#Mayor Anne Hidalgo

[higherentity]

[thepastisalreadywritten]

25 July 2024

The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games will see competitors parade on boats along the River Seine through central Paris on Friday.

An unprecedented security operation is in place, with organisers also facing challenges over the cleanliness of the Seine, costs and the environmental impact of the Games.

When are the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games?

The summer Olympics run from 26 July to 11 August, with 10,500 athletes competing in 329 events.

The Paralympics take place from 28 August to 8 September, featuring 4,400 athletes in 549 events.

There will be 206 countries represented at the Olympics, and 184 at the Paralympics.

Where will Olympic and Paralympic events take place?

The main athletics events will be at the Stade de France, on the northern outskirts of Paris.

There are also Olympic and Paralympic venues in the city centre.

The Pont d'Iena, for example, is hosting cycling events, while beach volleyball is at the Eiffel Tower and the marathon starts at the Hotel de Ville and ends at Les Invalides.

Is the Seine clean enough for swimming?

Open water swimming and triathlon events are due to take place in the Seine, more than 100 years after swimming in the river was banned.

Tests done in mid-June showed that levels of E. coli in the water were 10 times the acceptable level.

However, Games organisers hope July sunshine and measures like a rainwater storage basin will make it clean enough.

Ahead of the Games, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo took a dip to try to prove the river was safe.

How are France's security forces preparing for the Games?

The Games will be protected by the largest peacetime deployment of security forces in French history

Up to 75,000 police, soldiers and hired guards will be on patrol in Paris at any one time to guard venues and events.

The use of the Seine for the opening ceremony, with crowds watching the parade from the banks, is a first for the modern Olympics.

The original plan was to give free tickets to 600,000 members of the public to watch from the river's banks.

However, the government was worried about potential threats such as a drone attack, and spectator numbers were scaled back to 326,000.

More than 220,000 of those will be invited guests and 104,000 will be members of the public who have bought tickets.

Some 44,000 barriers have been erected, with QR codes for residents and others seeking access to the river Seine and its islands.

Many of the barriers will be removed after the opening ceremony.

Intelligence services uncovered two plots against the country by suspected Islamic militants in early 2024.

In May, a man was detained on suspicion of planning an attack on the torch relay in Bordeaux, and another man was arrested in southern France over a plan to attack an Olympic football venue.

How much are the Games costing?

The cost of this year's Games is estimated to be about 9bn euros (£7.6bn), less than any of the previous four Games — in Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, London, and Beijing.

Much of the funding is coming from private companies, as well as sales of tickets and broadcasting rights.

The government's official auditors have said it may have to pay between 3bn and 5bn euros (£2.5bn and £4.2bn) for costs such as policing.

Are the Games environmentally friendly?

The organising committee of Paris 2024 has promised to make it the greenest Games in Olympic history, with half the carbon footprint of London 2012 and Rio 2016.

The Games will be held in the same city where, in 2015, world leaders agreed to try to prevent global temperatures rising by more than 1.5C.

About 95% of the Olympic and Paralympic sites are either existing structures or temporary ones.

The organisers say they are using as much recycled material as they can — including recycled cardboard beds for athletes — and trying to minimise carbon emissions.

However, it has been reported that thousands of air-conditioning units have been ordered for Olympic Village rooms by some national teams.

Are the Games pushing up prices in Paris?

Millions of visitors are expected in Paris during the Games, with ticket holders expected to spend an estimated 2.6bn euros (£2.2bn).

Hoteliers in Paris pushed up their rates, in many cases doubling them or more, in anticipation of a big rise in demand.

But there have been reports that many hotels have had unexpectedly low sales.

Bus and metro fares are also doubling in the capital during the Games.

In January, the Louvre art gallery put up its entrance fees by almost 30%.

[hetaletmego]

France 100% used to call Spain "mon bel hidalgo" and now can't even take himself seriously anymore when he tries because of her ass

[bcacstuff]

Time for another epic show at the Stade de France Paris for the closing ceremony of the Olympics 2024

A Golden Voyager lands in a world that is deserted and mysterious, ready to explore.

Athens 1896 Greece 🇬🇷 to Paris 2024 🇫🇷

It’s always worth remembering Pierre de Coubertin’s vision for the modern Olympic Games and the contribution of Greece.

“The Hymn to Apollo”, like you’ve never seen or heard it before.

The Olympic rings! The Stade de France! 🩵💛🖤💚❤️

Angèle and Phoenix turning Stade de France into Stade de Dance

Speeches by Tony Estanguet, President of Paris 2024 and Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee.

As the Olympic Anthem plays, the Olympic flag is lowered. It’s a lovely performance by the Maîtrise de Fontainebleau and the Orchestre Divertimento.

