A few days before the 50th anniversary of the ring road, the general public, and not just Parisians or Ile-de-France residents, is invited to comment on the future of the ring road between Monday April 17, the start date of the online consultation, and May 28. The City Hall of the capital intends to reserve a lane of the ring road for carpooling, taxis and public transport. This project is part of public participation by electronic means (PPVE), organized under the aegis of the National Commission for Public Debate (CNDP).

Wanted by the socialist mayor, Anne Hidalgo, by 2030, this project is part of the “legacy” program of the 2024 Summer Olympics. During the Olympics, the reserved lane will allow athletes and the “Olympic family” to get from hosting sites to competition sites in a safe and fast way.

Two similar reserved lanes, provided by the State, are planned on motorways 1 (A1, in Seine-Saint-Denis) and A13 (Yvelines and Hauts-de-Seine). The government organized a PPVE at the start of the year, and their post-Olympic opening is planned for the beginning of 2025.

Opponents of the project “will be able to express themselves”

As for the ring road, a public meeting to launch the consultation will take place on Monday evening at the Town Hall, with 600 participants, almost fifty years after its inauguration on April 25, 1973. The participants can give their opinion on the “modalities of implementation of this lane dedicated to carpooling” and “public transport”, explains the Town Hall on the consultation website.

If the Town Hall does not intend that its project be called into question, it remains “open to discussion”, in particular because “the list of beneficiaries is not fixed”, explained at the beginning of April to the Agence France-Presse David Belliard, ecologist assistant for Anne Hidalgo’s mobility. He assures that opponents of the project “will be able to express themselves”.

Among these opponents is the president of the Ile-de-France region, Valérie Pécresse (LR), who estimated during a previous debate at the Town Hall that it was “not possible to close a lane on the device (…) given the traffic”.

One million vehicles every day

In 2019, the 35 km ring was, according to the research institute Forum vies mobiles, the busiest road in Europe. Used every day by a million vehicles, the ring road “has less than 20% of Parisian users and 40% of journeys are from suburb to suburb”, regularly reminds Ms. Pécresse, for whom the mayor of Paris does not care. commuters.

At the end of 2021, the region had organized an online consultation in which 90% of the 79,000 voters had said they were opposed to the “removal” of a lane from the ring road. For the Town Hall, it will not be “removed”, but “transformed” in order to make it “a faster way” for less polluting transport.

This reserved lane should make it possible “to reduce the expenses of Ile-de-France residents who travel by car and to reduce the environmental footprint of motorized journeys”, explains the Town Hall on its site. According to the Town Hall, this transformation must also make it possible to “resorb the congestion” of traffic, while for Ms. Pécresse it will lead, on the contrary, to a “thrombosis of Ile-de-France”.