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The preservation district does exist, but it's certainly not a major issue. There are plenty of places that are not subject to preservation, often within a five

The preservation district does exist, but it's certainly not a major issue. There are plenty of places that are not subject to preservation, often within a five-minute walk of preserved ones. The real problem in Paris is the transport infrastructure. As it stands, the morning and evening commutes already saturate several subway and bus lines, non-taxi cars only have access to a subset of all available lanes (and most of the time these are one-way), and while the bicycle rental system works quite well, it does not alleviate peak usage in cold or rainy weather. So, while it's entirely feasible (both technologically and from a historical preservation aspect) to build a 1000-person housing unit with the same footprint as the old 100-person ones, it would only take a few of these to completely saturate the local subway station and nearby streets every morning and every evening.

davidf18 13y ago
What you say is wrong because much of the traffic on the subway and busses are commuters who travel from the suburbs. In Manhattan where I live, commuters nearly double the daytime population from 1.6 million to 3.1 million. http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/commuters-nearly-double-manhattans-daytime-population-census-says/ http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/commuters-nearl... increasing the building density would simply enable those people who are less fortunate than many of us on HN to also live in Paris. Moreover, I can't speak for Paris but for certain I know in NYC/Manhattan the subways are not running nearly at their capacity. IIRC, the capacity could double if they automated the systems (which they are taking a very long time to do). The same may be true of Paris.