From Paris to LA. The Olympic flag is officially handed over!

Mayors Anne Hidalgo and Karen Bass make history as they join IOC President Thomas Bach for the handover.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” rings out around the Stade de France, while Simone Biles holds the Olympic flag.

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to bring the Olympic flag to Los Angeles.”

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are getting the #LA28 party started!

As we bid farewell to the Paris 2024 Olympic flame, Yseult treats us to a spine-tingling rendition of “My way”.

Merci Beaucoup Paris 2024, See you in LA 2028

[cognitivejustice]

Paris plants its first "urban forest" on a busy roundabout as part of a plan to turn the French capital into a garden city

The city will plant 478 trees on the Place de Catalogne near the Gare Montparnasse train station as a flagship project in Socialist Mayor Anne Hidalgo's drive to cut noise, pollution and tackle global warming.

The Place de Catalogne roundabout - designed by the late Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill in the 1980s - had for decades been a busy thoroughfare for cars. In recent years it has been transformed into a Dutch-style, bicycle-friendly junction that is also the start of a "voie verte" or greenway bike lane to the southern suburbs.

Paris City Hall aims to have planted 170,000 more trees between 2020 and 2026, and more than 63,000 trees have already been planted, opens new tab since November 2020.

Hidalgo's leftist-green coalition has also reduced the space for cars in the city, increased parking fees and is phasing out diesel cars from the city centre.

The city's latest plan is to drive large sports utility vehicles (SUVs) from its centre

[maaarine]

French Revolution: Cyclists Now Outnumber Motorists In Paris (Carlton Reid, Forbes, April 06 2024)

"Between October 2022 and April 2023, 3,337 Parisians aged 16 to 80 years old were equipped with GPS trackers to record their journeys for seven consecutive days.

In the suburbs, where public transit is less dense, transport by car was found to be the main form of mobility.

But for journeys from the outskirts of Paris to the center, the number of cyclists now far exceeds the number of motorists, a huge change from just five years ago.

Most of the journeys recorded were commuter trips.

The city’s socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo has pushed through a great many anti-motoring measures during her two administrations—such as reducing the number of parking places, restricting access by SUVs, and closing some major roads to motorists—and the latest survey will be validation for her policies, none of which have caused the kind of protests that the French capital has long been famous for.

In short, culling cars has been far more popular than her petrolhead critics predicted, with Paris becoming cleaner and healthier to boot.

Notably, and without the spread of conspiracy theories common outside of France, Paris is also putting into practice the home-grown concept of the “15-minute city,” creating urban areas where access to amenities is close and hence there’s less need to drive."

[mariacallous]

On a sunny Wednesday in Paris, the city’s mayor inches down a ladder into the blue-brown water of the river Seine, one cautious step at a time. After a few seconds, once Anne Hidalgo’s wet suit is completely submerged, she dons small dark goggles and dunks her face underwater—proving to the photographers and TV cameras following her by boat that she believes this water is clean.

This is a historic moment for Paris, which many people believed was not going to happen. Swimming in the Seine has been banned for the past century, and a river clean enough for a political photo op has long been an ambition among French lawmakers.

This cleanup operation has become the centerpiece of what Paris is calling “the Greenest Ever Games,” and the legacy of this effort is expected to last. After Hidalgo dries off, the Seine will stage several Olympic swimming events; three public bathing areas will open in the Games’ aftermath.

But the €1.4 billion ($1.5 billion) cleanup operation is not really about swimming. The ability to bathe in the Seine is simply a sideshow—payback to Parisians for the use of massive public funds to complete such an ambitious river restoration project. Instead, the real goal is to protect a source of drinking water and help life return to the river, so fish—such as the famous Parisian catfish—can continue to thrive.

The promise of swimming is intended to guard against the kind of criticism that pits environmental projects against the needs of ordinary people. Online accounts have already pledged to poop in the Seine en masse under the hashtag #JeChieDansLaSeine, or #IPooInTheSeine, to protest the amount of money spent on the project, as ordinary people struggle with the cost of living. (There is no evidence anyone actually has done this, and whoever set up the original website did not reply to WIRED’s request for comment.)

“Having this totemic goal of swimming in the river is something that really helps politically … because it’s very expensive,” says Caroline Whalley, a water pollution expert at the European Environment Agency. “It's a way to get public support, because they can see the benefit. There's something in it for them.”

The Seine started to die at the onset of the 20th century. For 50 years, raw sewage was released into the river, prompting the city to put an end to idyllic scenes of families cavorting in the water and rule bathing in the water (mostly) illegal from 1923. In the years that followed, the Seine became a grim symbol of industrialization.

