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ENVIRONMENT

Paris: Motorbike and scooter riders will soon have to pay to park

The owners of motorbikes and motorised scooters will have to pay to park in Paris starting next year, city hall announced on Tuesday.

Paris: Motorbike and scooter riders will soon have to pay to park
Illustration photo: Joel Sagat/AFP

Deputy mayor David Belliard, a member of the Green party, said the two-wheelers could use marked car parking spots and rates would be half of those charged to automobile owners.

At their current level, this would translate into €2 per hour of street parking in the centre of Paris for motorcycles, falling to €1.20 nearer the outskirts.

READ ALSO Central Paris could be almost car free by 2022

Some 100,000 people ride their motorbike or scooters every day in Paris, according to Le Parisien newspaper.

Electric vehicles, including e-scooters, will continue to park free in the French capital, Belliard said.

Paris will also add around 5,000 dedicated parking spots for motorcycles and scooters to the current 40,000, Belliard said.

Pavement parking, a major headache in a city with mostly narrow sidewalks, will still be banned, he said, warning that police would “severely” sanction offenders.

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo promised to introduce motorcycle parking fees during her 2020 re-election campaign.

Last month, she announced that car traffic would be drastically reduced in the heart of Paris next year, the latest step in her goal of greening one of the densest urban landscapes in Europe.

The plan would ban most vehicles from the Paris Centre district, formerly the first four arrondissements of the capital, that includes the two islands on the Seine river and the winding narrow streets of the Marais.

Critics blame her anti-car policies for traffic headaches for residents and for people living in suburbs lacking viable public transport options for getting to work in the city.

Belliard also said on Tuesday that the city would convert half the capital’s roughly 65,000 car parking spots into cycling paths, green areas and terraces, or use the space to widen pavements.

But disabled motorists, car sharers, delivery workers and taxis will get more dedicated parking spaces than now, he said. 

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ENVIRONMENT

Sweden’s SSAB to build €4.5bn green steel plant in Luleå 

The Swedish steel giant SSAB has announced plans to build a new steel plant in Luleå for 52 billion kronor (€4.5 billion), with the new plant expected to produce 2.5 million tons of steel a year from 2028.

Sweden's SSAB to build €4.5bn green steel plant in Luleå 

“The transformation of Luleå is a major step on our journey to fossil-free steel production,” the company’s chief executive, Martin Lindqvist, said in a press release. “We will remove seven percent of Sweden’s carbon dioxide emissions, strengthen our competitiveness and secure jobs with the most cost-effective and sustainable sheet metal production in Europe.”

The new mini-mill, which is expected to start production at the end of 2028 and to hit full capacity in 2029, will include two electric arc furnaces, advanced secondary metallurgy, a direct strip rolling mill to produce SSABs specialty products, and a cold rolling complex to develop premium products for the transport industry.

It will be fed partly from hydrogen reduced iron ore produced at the HYBRIT joint venture in Gälliväre and partly with scrap steel. The company hopes to receive its environemntal permits by the end of 2024.

READ ALSO: 

The announcement comes just one week after SSAB revealed that it was seeking $500m in funding from the US government to develop a second HYBRIT manufacturing facility, using green hydrogen instead of fossil fuels to produce direct reduced iron and steel.

The company said it also hoped to expand capacity at SSAB’s steel mill in Montpelier, Iowa. 

The two new investment announcements strengthen the company’s claim to be the global pioneer in fossil-free steel.

It produced the world’s first sponge iron made with hydrogen instead of coke at its Hybrit pilot plant in Luleå in 2021. Gälliväre was chosen that same year as the site for the world’s first industrial scale plant using the technology. 

In 2023, SSAB announced it would transform its steel mill in Oxelösund to fossil-free production.

The company’s Raahe mill in Finland, which currently has new most advanced equipment, will be the last of the company’s big plants to shift away from blast furnaces. 

The steel industry currently produces 7 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, and shifting to hydrogen reduced steel and closing blast furnaces will reduce Sweden’s carbon emissions by 10 per cent and Finland’s by 7 per cent.

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