By Michel Rose
PARIS, March 13 (Reuters) - Marion Soulet rides to Paris' City Hall along a once car-choked road that is now a cycleway and a symbol of the French capital's urban green transformation that faces a test in a mayoral election on Sunday.
Soulet welcomes the construction of about 1,000 km (620 miles) of cycle lanes by leftist Mayor Anne Hidalgo over the last decade, which she says means nearly half of Parisians now ride a bicycle at least once a week.
"The more the city is redesigned to accommodate it, the more cycling increases," Soulet, head of the Paris en Selle cyclists' group, told Reuters after rolling to a halt following her ride along the Rue de Rivoli. "People like it because it's easy, inexpensive, and fast."
The push to transform Paris from a polluted metropolis into a "15-minute-city" of bike lanes with more trees is the result of efforts by Hidalgo and her leftist predecessors, who have run City Hall for a generation.
That ecological legacy faces a reckoning in Sunday's election, with Hidalgo not running and right-wing rivals hoping to profit from voter fatigue over the increasingly car-free city, roadwork disruptions and mounting debt.
Opinion polls suggest the winner will either be Socialist Emmanuel Grégoire, who wants to double down on the green agenda, or conservative former minister Rachida Dati, who says the classical allure of Paris is being destroyed.
Sarah Knafo, a far-right nationalist aged 32, is rising in the polls and could complicate matters for Dati if she reaches the second round on March 22. Knafo polls above the 10% threshold needed to reach a run-off.
Grégoire, 48, is polling at around 33%, with Dati, 60, on about 30%.
"We're not fighting an ideological battle on mobility issues," Dati told Reuters while greeting shoppers in northern Paris. "We just want things to be organised."
URBAN TRANSFORMATION WINS PRAISE BUT ALSO FACES CRITICISM
Under Hidalgo, city authorities have sought to adapt Paris to climate change and make it more liveable for its 2 million residents, within a wider metropolitan population of 10 million.
City Hall has planted 130,000 trees and removed tens of thousands of on-street parking spaces. Highways along the River Seine have been pedestrianised.
Car traffic has fallen by over 60% since 2002 and bike use has more than tripled, according to city hall data. Air pollution has improved.
"There aren't many major cities in the world that have known such a spectacular transformation," said Patrick Le Gales, an urbanist at Paris' Sciences-Po University.
"But there's been strong criticism over cleanliness and the debt," he said, referring to a municipal debt of around 10 billion euros ($11 billion), up 42% since 2020.
Pierre Chasseray, head of motorists' lobby group 40 Million Motorists, said Hidalgo had built a "Berlin Wall" between wealthy inhabitants in the centre of Paris and car-reliant residents from poorer suburbs with no say over city decisions.
"We've ended up with a caricatured image of the capital: motorists on one side, cyclists on the other — the good guys versus the bad guys," he said.
Hidalgo has also faced viral social media posts using the #saccageParis hashtag that highlight social blight - everything from chronic roadworks to trash-strewn sidewalks.
Grégoire put this down to Hidalgo being too ambitious.
"We did too many things at the same time," he said. "I would have chosen a different timetable, above all for reasons of implementation quality."
DATI OUTFLANKED ON HER RIGHT?
Dati, a lawyer of North African descent, has toned down criticism of popular cycle lanes to focus on condemning dirty streets, and released a video of herself in a fluorescent jacket, joining garbage crews on their rounds.
"The city is increasingly dirty — it hasn't escaped anybody," she said.
Dati's increasingly moderate stance on transportation issues - and the fact she faces a September trial on corruption charges she denies - has provided an opening for Knafo.
Knafo has unveiled a plan generated by Artificial Intelligence to return cars to the banks of the Seine and staged interviews from the passenger seat while cruising through Paris.
Soulet believes Knafo's appeal is limited to "a very small group of Parisians who...want to turn the clock back."
(Additional reporting by Manuel Ausloos, Editing by Gabriel Stargardter and Timothy Heritage)
