Ring road at 50km/h: this is the exact time it will take you to go around Paris

This is the time that motorists should lose with the new speed limit of speed on the Paris ring road.

It was one of the hot topics of the new school year. And after some lively debates, the reduction in speed on the Paris ring road, long advocated by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, will indeed come into effect from October 1, in just over three weeks. As announced by the Mayor of Paris on September 9, the speed limit will therefore drop from 70 to 50 km/h on the entire boulevard encircling the capital, which is used by more than a million vehicles every day. Many motorists will therefore have to quickly get used to driving on the “ring road” as they would in the city if they do not want to be caught by a speed camera. This reduction in speed will obviously have repercussions on the travel time of several hundred thousand workers. But to what extent ?

The Parisian ring road, composed of of 38 doors (entrances/exits), has been added. drawing over a little over 35 kilometers, exactly 35.4. At a speed of 70 km/h, the limit in force since 2014, make a complete turn, whether on the inner boulevard (clockwise) or the outer boulevard. eacute;rior (opposite direction), a vehicle takes about half an hour, precisely 30 minutes and 20 seconds. To find this result , we divided the distance by the speed (35.4:70), which gave 0.505 hours, or 30.3 minutes. In these traffic-free conditions, how much additional time will it take a driver to go around Paris while limiting his speed to 50 km/h??

© MARIO FOURMY/SIPA

Using the same mathematical formula, the calculation gives 0.708 hours, which corresponds to 42.48 minutes, or almost 42 minutes and 30 seconds. More than 12 additional minutes to complete the entire lap in smooth traffic, this is precisely the time that a user of the ring road will “lose” when the speed limit is lowered from 70 to 50 km/h. It is true that one might wonder who enjoys driving around the entire Paris ring road. Fortunately, not many people. Most motorists drive around it for an average of ten kilometres.

It is therefore more interesting to calculate the difference in time to drive 10 kilometres on the Paris ring road depending on whether you are driving at 70 or 50 km/h. The results give respectively 8 minutes and 30 seconds with the current regulations and 12 minutes when they will have changed at the beginning of next month.

Of course, the one that remains 40 years after its creation the busiest road axis in Europe is only very rarely fluid. It is even very often congested, at rush hour but not only. The increase in travel time for several hundred thousand motorists will therefore need to be weighed up since it is often impossible to drive at 70 km/h, whether near Porte d'Orléans, Porte de Bercy or Porte de la Chapelle. This was also one of the arguments of those in favour of the move to 50 km/h, in addition to the fact that it should contribute to the reduction of pollution and noise pollution all around Paris…