Coupled with the capital’s investment in buses and trams, it was working to get people out of their cars: transit use rose by double digits between 2010 and 2020. Paris’s vast portfolio of garage spaces (about six off-street spaces for every one at the curb) was emptying out. Some were yielding to underground mushroom farms. In another, I heard a man practicing the saxophone. Najdovski wanted to get rid of the public garages, too: “They’re like vacuum cleaners for cars,” he said, pulling in drivers from the city’s suburbs.