“There was no life in the river Seine during these 50 years,” says Jean-Marie Mouchel, a professor at the Sorbonne University, who has been studying the river since the '80s. The sewage sapped the water of oxygen and created obstacles for river traffic. “There was so much sediment and deposits from the sewers that [they created] mountains of deposits on the bottom [of the river],” says Mouchel, “so boats couldn't even pass through.”

It wasn’t until the 1960s that restoring the river began to attract political attention, first with the establishment of the French water agency, and later with a pledge by then mayor of Paris (later Prime Minister) Jacques Chirac. “I will bathe in the Seine in front of witnesses to prove that the Seine has become a clean river,” he declared in 1988, promising to complete the stunt by the early '90s. Chirac, who died in 2019, never did take that public plunge. But his idea would live on in French politics, and the Olympics created a new deadline to complete the cleanup.

Macron has repeated his pledge. “I’ll do it,” he told reporters in March, refusing to be pinned down on a date. Both he and Hidalgo, however, were beaten into the water by sports minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, who plunged into the Seine with an ungraceful flop on Saturday. Her office did not reply to WIRED’s questions asking whether she was feeling fine after her swim.

Without the promise of swimming in the Seine, what Parisians get for the $1.5 billion cleanup operation is not immediately obvious. It is not actually possible to clean the river. Instead, the operation is focused on preventing new, raw sewage from entering in the first place. The city cracked down on houseboats and apartments with questionable plumbing, which had been dumping sewage straight into the Seine. Then officials started to tackle the problem being caused by intense rainstorms, which cause water to flow from the street into the city’s drains, swelling the amount of liquid in the sewers underneath. Too much rain means the city has a choice: Either let raw sewage back up through people’s toilets and flood bathrooms across the capital, or release untreated waste into the river to create space, regardless of the consequences.

To prevent this from happening, Paris built a giant storage tank near Austerlitz metro station, capable of holding 20 Olympic swimming pools of dirty water. “The idea of this is to be a buffer, so when it rains a lot, instead of the sewage network immediately overflowing, we have a basin that fills up,” says Dan Angelescu, founder and CEO of Fluidion, a company that tracks levels of E. coli in the Seine and had worked with the city on the cleanup project until last year. The basin created a “drastic” improvement of the water quality during small amounts of rain, says Angelescu, yet a rainstorm last week still caused levels of E. coli to peak above the level of 1,000 E. coli per 100 milliliters considered safe for the Olympics. “There is a limit to everything,” says Angelescu when asked about the basin’s effectiveness.

Recent heavy downpours have created lingering uncertainty around whether the Seine will be judged ready in time for the Games, and if it is, whether swimmers will be able to descend into the water without getting sick. Hidalgo may already have taken the plunge, but the real guinea pigs will be the Olympic athletes signed up to take part in the open water and triathlon events scheduled in the Seine, as long as the water analysis comes back safe.

Among them is a slightly nervous Daniel Wiffen, a world record holder who is set to compete in the Seine, representing Ireland. Paris will be the 23-year-old’s first “big race” in open waters, and he is worried about the water quality. “It’s a big issue,” he says. Ideally, he’d like to take a trial run in the Seine to better understand the currents, and he’s been asking fellow athletes whether they think it’s worth the gamble. “Do you risk two days before your race, getting in the Seine and getting ill the day before your race?” he says.

Yet he’s still hoping the race goes ahead. The idea of swimming in the iconic Paris river spurred him to sign up. “I want to swim beside the Eiffel Tower,” he told WIRED. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: France 24

Published: Jan 7, 2025

France on Tuesday marked 10 years since the terrorist shooting that targeted satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo led commemorations at the newspaper's former offices, where two al Qaeda-linked gunmen killed a dozen people in January 2015.  

France marked on Tuesday 10 years since an Islamist attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper that shocked the country and led to fierce debate about freedom of expression and religion.

President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo led commemorations at the site of the weekly's former offices, which were stormed by two masked al Qaeda-linked gunmen with AK-47 assault rifles.

Macron and Hidalgo also remembered Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim police officer guarding the offices who was executed at point-blank range as he begged for his life in one of the most shocking images recorded of the tragedy.

Twelve people died in the attacks, including eight editorial staff, while a separate but linked hostage-taking at a Jewish supermarket in eastern Paris by a third gunman on January 9, 2015, claimed another four lives.

The bloodshed signalled the start of a dark period for France during which extremists inspired by al Qaeda and the Islamic State group repeatedly mounted attacks that set the country on edge and raised religious tensions.

"Today is not necessarily sad," Frederica Wolinksi, the daughter of famed French cartoonist and Charlie Hebdo contributor Georges Wolinski said. "It's good that 10 years later we can still remember those who died on 7 January so well."

