Paris celebrates 40 years of le périph – one of busiest highways in Europe

To navigate the dense, usually fast-moving traffic of Paris’s Boulevard Périphérique, you need nerves of steel and 360degree vision. Motorcycles dart between vehicles. Tailgaters bear down in rear-view mirrors. Cars barrel across four lanes in every forward direction.

Known affectionately as le P ériph , the Paris ring road is one of the busiest highways in Europe, with an estimated 1.1 million motorists using at least part of the ring road daily. Officially opened 40 years ago, it is the stuff of urban legend.

There was the Father Christmas photographed at the wheel of a speeding car on Christmas eve whose costume prevented police from identifying him. In 1989 a motorcyclist known as the Black Prince, or the K amikaze du Périph , drove the 35km ring road in 11 minutes and four seconds during daytime on a Suzuki GSX-R1100, an average speed of 190kmh (118mph). Last year a baby girl was born at the Porte de Bagnolet after her parents' car broke down.

The périphérique's traffic jams are also legendary. Every weekend, Parisians engage in the strange, masochistic ritual of the Friday night soireé on the périphérique as the city empties. The process is repeated on Sunday when the capital's residents return.

Back in 1973, when the périphérique was opened, it was used by 160,000 motorists a day. At age 40, the ring road is entering its midlife crisis. Its future, like that of France, is far from certain. "What was once a symbol of triumphant modernity has become, in scarcely four decades, a 'car sewer'," said Le Figaro . Environmentalists would like to dismantle it. René Dutrey, the Green official responsible for sustainable development at Paris town hall, calls it "an aberration".

Pollution
The 100,000 people who live within 200m of the boulevard are subjected to pollution levels up to four times the standards established by the World Health Organisation. Noise levels are also much higher than those recommended by the organisation. A health-monitoring agency for the Paris region blames 29 per cent of asthma attacks among children on proximity to heavy traffic. Air pollution shortens the life expectancy of inhabitants of the Paris region by six months, according to another study.

Bertrand Delanoë, the socialist mayor of Paris, boasts that traffic has decreased 25 per cent under his stewardship of the city. Taxi drivers rail constantly against Delanoë for closing expressways on the banks of the Seine, and for cutting the number of parking places in the city by a third.

"You're far too much into repressive measures that correspond to an anti-car ideology," Pierre Chasseray, who heads the "40 Millions d'Automobilistes" association, told Delanoë in a radio debate marking the périphérique's birthday. At any moment, Chasseray said, two out of 10 motorists in Paris are looking for a parking place. "You want to eradicate the automobile!" he said.

But the leading grievances against the périphérique are sociological and psychological. Like a moat around a medieval fortress, it cuts Paris intra muros from the 29 towns of the banlieue . Paris has been walled since 1200, and the périphérique was built on the vestiges of the Thiers wall that surrounded the city from 1840 until 1919. Experts say the ring road is far too close to the capital's historic centre. As a result it merges urban and interurban traffic.

To celebrate the Périph's 40th birthday, Delanoë inaugurated a 7,500sq/m garden on a slab built over the road at the Porte de Vanves, an attempt to unite the city with the suburb of Malakoff on the other side of the ring road. A bigger garden has straddled le Périph at the Porte de Lilas since 2007. But the cost of such "keyholes" in the virtual barrier around the city is prohibitive: €140 million for the latest fraternal garden.

Experiment

Delanoë hopes to reduce the legal speed on the highway from 80kmh to 70kmh this summer. The city is experimenting with a new kind of noise-reducing asphalt, and the Greens advocate covering part of the road with an electricity-producing “solar canopy” that would lessen noise and air pollution.

There are 23 tunnels under the ring road but the city has given up on the idea of a “big dig” similar to that involved in Boston’s Central Artery/Tunnel, a project that cost $15 billion (€11.3 billion), took 15 years to complete and increased traffic.

Sections of the périphérique have been flanked with acoustic walls. The walls are themselves a form of visual pollution, says Jean-Louis Cohen, an architect and co-author of a book about the périphérique.

“We mustn’t forget that the périphérique is also a modern landscape,” says Cohen. “A lot of people are passionate about it. On some sections there are vistas of great beauty, of Paris as a big, modern city in the age of the automobile.”