See for example Paris's recent (yesterday?) "no car day" in the center. The city's usual blanket of smog is gone. France of course having the highest %age of diesel cars in its passenger fleet of any country.
Paris is one of the densest cities in the world[1], placed 6th if you disregard cities with a population of less than a million. It's the most dense large city among G8 countries. The only vaguely comparable European cities are Athens and Barcelona, both smaller and less dense. London has about a quarter of the density of Paris. The most dense large German cities, Munich and Berlin, less than a quarter. The city I live in -- part of one of the world's largest conurbations --, less than a tenth.
Statistics like these should be taken with a grain of salt (for one thing, city delimitations are fairly arbitrary), but the details are not worth haggling about: the point is that Paris is not at all representative of large European cities.
Statistics like these should be taken with a grain of salt (for one thing, city delimitations are fairly arbitrary), but the details are not worth haggling about: the point is that Paris is not at all representative of large European cities.
[1] if Wikipedia can be trusted on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d...