Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars

“Paris removed 70,000 parking spaces over a decade. Car traffic fell by 45 percent.”

The argument from American transit critics has always been that you cannot reduce car use without first building the alternative. Paris ran the experiment in reverse. They took the parking away first. Drivers did not move to a new highway. They stopped driving. The lesson is that demand for car infrastructure is largely created by the existence of car infrastructure.