A retrospective of Wolinski's work went on display at a Paris gallery at the end of last year in one of several media events, from new books to documentaries, to commemorate the anniversary.

Charlie Hebdo has published a special edition to mark the 10-year anniversary that features a front-page cartoon with the caption "Indestructible!"

In a typically provocative move, the militantly atheist publication also organised a God-themed cartoon contest that invited submissions of the "funniest and meanest" caricatures of religious figures.

"Satire has a virtue that has enabled us to get through these tragic years: optimism," said an editorial by its director Laurent Sourisseau, known as "Riss", who survived the 2015 massacre.

"If you want to laugh, it means you want to live."

The attack on the newspaper by two Paris-born brothers of Algerian descent was said to be revenge for its decision to publish caricatures lampooning the Prophet Mohammed, Islam's most revered figure.

'Je suis Charlie'

The killings fuelled an outpouring of sympathy in France expressed in a wave of "Je Suis Charlie" ("I Am Charlie") solidarity, with many protestors brandishing pencils and pens and vowing not to be intimidated by religious fanatics.

[ Francois Hollande, then president, led a solidarity march in Paris joined by 40 other world leaders days after the 2015 attack. ]

Days after the attack France's then-president François Hollande led a solidarity march in Paris joined by 40 world leaders and millions of protestors in support of free speech.

Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, speaking on RTL Tuesday, acknowledged how far France has come, while warning of the persistent dangers.

“France has rearmed considerably, but the threat is still there,” he said, pointing to both external dangers and the rise of homegrown radicalisation.

“The nature of the threat has changed,” Retailleau added. “It is now primarily endogenous – young individuals radicalised through social media. Last year alone, our services foiled nine attacks, the highest number since 2017.”

The impact of the attacks continued to reverberate beyond France.

On the 10-year anniversary, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that Germany "shares the pain of our French friends".

The "barbaric attack ... targeted our common values of liberty and democracy – which we will never accept", Scholz said in a post in French on X.

Cartoons and controversy

The 10-year anniversary of the killings has lead to fresh introspection in France about the nature of press freedom and the ability of publications such as Charlie Hebdo to blaspheme and ridicule religious figures, particularly Islamic ones.

"Are we all still Charlie?" public broadcaster France 2 will ask in a special debate programme on Tuesday evening, with all major media organisations marking the event in some way.

Left-leaning daily Le Monde said the shock of the killings was comparable to that felt in the United States after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the country.

"How can we not deplore that the 'I am Charlie' has given way to a certain relativism with regards to freedom of expression and blasphemy, in particular among young generations?" it said.

Critics of Charlie Hebdo, foreign and domestic, are often puzzled by its crude humour and deliberately provocative cartoons that regularly incite controversy.

It has been accused of crossing the line into Islamophobia – which it denies – while its decision to repeatedly publish cartoons of Mohammed was seen by some as driving a wedge between the white French population and the country's large Muslim minority.

But a survey carried out by polling group Ifop and published in this week's Charlie Hebdo indicated widespread public support among French people for the freedom of expression to override concern for religious sensibilities.

A total of 76 percent of respondents believed freedom of expression and the freedom to caricature were fundamental rights, and 62 percent thought people had the right to mock religious beliefs.

--

[ "Indestructible!" ]

"If you want to laugh, it means you want to live. Laughing, irony, and caricatures are manifestations of optimism. Whatever happens, dramatic or happy, the desire to laugh will never cease." -- Charlie Hebdo director Riss

[strawblemon]

Wait a minute... the French name for Jett is Bridjet... she's an older woman...

She's not Anne Hidalgo (current mayor of Paris)... she's Brigitte Macron (wife of current French president Emmanuel Macron)!!

[mask131]

I was chatting with themousefromfantasyland about the Olympic Games and you know, I do have something to point out that people not in France might not know about.

More precisely we were chatting about the situation with the river Seine. Part of the reason Hildago's government focused so much on the Seine, outside of it being - you know - one of the emblems of Paris, is also tied to her project's of sanitizing the Seine. [Note: warning, I will throw it all at the head of Anne Hildago. Maybe there are other authorities beyond her and her city-government involved in this matter, but honestly I don't care, she is a very bad mayor and might have been one of the worst mayors of Paris in modern day, and I don't like the woman, and it isn't the first time she screwed up with poorly-thought if not idiotic plans. So she'll be my go-to culprit for the sake of this post]

Because the Seine, despite being THE most iconic river of France, the heart of Paris, such an important part of the city's culture, a crucial part of its tourism industry, and one of the reasons the city got its official motto - is also dreadfully polluted, and one of the most polluted bodies of water of France. Hidalgo, who was always involved in ecological concerns and in "making Paris great again", decided that for the Olympics the Seine would be cleansed - at least enough for the Olympic athletes to be able to swim in there. She even vowed that she would take a swim in it herself before the Olympics to prove how clean it all became.

