Hosting the Olympic Games often changes the face of a city. This can be for the worse, with white elephant stadiums attracting dust and the ire of residents. When Paris was awarded the 2024 Games in 2017, however, mayor Anne Hidalgo was determined to use the preparation for the event as a catalyst for transforming the French capital into a greener, healthier metropolis.
In particular, she used the Games as cover to target a contentious enemy: the car. Where city officials had long appeased motorists for fear of angering voters, Hidalgo boldly declared car dependence “archaic”. When backlash from conservative car lovers hit, she ascribed their protests to the “fachosphére”, a neologism meaning community of the extreme right.
Hidalgo’s plan was a departure from Paris’s post-war thinking on transport. Architect Le Corbusier’s “Plan Voisin” proposed the demolition of large parts of walkable central Paris to make way for highways. It was never fully implemented, but it inspired many pro-car policies by presidents Georges Pompidou and Jacques “Le Bulldozer” Chirac, such as the express routes along the Seine’s right bank.
Yet what Hidalgo has achieved in Paris is one of the most remarkable—and successful—programmes to reduce car use in a major city since the inexorable rise of the automobile. The Seine’s banks were pedestrianised in 2016, as was the Rue de Rivoli (the street passing the Louvre) in 2020. An entire new 200km metro train system is being built that will add four train lines and 68 new stations. More than 10km of dedicated cycling paths have been added—the Olympic cycle network, designed to assist venue access, has added 55km alone. Some 20,000 new cycle spaces have been introduced.
Parisians are using this infrastructure. Occupancy of bike lanes has doubled in the last year alone. For the first time in living memory, more people cycle (11.2 per cent) than drive in the city centre, while walking (53.3 per cent) and public transport (30 per cent) are far more popular than both. A mere 4.3 per cent of metro area trips are by car.
In the 20th century the car symbolised modernity and whole cities were redesigned around its supposed needs. But in the 21st century, the car’s pitfalls have become increasingly apparent. Street vehicles, primarily cars, are now the second-largest source of carbon emissions in Europe, and, despite the advent of electric vehicles, their emissions are still growing. They are also the leading killers of children in both the US and Europe, and the leading cause of noise and air pollution in European cities.
“Thanks to the car, our cities are uglier and more dangerous to get around, our air is less breathable, and our lives are interrupted more by traffic jams,” Daniel Knowles wrote in his book Carmageddon, published last year. “Car manufacturers want us to believe that driving is freedom. But in fact, we are trapping ourselves in an enormous prison made up of moving metal cells.”
This sense of entrapment, now articulated by many writers and thinkers, is in stark contrast to the car’s 20th century image. The post-war generation of beatniks and rebels celebrated the car as enabling rugged autonomy, even anarchy. As the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik put it last year, however, “Public transit is now the cause of the reforming classes, and the car their villain. The car is the consumer economy on wheels: atomizing, competitive, inhuman—and implicitly racist, hiving people off to segregated communities—while the subway and the train are communal zendos”.
This vibe shift may not have yet reached middle-class suburban parents and grandparents who keep buying larger and larger SUVs—but it has reached many of their kids. Gen Z are far less likely to get their driver’s licence than previous generations. Such sentiment has influenced many forward-looking policymakers and politicians, with urban planners increasingly experimenting with rules and charges to discourage excessive car use.
This momentum has mostly been concentrated in cities, like Paris, that are building on a reasonable foundation—namely, European and Asian cities that already possess narrower streets and greater building density, partly inherited from pre-automobile town plans. What about cities without such advantages, such as the two upcoming summer Olympic hosts, Los Angeles and Brisbane?
Los Angeles is perhaps the most notoriously car-dependent city in the developed world. Some 93 per cent of all passenger kilometres in LA are travelled by car. Less than 1 per cent of commuters travel by bicycle.
“There’s an enduring disbelief that anyone would even consider commuting by bike in this city where the car is king”, wrote Christopher Lord, Monocle’s LA-based US correspondent. “‘What the hell is this, Paris?’ a woman once shouted as I whizzed across Venice on my two-wheeler. [...] LA has clement weather and gentle contours that should make it a cyclist’s paradise. Yet [...] no other urban layout in the world is shaped as much by the automobile.”
