The strategy was developed with the input of almost 7 000 stakeholders in a consultation period from December 2014 to January 2015.
‘We have organised our priorities in order to establish what improvements need to be made. Safety is a highly important aspect,’ Christophe Najdovski, Paris’s Deputy Mayor for Transport and Public Space, told the Le Figaro newspaper.
A total of € 150m has been allocated to realise the strategy’s aims. More than a third of this amount, € 63m, will be spent on improving and extending the cycle network, effectively doubling it from its current length of 700km to 1 400km by 2020.
A sum of € 30m is dedicated to making Paris’s streets safer. This will be achieved by transforming secondary roads into 30km/h zones and implementing two-way cycle lanes so that cyclists can navigate the city more easily.
By 2020, 15 per cent of journeys should be completed by bicycle, up from 5 per cent today. To accomplish this, € 7m will be spent on creating a further 10 000 bicycle parking places and a subsidy scheme worth € 10m will help residents with specific cycling needs to buy cargo and electric bicycles.
Finally, € 40m has been set aside to better integrate cycling with public transport as well as with the city’s public squares and major roads.
The strategy also aims to deal with Paris’s high air pollution and concentration of particulates, which caused heavy smog earlier this year and in spring 2015.
