金融时报:巴黎——世界首个“后汽车时代”大都会？

巴黎——世界首个“后汽车时代”大都会？

巴黎2024年奥运会的准备工作即将全面展开，以奥运会为契机，副市长Missika介绍了巴黎未来几年的城市规划：几年之内，巴黎市内现有的交通系统将发生翻天覆地的改变，无人驾驶和电动交通工具将成为巴黎道路的主宰。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

dense[dens] adj. 密集的，浓厚的

metropolis[mə'trɒpəlɪs] n. 大都市, 重要中心

lobby['lɒbi] v. 游说

commute[kə'mjuːt] n. 乘车上下班，通勤

doddle['dɒdl] n. 轻而易举之事

obsolete['ɒbsəliːt] adj. 已废弃的，过时的

boulevard['buːləvɑːd] n. 林荫大道

unrivalled[ʌn'raɪvld] adj. 无对手的，无匹的

pragmatic[præɡ'mætɪk] adj. 实际的，实用主义的

Why Paris will be the first post-car metropolis(652 words)

By Simon Kuper

In Lima next Wednesday, the International Olympic Committee will rubber-stamp Paris as host of the 2024 Games. By the time the Games begin, Paris will be transformed. “Vehicles with combustion engines driven by private individuals” could well be banned from the city by then, says Jean-Louis Missika, the deputy mayor.By 2024, driverless shuttle buses should be going up and down the road all day. Olympic visitors will see a vision of the post-car city.

Anyone watching lorries calmly unload on pedestrian crossings in today’s Paris will struggle to believe this. Paris is now dirty, chaotic, years behind the transport frontrunners Amsterdam and Copenhagen and, according to its mayor, Anne Hidalgo, suffers 6,500 deaths a year from pollution. But that’s largely because Paris was built pre-car, and never had the space for the 20th-century technology. Now, as private cars start fading out, pre-car cities will come into their own. Paris, capital of the 19th century, could be the capital of the 21st.

The city is already unrolling the future: raising the price of parking, adding bike lanes and planning to ban diesel cars by 2020. Paris has all the qualities to become the world’s first post-car metropolis. First of all, it’s too dense for cars and, as ever more tourists pile in, it keeps getting denser. “Every inch of that road surface has to be maximised,” says Ross Douglas, who runs Autonomy, an annual urban-mobility conference in Paris. “The first thing the city will want to do is reduce the 150,000 cars parked on the street doing nothing.

By 2024, driverless taxis will be making ride after ride, almost never parking. Paris’s parking spaces will become bike or scooter paths, café terraces or playgrounds.

The second reason Paris can change fast: France’s car industry has been steadily shedding jobs since the 1980s. It’s now too small to lobby hard against the future. Third, France has a 39-year-old tech-savvy president. Whereas his predecessors spent their energy saving dying industries, Emmanuel Macron intends to grab pieces of new ones, such as driverless vehicles. Fourth, Paris doesn’t need private cars because it already has the best public transport of any international city, according to the New York-based Institute of Transportation and Development Policy. Visitors from clogged developing cities ride metro trains here goggling in amazement. Already, nearly two-thirds of the 2.2 million Parisians don’t own cars, says Missika.

New electric bikes will allow suburban cyclists to cover two or three times current distances, making long commutes a doddle. The Périphérique — Paris’s ring road, which now cuts off the city from the suburbs — will become obsolete, predicts Missika. He looks forward to it turning into an urban boulevard lined with trees and cafés.

By then Paris and the suburbs will have merged into a single “Grand Paris”. Missika points out that the Olympic stadium and athletes’ village in 2024 will be outside Paris proper, in Seine-Saint-Denis, one of France’s poorest departments — just five minutes from Paris by train, but currently a world away.

By 2024, Paris will be the EU’s unrivalled number one metropolis. I asked Missika if he expected Brexit to benefit Paris. He replied that he considered London and Paris a single city, “the metropolis”. You can travel between them in less time than it takes to cross Shanghai. Anyway, he adds: “I have the impression Brexit won’t happen, since the English are pragmatic. The moment when they say, ‘We were wrong, we’ll take a step back’ will be a bit humiliating, but it will be better than doing Brexit.”

“Paris is again picking up,” British architect Richard Rogers told me at last Saturday’s FT Weekend Festival. Admittedly, the city won’t be paradise yet in 2024. Soldiers with machine guns may still spend their days patrolling sleepy side-streets for terrorists, alleviating their boredom by eyeing up Parisiennes. But already, Paris is starting to regard its English neighbour with sympathy rather than envy.

请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：

1.Which kind of vehicle could disappear in Paris by 2024 ?

A. Driverless shuttle bus.

B. Taxi with combustion engine.

C. Private car with combustion engine.

D. Shuttle bus driven by private individual.

答案(1)

2.Why does Paris have serious traffic problems?

A. Because the parking lots and bike lanes in Paris take up too much space.

B. Because there are 150,000 cars parked on the street doing nothing in Paris.

C. Because Paris was built before car was invented and thus left no space for car.

D. Because France’s car industry has been steadily shedding jobs since the 1980s.

答案(2)

3.Which of the following is an advantage Paris possesses to become the world’s first post-car metropolis?

A. France’s petroleum industry is too small to lobby hard against the future.

B. Paris already has the best public transport of any international city.

C. New electric bikes allows suburban cyclists to cover longer distances.

D. France’s car industry is accelerating to get ready for the era of electric vehicle.

答案(3)

4.According to the article, the deputy mayor of Paris believes that ____.

A. The English will not take Brexit into practice eventually.

B. Paris is the EU’s unrivalled number one metropolis.

C. Paris will benefit greatly from Brexit in a few years.

D. Travelling across Paris will take less time than crossing Shanghai.

答案(4)

* * *

(1) 答案：C.Private car with combustion engine.

解释：副市长Jean-Louis Missika表示，2024年巴黎奥运会前，装有内燃机的私人轿车可能被禁止。

(2) 答案：C.Because Paris was built before car was invented and thus left no space for car.

解释：巴黎在汽车发明前就已经建成，没有为这种20世纪才出现的科技预留空间。

(3) 答案：B.Paris already has the best public transport of any international city.

解释：第四，巴黎不需要私人轿车，因为巴黎已经有了全世界国际大都市中最好的公共交通系统。

(4) 答案：A.The English will not take Brexit into practice eventually.

解释：巴黎副市长Missika相信英国脱欧最终不会发生。