Common Dreams - Paris officials announced a new goal to ban gas-powered cars from its streets by 2030.
The proposal would accelerate existing efforts to reduce air pollution in the city after French President Emmanuel Macron promised to ban the sale of vehicles with combustion engines by 2040.
Under the rule, only electric cars would be allowed in the city. Paris is already home to an electric car-sharing service, Autolib, which has become wildly popular since its launch in 2011 with the goal of reducing carbon emissions by 20 percent over a decade.
Mayor Anne Hidalgo also said that diesel vehicles would be banned in the city by 2024. She has established bike paths and new bus lanes in an effort to reduce the city's dependence on cars.
2 comments:
The most important thing any government could do to shift people from driving to cycling is to make cycling physically safer.
Provide physically-separate lanes on all main streets/roads for cycling, so that commuter and utility cyclists need not risk being dismembered by a speeding car with a distracted driver.
Requiring that covered, locked parking be provided for tadpole trikes (whose 3 wheels make them inherently safer than 2-wheelers) would also help, since someone living in a flat generally cannot physically get a tadpole in and out of the building.
Oh, and it's a bad idea to ban all but electric vehicles, since the Second Law of Thermodynamics guarantees they're less efficient because of losses all along the way.
A much BETTER idea would be to require a high payload-to-weight ratio, instead of the profligate one (1.5 tons of vehicle to transport a 200 lb payload) we consider okay now.
For safety's sake, separate vehicles by mass and speed so that ultralight vehicles that have little mass and no protection for their riders/occupants don't have to share their travel environment with high-mass goods or multi-person carriers that will squash or dismember (2nd Law again) anything smaller that they hit.
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