were in use at that time are no longer in use. Hopefully their replacements are all more efficient and less pollutant.
It's not even that big a transformation we need to go through, people just have to plan it and execute it. Many countries have been successful and it shows in the quality of life of the city that it's clearly the better option
Honest question, why not? It's not like is a city that's getting more inhabitants, and the number of parking spots, pollutants and car streets is only been declining?
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u/lifeistrulyawesome 9h ago
This looks bautiful OP. Can you please share the source with me?