Problem is, Hidalgo is the living embodiment of something that has been unfortunately very prevalent with left-oriented politicians in France: vapid ecology. Good intentions, well-meaning projects, but behind it, it is all just superficial and empty. And the Seine purification example is such a great demonstration of this: she literaly thought that by throwing enough money and machines at the Seine, she would be able to clean it up before the Olympics. We are talking of cleaning up in a few months DECADES AND DECADES if not CENTURIES of pollution caused by an enormous city. Hidalgo literaly thought "It's fine, we will just wipe this pesky little problem in a jiffy, and I am so confident that this pollution problem is not a big deal that I will bet France's international reputation on that".

Of course, I can tell you that Hildago did took her swim - but only at the very last minute because, as it turned out, cleaning the Seine took much more time, money and effort than originally planned... and it wasn't even done! First they realized it would take more time than planned, then there was the whole fight between the Paris town hall (which claimed the waters had been purified and cleaned) and the outside health organizations (who claimed the waters would still make people who plunged in them sick), and then of course the RAINS! We are living one of the rainiest summers France knew in a long time, and of course no matter how much Hidalgo's projects clean up the Seine, with each new rain it is polluted again and everybody has to start over. Everybody in France is joking about how the Olympic swimmers will grow a third eye.

That's what I call a "vapid ecologism" - because Hildago clearly never cared very much before about cleaning the Seine, now, did she? She was there for quite a long time but oh, turns out she only puts the big guns and the big money when the Olympic games are arriving. She literaly thinks that a problem that will require years and years of hard work can just go away in a few months? Because it is a very, VERY deep and systemic problem, this Seine pollution, that requires re-organizing PARIS ITSELF!

Right now, all the news are talking about how trainings and trials are currently being pushed back because the Seine waters are, again, polluted after the rain of the opening ceremony, and people are wondering if all the games planned to take place in the Seine (instead of an Olympic pool) won't be cancelled. As such, experts talk more and more about the why and how of this pollution that won't go away, and do you want to know the fun thing? One of the main reasons rains keep polluting the Seine is because the Parisian water-evacuation system is very flawed. There are many, many "wrongs turns", purposefully created or accidentally made, that mix together the evacuation of the rain water and the evacuation of the used waters. When Hidalgo's team decided to finally get their ass on the problem, they identified roughly 23 000 "wrong turns", and by the end of their operation they claimed to have treated 80 percent of them... But what their project and investigations revealed - and that's something so typical of Parisian businesses - that there were MUCH MORE wrong turns than everybody believed. How much? Oh just between 60... AND 120 000 WRONGS TURNS! The entire system is to be remade, and them fixing 80 percent of a meager 23 000 turns when there might be up to 120 000... Yeah it is a speck of dust in a pile of sand.

However I don't want to JUST speak about the Seine. The thing my discussion made me realize is that the Seine situation is just a repetition of EVERYTHING that has been happening with the Olympic Games, and I couldn't help but draw a parallel with another scandalous business related to the organization of these games, though a scandal that has been smothered by the actuality and likely will only pop back up once everything is over. The homeless scandal.

Paris is filled with homeless people. It is a fact, and that's one of the things I myself is always shocked by every time I go to Paris, the amount of homeless people I met. Or rather that I used to meet, because of course, with the Olympics arriving, the cities were "cleaned" up and the hobos removed! I hear you gasp in shock but don't worry, it was actually done in a quite nice and humane way! I mean it: there were empty buildings and vacant lots refurbished into lasting shelters for the duration of the Olympic Games. There were all those little flats prepared for the homeless people to live for free - very tiny, and with just the bare minimum to have a decent life, but you know, it is much better than just being in the street. It doesn't remove all of the homeless people and it doesn't solve their situation, but you know, at least it is an actual improvment and a humane gesture.

Now, take a wild guess: are they going to make it last beyond the Olympic Games? Come on, we are talking about Parisian government, and about Hidalgo's team! Of course not! Once the games are over and everything has been removed, all the homeless people from those buildings will be kicked back in the street, and the shelters will turn into something else. And they were told so the minute they entered their new little temporary homes. Because again, Hidalgo's point is all about cleaning up Paris before the entire world takes a look at it. Not solving Paris problem, just making it look good for the international event.

