Paris experiments with 'car-free day'

Parisians were encouraged to roller-blade, bike or stroll through the City of Light on Sunday for a "car-free" day intended to leave the streets vacant for slower, clean forms of transport.

Sunday marks the third time the French capital has experimented with a car ban, but it is by far the most ambitious with the zone set aside for pedestrians or cyclists covering the entire historic heart of the city -- 105 square kilometres (40 square miles).

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"This initiative requires an enormous amount of preparation," city mayor Anne Hidalgo told Le Parisien newspaper on Sunday. "Particularly because this year the zone has been enlarged to the whole of Paris."

Hidalgo, a Socialist, was elected in 2014 promising to tackle pollution in the capital and she has focused on building new bus and cycle lanes and reclaiming roads -- leading critics to see her agenda as too radical and anti-car.

"What's it for?", grumbled Pierre Chasseray, the head of the lobby group "40 million drivers" when asked about the car-free day by AFP. "It's just PR to say that cars aren't good."