An electric tram will run through the centre of Paris for the first time in 70 years today when Bertrand Delanoë, the Mayor, inaugurates a five-mile line that symbolises his controversial drive to banish cars from the city.

In protest at the Mayor’s campaign against cars, the council’s conservative opposition is boycotting the ceremony to mark the start of the T3 service, a sleek, high-tech tram that glides along the Boulevard des Maréchaux, the inner ring-road of the Left Bank from the Garigliano Bridge to the Porte D’Ivry.

The 21 white and jade trams, which run every four minutes on tracks embedded in grass, are expected to carry 100,000 passengers a day, cutting traffic and relieving the overloaded Petite Ceinture bus. The first central Paris tram service since 1937 will now be extended northeast, and there are plans to have it circle the city.

For Mr Delanoë, a Socialist who has tried to add a funky and green side to his sometimes stuffy city, the €310 million (£214 million) line is “a wonderful glimpse of a future, cleaner Paris, a great new urban adventure”. To accompany the biggest urban project since the Périphérique motorway in the early 1970s, the city has widened the pavements, added a cycle path, planted a thousand trees and spent €4 million on art.

Paris residents, most of whom do not drive daily, are happy with the anti-car policies of Mr Delanoë’s Socialist-Green Administration. But to the millions of motorists who suffer in what is known as “Delanoë’s traffic hell”, the tramway is a costly waste of money.

The opposition sees it as a symbol of a “class war” that pits Mr Delanoë’s well-off city of 2.5 million against the banlieusards, commuters from beyond the Périphérique. Françoise de Panafieu, a former minister under President Chirac who is the opposition candidate for mayor in 2008, has denounced the tramway as a “new city wall”.

“Before deciding to put a tram around Paris, which separates the city from the adjoining towns, Mr Delanoë should have talked to their mayors to find out what they really wanted,” she said yesterday.

A dozen other French cities have renewed the country’s love affair with the tram, including Marseilles, Bordeaux and Strasbourg. Two lines already operate in the suburbs of Paris.

Out of the smog, into the sun

Sources:Musees des transports urbains;NYC Subway

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