Design for Living: Paris rethinks the boulevard

The reimagined Avenue de la Grande Armee in Paris.

Stand in front of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and the boulevard you’re looking at is the Champs Elysees. Turn around, and you’ll see the Avenue de la Grande Armee. It’s an arterial route leading straight to the towers of La Defense, the business district, and on to the ring road around the old city, called Boulevard Peripherique, or the Periph.

Avenue de la Grande Armee has a bike lane and a lot of trees – it is Paris – but it also has eight lanes for traffic. It’s noisy, dangerous and one of the most polluted streets in the city.

Avenue de la Grande Armee today.

That’s about to change. The city is converting the access lanes and parking spaces on each side into pedestrian areas. It’s also creating new parks and play areas that will function as rain gardens, designed to control flooding when the drains overflow. Paris has the same problem we do, that most temperate climates now do: it’s warmer and a whole lot wetter.

The existing bike lanes will be broadened into cycle “highways”, protected by barriers – which is still not common in Paris. Two vehicle lanes will be dedicated to buses, taxis, emergency and delivery vehicles, while general traffic will be reduced to four lanes.

With less traffic and fewer of the problems it creates, the avenue will become home to cafes, bike workshops and other new retail outlets.

Proposed for Avenue de la Grande Armee: Parkland and pedestrian areas that become rain gardens.

The plan is not unlike the scheme for the top end of Great North Rd approved by the board of Auckland Transport this week. The Parisian version is a lot more, well, Parisian, but the same basic principle applies. The public space we think of as carriageways for cars is being adapted to meet the needs of all street users, notably the growing numbers of pedestrians, cyclists and bus patrons.

Great North Rd will be bare bones compared to Avenue de la Grande Armee, but it’s a good start and it can be made better over time.

Auckland could have learned more from Paris these last few years. They have a nifty rule that a bicycle is allowed to go the wrong way up a one-way side street. During Covid lockdowns they created pop-up bike lanes, then they kept many in place. The boulevards along some stretches of the River Seine, once totally clogged with cars, are now delightfully pedestrian and bike-friendly. They’ve been brave.

And they have even bigger plans. Avenue de la Grande Armee joins the Periph at a junction called Porte Maillot, on the edge of the old city. It used to be marked by a pedestrian plaza, but in the 1970s it became a mad mess of cars, while the Periph became the busiest road in Europe.

Now the city has decided there’s no future in continuing to give in to cars. Their value is badly compromised if you’re always stuck in traffic, and all the problems they cause just keep getting worse. So they’re reducing the number of traffic lanes on the Periph and Porte Maillot will feature a new park.

Proposed for Porte Maillot: A new playground in the city.

The proposed remodelling of Porte Maillot shows extensive new pedestrian areas, partly overlying the ring road.

And the city is being covered in a spiderweb of bike lanes: Mayor Anne Hidalgo wants to create a “100 per cent cyclable city”. The Olympics begin there in July 2024 and she plans to showcase to the world just how possible, and how rewarding, that idea can be.

Safer for everyone, easier to shop, nicer to be in, more resilient against the wilding weather. Someone should take our own mayor on a fact-finding mission.

Simon Wilson is a senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.

Design for Living appears most weeks in Canvas magazine.