WINDSTAR CRUISES This week, when an estimated 15 million people descend on Paris for the Olympic Games, much of the city center will be inaccessible to most motorized traffic. These Games will be the first in history to ban cars from Olympic venues in a program called “Paris Breathes.” The French capital already has more than 100 city streets that are closed to motorized vehicles year-round and occasionally schedules car-free days.
The City of Lights is just one of many urban areas that are banning cars in an effort to decrease congestion and improve air quality — and not incidentally, push back against overtourism. While not new, this trend is growing. The Slovenian capital Ljubljana has been car-free for more than a decade.
Cars are already banned in Venice and private vehicles will be banned from Milan, Italy’s second largest city, this year. Austria’s capital of Vienna already has a car-free inner-city zone and the Swedish capital, Stockholm, will forbid cars from 20 inner-city blocks starting next year. While the car-free push is driven primarily by environmental concerns, an equally passionate move is on to ban large cruise ships to counter overtourism.
More and more major cruise ports are preventing larger ships from berthing at all to limit the impact of thousands of passengers all at once into fragile destinations. When swarms of cruise day trippers descend on a city, they overload its restaurants, shops and city streets and degrade its appeal with excessiv.