The Seine, the homeless people - it is all the same. It is a well-meaning project poorly thought by people not actually caring about it, it is a lot of excellent effort not made to last but just to impress, it is a deep and systematic problem that they think they can wipe out in a few months, it is just putting silk paperwall over a rotten, fractured stone ; it is just hiding the dust under the rug, empty humanitarianism, vapid ecologism, fake kindness motived by a good will so detached from reality it becomes as arrogant as absurd. Forcing athletes to swim in a polluted and diseased river because you can't force yourself to admit your town has a problem ; offering with hypocrisy a home to the poor only to plan to throw them back into their misery just because nobody will be looking anymore...

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

G20: mayors from around the world gather in Rio to present key demands

Document estimates cities will need $800 billion annually until 2030 to tackle climate change challenges

After four days of discussions at the Armazém da Utopia in Rio's port area, the Urban 20 (U20)—a G20 forum that brings together leaders from major cities worldwide—concluded yesterday with the presentation of a document to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The document was signed by representatives from the 26 member cities of the U20, along with seven observer cities and 25 invited cities, totaling over 100 cities represented in the discussions. The document focuses on addressing climate change issues, emphasizing that local governments will need approximately $800 billion annually until 2030 for investments to mitigate urban impacts.

Lula received the document from Rio's Mayor Eduardo Paes, alongside Mayors Yvonne Aki-Sawyer of Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, and Anne Hidalgo of Paris. Chilean President Gabriel Boric also attended the ceremony as a guest. The expectation is for the Brazilian government to present the document at the main G20 summit, happening today and tomorrow at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM), with the participation of heads of state and government from the world's largest economies. The document contains 36 items covering topics such as social inclusion, combating hunger and poverty, reforming global governance institutions, sustainable development, and energy transition.

Upon receiving the document, Lula stated that "cities cannot bear the cost alone (…) of financing the climate transition" and stressed the need for both global investment and "appropriate multilateral governance."

Continue reading.

[thoughtportal]

Official measurements have found that Paris is rapidly becoming a city of transportation cyclists. The survey of how people now move in Paris was conducted with GPS trackers by academics from L’Institut Paris Région, the largest urban planning and environmental agency in Europe.

The institute’s transportation report was published on April 4. It found that the way Parisians are now traveling from the suburbs to the city center, especially during peak periods, has undergone a revolution thanks in part to the building of many miles of cycleways.

Those cyclists now on the streets and roads of central Paris are not Spandex-clad professionals as seen on the Tour de France but everyday transportation cyclists.

L’Institut Paris Région carried out the survey for a consortium of fourteen public and private partners, including local government and rail companies.

Reporting on the institute’s survey, French TV channel 20 Minutes told viewers that the “capital’s cycle paths are always full.”

Between October 2022 and April 2023, 3,337 Parisians aged 16 to 80 years old were equipped with GPS trackers to record their journeys for seven consecutive days. In the suburbs, where public transit is less dense, transport by car was found to be the main form of mobility. But for journeys from the outskirts of Paris to the center, the number of cyclists now far exceeds the number of motorists, a huge change from just five years ago. Most of the journeys recorded were commuter trips.

The city’s socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo has pushed through a great many anti-motoring measures during her two administrations—such as reducing the number of parking places, restricting access by SUVs, and closing some major roads to motorists—and the latest survey will be validation for her policies, none of which have caused the kind of protests that the French capital has long been famous for.

In short, culling cars has been far more popular than her petrolhead critics predicted, with Paris becoming cleaner and healthier to boot.

Notably, and without the spread of conspiracy theories common outside of France, Paris is also putting into practice the home-grown concept of the “15-minute city,” creating urban areas where access to amenities is close and hence there’s less need to drive. {read}

Carlton Reid

I was Press Gazette’s Transport Journalist of the Year, 2018. I’m also an historian – my most recent books include “Roads Were Not Built for Cars” and “Bike Boom”, both published by Island Press, Washington, D.C.

[allthegeopolitics]

Arsonists attacked France's high-speed rail network early Friday, setting fires that paralyzed train travel to Paris for some 800,000 people across Europe, including athletes heading to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. Targeting remote locations far from the capital, the apparently co-ordinated attacks sought to cut off rail routes into the city from all directions. The fires were predominantly set in pipes containing critical signaling cables for the system known as the TGV. There were no reports of injuries. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said the damage would not affect the ceremony, in which 7,000 Olympic athletes were due to sail down the Seine past iconic Parisian monuments such as Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Louvre Museum and the Musee d'Orsay.

Continue Reading.

