This is the amount of time motorists are expected to lose with the new speed limit on the Paris ring road.
It was one of the hot topics of the new school year. And after some lively debates, the reduction in speed on the Paris ring road, long advocated by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, will be effective from October 1st, in just over three weeks. As announced by the Mayor of Paris on September 9th, the speed limit will therefore drop from 70 to 50 km/h on the entire boulevard encircling the capital, used every day by more than a million vehicles. A great many motorists will therefore have to quickly get used to driving on the “ring road” as in the city if they do not want to be caught by a speed camera. This reduction in speed will obviously have repercussions on the travel time of several hundred thousand workers. But to what extent?
The Paris ring road, made up of 38 gates (entrances/exits), was designed over a little over 35 kilometers, 35.4 exactly. At a speed of 70 km/h, the limit in force since 2014, making a complete turn, whether on the inner boulevard (clockwise) or outer (counterclockwise), takes a vehicle about half an hour, precisely 30 minutes and 20 seconds. To find this result, we divided the distance by the speed (35.4:70), which gave 0.505 hours, or 30.3 minutes. In these traffic-free conditions, how much additional time will a driver take to go around Paris by limiting his speed to 50 km/h?
Using the same mathematical formula, the calculation gives 0.708 hours, which corresponds to 42.48 minutes, or almost 42 minutes and 30 seconds. More than 12 additional minutes to complete the entire lap in fluid traffic, this is precisely the time that a user of the ring road will “lose” by lowering the speed limit from 70 to 50 km/h. It is true that one might wonder who enjoys doing the complete lap of the Parisian belt? Fortunately, not many people. Most motorists use it for an average of ten kilometers.
It is therefore more interesting to calculate the time difference to travel 10 kilometers on the Paris ring road depending on whether you drive at 70 or 50 km/h. The results give respectively 8 minutes and 30 seconds with the current regulations and 12 minutes when they will have changed at the beginning of next month.
Of course, the one that remains 40 years after its creation the busiest road axis in Europe is only very rarely fluid. It is even very often congested, at peak times but not only. The increase in travel time for several hundred thousand motorists will therefore have to be weighed up since it is often impossible to drive at 70 km/h, whether near Porte d’Orléans, Porte de Bercy or Porte de la Chapelle. This was also one of the arguments of the defenders of the move to 50 km/h, in addition to the fact that this must contribute to the reduction of pollution and noise pollution all around Paris…