Since 2020, the city has installed over 300 rues aux écoles which I had to stop and photograph pretty much every time I saw one. Closing a street to cars immediately adjacent to a school delivers a myriad of obvious safety benefits, and on top of that, Paris’s version perfects the triple whammy to combat pollution that Moran describes: fewer cars, less pavement, and more trees. But these school streets are also effective at cooling down the neighborhood. Armed with a thermal camera, Moran spent last summer visiting 272 school streets and found that ones with the full treatment — trees, gardens, light-colored pavement — were on average, an astonishing 9 degrees (Fahrenheit) cooler than nearby non-school streets, a differential that even Moran was unprepared for. This summer, Moran will be investigating how much the parked cars on the non-school streets serve as heat amplifiers in the surrounding area — and as someone who’s been burned by a Subaru on a 95-degree day I think I can make an educated guess about that outcome.

What struck Moran was how Paris went all-in with permanent infrastructure, relocating utilities and water mains. “These are not tactical urbanism, they’re not pilots, not rubber and plastic,” he says. “The American experience is, oh, we’ll put cones down and a barrier you can run over. But there’s something really different here in the materiality and the ambition — these are aspirational spaces.” Moran only knew of two projects that had to be reinstalled due to community feedback; overall they’ve been enthusiastically embraced by the city. In a fantastic Fast Company story about Hidalgo’s legacy by Adele Peters, AREP’s Hiba Debouk, who has designed many of the city’s school streets, told Peters that during construction, neighbors wave down from adjacent apartments to thank her for making the changes.