Socialist Anne Hildago, the vandal who has been mayor of Paris for over a decade, has won plaudits from “new urbanists” for her anti-car policies and determination to make Paris more “walkable.” The long decline in the city’s population, which had gone into (partial) reverse toward the end of the 1990s, resumed just before she was elected and has carried on relentlessly since then.
Has “walkability” done its bit to make people run away from the city?
Surely not!
Meanwhile James Tidmarsh writes in The Spectator:
The New Year’s Eve concert on the Champs Élysées has been cancelled for security reasons. Paris was supposed to host its usual spectacle. A free open-air concert at the Arc de Triomphe, video projections on the monument and the midnight festivities that once drew close to a million people. Instead, the concert has been scrapped. It will be replaced on national television with a prerecorded concert filmed weeks ago with a handpicked crowd to mimic a celebration Paris no longer believes it can safely host. A capital once famed for its public life now performs it under studio conditions…
For decades families and friends would spill out onto the streets on New Year’s Eve. Families, couples carrying a bottle of champagne, tourists wrapped in scarves, all drifting towards the Champs Élysées to count down the final seconds of the year. It was spontaneous and cheerful and open to everyone. That Paris no longer exists…
Over recent years ordinary Parisians quietly stopped going. The Champs Élysées on any holiday weekend has become a no-go zone. The crowds have changed. The atmosphere’s changed. I remember hosting American friends one New Year’s Eve a couple of years ago. They suggested walking up to the Champs Élysées at midnight because it was the thing to do. We persuaded them it wasn’t a good idea. Anyone who lives here understands why.
Yes, Tidmarsh lives in Paris. What does he know?
More:
The fireworks will still take place at midnight, but they will rise over a boulevard the authorities no longer consider safe for real celebration. The city knows where the pressure lies. It knows who floods into the avenue on nights like these. It knows how quickly things can turn.
The threat of terrorism is also ever present.
“Also.”
More:
Paris has spent two decades in the grip of an ideological project that ignores reality. The city promised to be greener, cleaner and more progressive. What it’s become is brittle and dangerous.
Who could have predicted such a thing?
Meanwhile, another socialist “new urbanist,” London’s Bloomberg-backed Sadiq Khan, is pressing ahead with plans to pedestrianize London’s (somewhat shabbier and far from crime-free) Oxford Street.
The plan seems to be popular across London, but in the area itself, well, people appear to be less enthusiastic.
Sir Sadiq Khan’s bid to pedestrianize will turn the thoroughfare into a haven for shoplifters, muggers and criminal gangs, local residents have warned.
The Marylebone Association, which represents local residents and businesses, said that rather than creating the “world-class boulevard” touted by the London Mayor, the plan will add to soaring crime rates on Europe’s busiest shopping street.
Branding the proposals “dangerous, unworkable and catastrophic for the surrounding neighbourhoods”, the association said they would make the shopping district a “magnet” for miscreants.
Bloody locals, what do they know?
New York City’s Mayor-elect Mamdani, another leftist central planner, is, needless to say, keen to encourage more pedestrianization in Manhattan and elsewhere in Gotham.
And as a local (who, incidentally, does not own a car), I know what I think . . .