[magnetictapedatastorage]

full article under the cut

June 12, 2024

By David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Writer

Here is what the indefinite pause on New York City’s congestion pricing program, if it sticks, will cost: 120,000 more cars daily clogging Lower Manhattan’s bumper-to-bumper streets, according to a New York State analysis, and perhaps $20 billion annually in additional lost productivity and fuel and operating costs, as well as health and environmental burdens and a practically unbridgeable budget shortfall for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that will straitjacket an already handicapped agency and imperil dozens of planned necessary capital improvement projects for the city’s aging subway system.

Here is what it gains Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, who announced her unilateral decision about the suspension last week: perhaps slightly better chances for New York Democrats in a couple of fall congressional races. According to reporting, these are especially important to the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who may still be somewhat embarrassed about his state’s performance in the 2022 elections, when surprise victories for several New York Republicans kept the House of Representatives out of Democratic control. It has also handed the governor several news conferences so bungled, they have made reversing a policy unpopular with voters into a genuine political humiliation.

In her announcement, Hochul emphasized the precarious state of the city’s recovery from the Covid pandemic, but car traffic into Manhattan has returned to prepandemic levels, as has New York City employment, which is now higher than ever before; New York City tourism metrics are barely behind prepandemic records and are expected to surpass them in 2025. Tax coffers have rebounded, too, to the extent that the city canceled a raft of planned budget cuts. The one obvious measure by which the city has not mounted a full pandemic comeback is subway ridership — a measure that congestion pricing would have helped and pausing it is likely to hurt.

In announcing the pause, she also expressed concern for the financial burden the $15 surcharge would impose on working New Yorkers, though the city’s working class was functionally exempted from the toll by a rebate system for those with an annual income of $60,000 or less. In a follow-up news conference, she emphasized a few conversations she’d had with diner owners, who she said expressed anxiety that their business would suffer when commuters wouldn’t drive to their establishments. But each of them was within spitting distance of Grand Central, where an overwhelming share of foot traffic — and commercial value — comes from commuters using mass transit.

Robinson Meyer, a contributing Times Opinion writer, wrote for Heatmap that delaying the plan will be “a generational setback for climate policy in the United States,” adding that “it is one of the worst climate policy decisions made by a Democrat at any level of government in recent memory.” He called it worse than the Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Willow oil project in Alaska — not just because of the direct effect on emissions, though that would be large, but what a pause means for the morale and momentum of any American movement toward a next-generation, climate-conscious urbanism.

For years, the country’s liberals have envied the transformation of London by its Ultra Low Emission Zone, which generates hundreds of millions of pounds annually and quickly cut nitrogen dioxide air pollution in central London by 44 percent from projected levels. And liberals practically salivated over the remaking of Paris by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, whose policies have significantly reduced the number of cars in the city center, cutting nitrogen oxide pollution by 40 percent from 2011 levels, and turned huge swaths of the urban core into a paradise for pedestrians and bikers.

Similar programs have been carried out in Stockholm and Oslo, proving remarkably popular, and while it didn’t exactly seem likely that all the world’s cities were on the verge of leaving behind the car, the fact that any American city was taking the leap looked like a sign that change was possible. There aren’t many places in the United States that could plausibly hope to take even a few steps in the direction of the 15-minute city. But the New York City metro area — which has higher public transportation ridership than the next 16 American cities combined and whose residents account for 45 percent of U.S. commutes by public transit — was the obvious place to try. At least until last week.

To enthusiastic reformers, the reversal was all the more painful because the obvious hurdles had already been cleared. Especially after the Inflation Reduction Act kicked off a frenzied real-world spending spree, progress-minded Democrats have argued about the difficulties of building things at anywhere close to the necessary speed, taking aim at a bundle of obstacles to more rapid development and build-out of green infrastructure — rampant NIMBYism, burdens of environmental review, permitting and zoning challenges, social justice litmus tests. It had taken a few decades, but congestion pricing had jumped through all the necessary hoops. The everything bagel had been slathered with cream cheese and was ready to serve. And Hochul put the kibosh on it anyway.

The cash-strapped Metropolitan Transportation Authority has spent $500 million developing the system and installing its hardware, and the inevitable shortfall now means a much less ambitious future for the agency, to trust its spokesmen, which is now probably incapable of extending the Second Avenue Subway or undertaking the Interborough Express project, which promised to revitalize huge corridors of Brooklyn and Queens and give more than 100,000 New Yorkers more viable public transit commutes. (Hochul says the pause won’t imperil those projects.) The pause may even be illegal, as State Senator Liz Krueger argued last week in The Daily News.

But for all its inscrutability, Hochul’s reversal follows a recent partisan pattern, a sort of centrist backlash among establishment Democrats and their supporters against left-wing causes and their supporters in the run-up to the November elections, partly as a matter of electoral strategy and perhaps as part of a pre-emptive blame game in anticipation of Republican victories, possibly including Donald Trump’s re-election.

