It’s been 50 years that parking has been paid in Paris, so five decades that the capital has been trying to reduce the place of the car within it. While the intramural speed limit has just been lowered to 30 km / h, back to the history of Parisian parking meters.
The lowering of the speed limit to 30 km / h in Paris (with the exception of a few axes) coincides with the 50th anniversary of another coercive measure against Parisian motorists: the introduction of paid parking in the capital. The city’s first parking meters were put into service on October 6, 1971, following a vote by the municipal council on 1er July of the same year which put an end to three years of debate on the subject.
Paid parking, the province before Paris
Paris was not the first city in France to charge for parking. This title goes to Bayonne, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, which established this principle in 1926 through a tax of 2 francs per day or an annual subscription of 36 francs for vehicle owners residing in the municipality.
The first parking meter was installed in the United States in 1935 in Oklahoma City. This invention of the American lawyer Carl Magee became widespread in France during the 1960s, in particular around Le Bourget airport and then in several large provincial towns. The machine was therefore already familiar to the French when it was introduced into the City of Light.
TO READ. Paris. Where to park for less: in the car park or on the street?
The first anti-car measure in Paris
In 1971, the automobile experienced a golden age encouraged by an economic boom that had not yet been hampered by the oil crisis that would occur two years later. Citroën and Renault still produced vehicles in Paris. Major development work over the previous decades (ring road, bank lanes, etc.) had also contributed to inviting cars into the city, to the point that traffic jams and the increase in the space used for parking increased the Town Hall to take measures to curb traffic. The idea was therefore already to reduce the number of vehicles and dissuade their drivers from venturing into the streets for too long., not without taking advantage of the financial windfall.
The half-hour of parking was billed at 50 cents and the hour at 1 F, or the equivalent of € 1.06 according to Insee’s franc-euro converter. It was necessary to count 3 F for two hours, as revealed it the televised news of the time presented by Jean-Pierre Elkabbach. Initially tested in a limited area of central Paris, paid parking quickly spread to almost the entire town.
In Paris, places are more and more expensive
Gradually, parking meters allowing the management of many spaces on a single device replaced the parking meters assigned individually to each location. Today, parking in a street in Paris costs between € 4 and € 6 per hour depending on the arrondissement (light vehicles, excluding residents, excluding wood). The FPS (Post-Parking Package), which replaces the PV and penalizes non-payment for parking, costs € 50 or € 75 depending on the zone. Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, wants to remove half of surface parking spaces by 2026, or between 60,000 and 70,000 spaces.
Via Le Monde, RTL, INA