Los Angeles once sported “the largest rail system in the world for any urban environment”, LA resident Michael Schneider, founder of transport lobby Streets for All, tells me. But the last of their streetcars were decommissioned in 1961. Some have dubbed this a corporate conspiracy, given oil companies and car manufacturers like General Motors invested in the company which took over the network, then ran it into the ground. More sober observers attribute this failure, however, to broader systemic issues—the system financed itself via commuter fares, which declined once cars offered more convenience.
In 2017, when LA was awarded the Olympics alongside Paris city, officials similarly promised measures to cut back on car use. Former LA mayor Eric Garcetti signed an agreement with Hidalgo to align their transport initiatives and promised the 2028 Olympics would be a “car-free games.”
LA’s Metro authority launched a plan called “28 by ’28”, featuring 28 transport projects it plans to build before the opening ceremony. The federal government has contributed $900m. Yet, six years on, only a few of these initiatives have been completed, and only a few more are on track for completion on time. The official slogan has shifted to a “transit-first Games” instead of “car-free”.
This reflects an inability to build infrastructure quickly and cheaply, particularly in the English-speaking world, which is partly due to heavier procedural weighting given to objections from nearby property owners. It’s a problem Britons are familiar with, too—road and rail projects can cost as much as 850 per cent more in the UK compared to the European Union, and America isn’t much better.
Public sentiment does appear to have shifted. Nearly two-thirds of Los Angelenos passed a ballot initiative, or public referendum, in March which will force city officials to speed up progress of its mobility plan. This means rolling out more than 805km of widened pavements and improved crossings, nearly 482km of bus-only lanes, 1287km of painted bike lanes, and another 643km of protected bike lanes.
Schneider, who helped organise the ballot campaign, thinks it’s “certainly not too late” to live up to the city’s lofty Olympic goals. “There’s nothing unique about the soil in Los Angeles or the air that makes it impossible to do such a transformation,” he says. “The problem here is just a political one.”
Brisbane, which will host the Olympics in 2032, is the poor man’s city of angels. In the 1960s, Charles Barton, a city official, travelled to LA and fell in love. He sponsored a plan for Brisbane to emulate LA upon his return tearing up the city’s tram system to make room for cars.
Today, 60.8 per cent of Brisbane residents get to work by car—a number which keeps rising. Train, bus and active transport options are dwarfed by comparison. Unsurprisingly, the city has the worst congestion in Australia and some of the worst public transport accessibility for an urban capital—just 33 per cent of residents can access a stop within walking distance.
Can Brisbane use preparation for the Games to make a U-turn? The city’s ambitions are currently narrower than LA’s, mainly focused on upgrading an existing rapid bus system. The state government has also slashed transport fares to only AUD $0.50 (£0.25), to try to coax residents back onto trains after Covid prompted a steep drop-off. With low frequency and coverage, however, the likelihood of lower fares significantly increasing passenger volumes is questionable.
Rob Lucas, organiser of urbanism collective Greater Brisbane, a lobby group, argues that governments must do “more than the minimum” planned. “Both public and active transport links are especially important as many of the planned Olympic precincts are outside of the city centre”, he tells me.
He would also like the city to “strike a balance between celebrating our urban heritage as a ‘big country town’”.
Brisbane’s flat and growing urban sprawl—it takes 105 times as much land to house 2.28m people here as Paris does for 2.1m people—makes network expansion far more difficult.
The impact of Olympic Games on a host city can be ephemeral. Some previous have seen upsurges in cycling during the Games, but some investments were since discontinued. In Paris, however, with promises of yet more investments—180km of additional cycling paths and 130,000 bike parking spaces by 2026—the changes to the urban landscape appear likely to endure.
Once you build a city around cars and their supposed needs, however, it’s slow and expensive to reverse, as the pre-Olympics experience of LA and Brisbane shows. And in such places, the temptation to keep expanding road networks is often irresistible for politicians who are subject to industry lobbying and motorist disaffection. Some of LA’s “28 by ‘28’” projects for a “car-free” Olympics, for instance, are actually road expansions. Such road expansions tend to induce more congestion, however, by encouraging more people to drive.
Anne Hidalgo’s sheer determination will undoubtedly serve as an inspiration for many urbanists globally. “Our mayor [LA’s Karen Bass] is going to Paris three times—for the opening and closing ceremonies, and then for the Paralympics,” says Schneider. “I just hope spending time with the most transformational mayor in the world right now... rubs off on her.”
The best time to reshape cities so they’re easier for humans to get around, rather than their vehicles, might have been fifty years ago. The next best time is now.