The backlash is perhaps most visible in commentary from liberal pundits, who in recent weeks have tried to blame the party’s left wing for President Biden’s dicey re-election prospects, though the most obvious drags on those chances are his age and voters’ perceptions about the cost of living. At the national level it is best embodied by Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who rarely speaks at length but happily seizes opportunities to punch left, particularly toward those protesting the war in Gaza. More locally, it is embodied by Mayor Eric Adams, who won election in 2021 as a kind of centrist backlash candidate — hailed at the time as a political counterweight to progressive candidates like Maya Wiley and progressive forces like the Black Lives Matter movement and perhaps even as a future face of the Democratic Party — and whose approval ratings are now lower than any other New York City mayor in decades, even as the city has inarguably bounced back from its pandemic trough on his watch.

Hochul has been a less visible and less polarizing figure than Adams. But every time she has poked her head up and made national news lately, it has been in the same spirit, to roll her eyes at or pick fights with those to her left. In February she mocked critics of Israel’s war in Gaza by saying, “If Canada someday ever attacked Buffalo, I’m sorry, my friends, there would be no Canada the next day.” (She later apologized.) In March she suddenly deployed the state’s National Guard to patrol the subways, on the same day that Adams boasted about rapid declines in subway crime. And now on congestion pricing, just weeks after bragging she was proud to stand up to “set in their ways” drivers, she reversed course out of apparent deference to those drivers and their outsize political clout. The state government and the transit authority have hard-earned reputations for ineffectuality, and faced with an opportunity to do something big, the governor chose to retreat and do nothing instead.

“It makes me think about the fight for progress, and how any real progress in the moment seems impossible,” wrote Cooper Lund in a melancholy reflection he called “Who Gets to Be a Constituent?” Nine times as many people ride public transit into the central business district each day as take cars there. There are 11 times as many people living in Manhattan who breathe the air polluted by automobile exhaust each day as there are who drive there for work. And those who work in the greater New York area lose 113 million hours each year to traffic, at an estimated cost of nearly $800 for each commuter. “With N.Y.C.’s reputation you’d think that the Democrats would be eager to uphold the city as an example of what a liberal, multicultural society is capable of, and to foster it,” Lund went on. “But both the mayor or the governor proved that they don’t have any interest in that. Instead, the things that would improve the city are pushed away for the suburban lifestyle that both parties seem to agree represents their actual constituency.”

A generation ago, it was common for informed liberals to lament the transformation of the country’s densest and most walkable city into a traffic-snarled carscape at the hand of Robert Moses in the mid-20th century. But despite the rise of YIMBYism and a sort of conventional wisdom new urbanism, the city hasn’t become meaningfully less automobile-centric since. More cars traveled into Lower Manhattan in 1990 than in 1981, more came in 2000 than in 1990, and although the rates dropped a bit after Sept. 11, they were still slightly higher in 2010 than they were 20 years before and have remained pretty flat since. Decades into new urbanism, the country’s most walkable city has just about the same number of cars driving into its in-demand downtown.

Taxi registrations doubled from 1980 to 2010 and then grew even more rapidly through the Uber years that followed, so that there are now five times as many taxis registered in the city as there were nearly 40 years ago and two and a half times as many taxi rides. (The difference between the two figures suggests that a pretty big portion of the increase is empty cars idling or cruising without fares.) Since 2006, excess congestion has grown by 53 percent, and since 2010, the average travel speed in the central business district has fallen 22 percent, from a crawl of 9.1 miles per hour to a glacial 7.1. I can comfortably run faster.

As has been the case everywhere, the kind and size of cars in New York have changed, too. When I was growing up there in the 1980s and ’90s, I could look out at the streetscape and see things other than trucks and supersized sport utility vehicles — trees, storefronts, pedestrians on the opposite curb, each of them visible because the streets were much less packed with automobiles the size of small elephants. Parking spots were not walls of S.U.V.s back then but lines of sedans, nestled along the sidewalk, it seemed, almost like a string of small boats puttering by the boarding platform of a flume ride. I remember climbing down into cars then, even as a 9- or 10-year-old. As a grown-up, I’m now climbing up, into what feels more like a cockpit and an imperious claim to the street.

My parents and in-laws remember a different kind of city still, the kind where you could park right in front of restaurants, play stickball in the street with infrequent interruptions, ride bikes down the cobblestones of SoHo and see only the occasional delivery truck along the way. I never knew that world, except through photographs and the haze of secondhand nostalgia. By the time I came around, the streets were already pretty full of cars. But even so, the city as a whole didn’t seem to belong to them yet. Certainly they didn’t seem to be holding its future hostage.