Rush-Hour Traffic

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Despite the fact that Paris has one of the finest public-transit subway systems in the world, there are still many Parisians who inexplicably insist on driving cars in the capital, and because of this, traffic jams are an unfortunate and common sight within the city. This photo shows an extremely small, randomly-selected sample of daily traffic, on the voie Mazas, an expressway leading eastbound along the Right Bank of the Seine River. The traffic in this photo was mostly stopped, with only a few cars moving forward slowly. This is typical of a weekday at this time of day (around 6 PM).

You are looking southeast from the Austerlitz bridge in this photo. The gray metallic subway bridge in the distance doesn’t have a name, as far as I know. The large building far off in the background, with the helicopter landing pad on top, is the palatial headquarters of the Ministry of Finance. At the extreme right of the photo, behind the arch of the subway bridge, you can see one of the towers of the Mitterrand site of the Bibliothèque Nationale (the national library). The highway sign over the expressway, which is difficult to read in this reduced photograph, points the way to the freeway leading east out of Paris towards Metz and Nancy. Since many people work within Paris but live in the ’burbs, there is a mad rush to get into the city each morning on the four freeways that mark each point of the compass, and a similar mad rush to get back out of the city in the evenings. The mass departures and returns from holiday vacations are even worse.

And just incidentally, the red brick building on the left of the photo near the foreground is the Paris morgue; in French this is called the Institut Medico-Légal.

Photographed on July 4, 2000.