The lack of sound on the Champs Elysees was striking.
With the eight lanes of France’s most famous avenue cleared of all traffic on Paris’ first car-free day, the usual cacophony of car-revving and thundering motorbike engines gave way to the squeak of bicycle wheels, the clatter of skateboards, the laughter of children on rollerblades and even the gentle rustling of wind in the trees. It was, as one Parisian pensioner observed as she ambled up the center of the road taking big gulps of air, “like a headache lifting.”
There were other weird and pleasant effects of this tiny glimpse of carless utopia.
“Everyone seems to be smiling, and not as stressed,” said Elisabeth Pagnac, a civil servant in her 50s, who had been emboldened to cycle in from the eastern edge of the city without a helmet. But strangest of all was the sky.
“I live high in a tower block in the east of the city and looking out of my window today I saw the difference straight away: The sky has never been this blue, it really is different without a hazy layer of pollution hanging in the air,” she said.
Others agreed that looking up toward the Arc de Triomphe and to La Defense beyond, a view that was so often hazy and distorted by the city’s famous smog, was suddenly crystal clear.
“What a joy to go down the middle of the road taking in the sights,” said Claude Noirault, a wheelchair-basketball coach, who had done 10km in his sports wheelchair and was planning 30km more.
When Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo launched the idea of the French capital’s first car-free day at the suggestion of the collective Paris Without Cars, pollution was top of the agenda.
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