Few things please a Frenchman more than starting a trend that catches on. So there was a hint of Gallic pride when Yves Cochet, the Green minister for the environment, made a presentation about this year's car-free day in front of a packed Paris auditorium.
La Rochelle, on the west coast, takes credit for starting the ecologically correct day, on September 22nd, 1997. The following year, 35 French towns followed. Then it snowballed: 156 French and Italian towns in 1999, more than 750 towns across the EU last year.
This Saturday, Cochet boasted, all 15 EU countries will celebrate the car-free day. "Some 100 million citizens in nearly 1,000 towns will live the same adventure," he said. With his elegant suits, the 55-year-old Breton reminds you of his fellow Green Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister.
"You can wear any kind of clothes on a bike," says Cochet, whose favourite transport is still a four-speed Peugeot bicycle. He was originally a maths professor. Now he's in charge of a French initiative that is reaching global proportions.
Countries as distant as Romania and Canada are to join the car-free day this year. Ten towns in the Republic of Ireland are on Cochet's list of good pupils. Next year, Cambodia, China and Turkey have promised to participate.
Not a moment too soon, when you consider that the number of cars in the world is expected to double, to a billion, by 2020, and rise to two billion by 2050. Cochet insists he's not making war on cars, "just reassessing the space taken up by private cars, especially in cities".
Strangely, the car manufacturer Renault is among the car-free-day sponsors that set up a festive exhibition marquee in front of the ministry of the environment. But the theme cartoon for the car-free day shows a tiny, hunched automobile man evolving in Darwinist fashion towards a proud, tall, cyclist and bus passenger.
Paris will mark the car-free day with unprecedented enthusiasm, as the socialists and Greens won last March's municipal elections. The new socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoδ, angered motorists when he closed the banks of the Seine to traffic this summer. While most of the city's residents were away, in August, Delanoδ began building 40 kilometres of extra-wide "protected" bicycle and bus lanes, separated from traffic by cement kerbs.
Parisians accused the mayor of wanting to create huge traffic jams to wean commuters from their cars. But a new study has shown that the average bus speed has increased to seven kilometres per hour and that journey times have halved. Traffic on the busy rue de Rivoli has reduced by 17 per cent.
On Saturday, the capital will shut cars out of nine central arrondissements, the Bois de Boulogne, the Bois de Vincennes and the Butte Montmartre. The city is offering horses and bicycles for rent, as well as boat shuttles on the Seine and canals.
The French traditionally marry on Saturdays, so wedding guests will have to show invitations to get to churches by car. The suburb of Montreuil has a better idea: free horse-drawn carriages for brides and grooms.
