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SENSEABLE CITY LAB

 Cities xxx (xxxx) xxx

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Cities
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cities

Measuring the impact of slow zones on street life using social media
Arianna Salazar-Miranda a, b, 1, *, Cate Heine a, 1, Fabio Duarte a, b, Katja Schechtner a, Carlo Ratti a
a
Senseable City Lab, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
b
Center for Real Estate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Streets are fundamental to social and economic exchange in cities. Despite their importance for urban life, streets
Human activity continue to dedicate more space to cars than people, raising concerns about their ability to host social exchange.
Pedestrian zones In this paper, we study the extent to which slow zones (areas designed to be more pedestrian-friendly via speed
Social media
limit reductions) affect human activity in streets. We study this question in the context of Paris, which imple­
Twitter
Big data
mented several slow zones covering a large portion of the city between 2010 and 2019. We exploit differences in
the effects of the policy at the boundaries of the slow zones and their staggered introduction over time to identify
their causal effect on human activity. Comparing street segments immediately within the slow zone boundary
(our treatment group) to street segments immediately outside the slow zone (our control group) shows that
human activity measured using Twitter is 44% higher in slow zones. This effect is driven by an increase in both
the number of users and in the number of tweets per user, suggesting that slow zones attract more people and
that people are tweeting more in these areas. We also show that slow zones draw visitors from a wider
geographic range of neighborhoods, contributing to social mixing.

1. Introduction
Streets are a vital part of our urban environment. They provide a
network for social, economic, and physical activities and are frequented
by millions of pedestrians. Despite their importance for urban life, many
street designs continue to grant more space to cars than people and
prioritize drivers over pedestrians. Rising concerns regarding air quality,
traffic congestion, and decaying social life in streets are sparking global
interest in strategies to recover space from cars. In this context, many
cities are developing street plans with various strategies to free up public
space for pedestrians, cyclists, and other outdoor communal activities.
Examples include cities like Barcelona, San Francisco, Paris, and
Medellin, which have invested in pedestrianizing areas by creating slow
zones that reduce the speed of cars or offering alternative micro-
mobility options for people to move around the city. The “slow zone”
movements in these cities are primarily motivated by three factors: (1)
increasing safety for bikers and pedestrians by reducing vehicle colli­
sions, (2) lowering pollution and reliance on cars by promoting more
sustainable forms of transportation like walking and biking, and (3)
increasing the quality of life in public space in order to promote social
and commercial activity in neighborhoods.
These interventions are rooted in sociological theories that highlight
the importance of fixed locations—focal points that bring people
together—in fostering human activity and social interactions (Feld,
1981; Simmel et al., 1997). Urban scholars have argued that pedestrian-
friendly streets with diverse uses can become such focal points (Apple­
yard & Cox, 2006; Jacobs, 1961; Whyte, 1980). Despite these clear goals
and expectations, there has been little research on the actual impacts of
slow zones. As the slow zone movement becomes widespread world­
wide, it is critical that we fully understand the ways that slow zone
policies affect city function across multiple dimensions and whether
slow zone policies are effective in creating focal points that promote
social activity.
This paper studies whether slow zones—areas designed to be more
pedestrian-friendly via speed limit reductions—affect human activity in
streets. By exploring this question in the context of Paris’s slow zone

* Corresponding author at: Senseable City Lab, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States.
E-mail address: ariana@mit.edu (A. Salazar-Miranda).
1
These authors contributed equally to this work.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.104010
Received 13 April 2022; Received in revised form 19 September 2022; Accepted 24 September 2022
0264-2751/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Arianna Salazar-Miranda, Cities, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.104010

A. Salazar-Miranda et al.
policy—one of the earliest and largest-scale policy implementations thus
far—we draw conclusions that have immediate implications for the
more recent slow zone policies emerging in other cities worldwide.
The context of Paris is well suited for large-scale analysis of slow
zone impacts due to the sizeable geographic extent and the sharp spatial
and temporal variation of Paris’s zones. Between 2007 and 2019, Paris
reduced traffic speeds discretely within the boundaries of 142 slow
zones covering a large portion of the city. On the inside of these zones,
all traffic is restricted to a maximum of 30 km/h, while on the outside,
previous, often higher speed limits remain in place. Besides limiting
vehicle speed, Paris implemented physical changes in slow zones to
improve walking conditions, adapt the city infrastructure for active
transportation, and offer livelier, more pleasant streets.
Paris’ policy approach is broadly relevant for urban planners across
the globe for two main reasons. First, the city’s efforts to get cars off its
streets and reclaim walkable space are some of the earliest of their kind.
These efforts have inspired many other cities worldwide; for example,
New York City began implementing 30 km/h zones on certain neigh­
borhood streets in late 2011. Efforts in Paris have also inspired citizen-
led campaigns such as 20’s Plenty in the UK, Ville 30 in Belgium, and
Zona 30 in Barcelona. Since Paris’s slow zones policy was one of the first
of its kind, it serves as a valuable case study in predicting the long-term
impacts of the many similar slow zone campaigns that have developed
elsewhere in the world. Second, the policy was implemented city-wide,
impacting 2.2 million inhabitants. Although more and more cities are
beginning to consider implementing this kind of large-scale speed
reduction policy, similar programs in other cities thus far have targeted
smaller and fewer areas. Paris is thus a uniquely rich case study for
evaluating the effects of a slow zone policy across many neighborhoods
and contexts within a city and for evaluating large-scale slow zone
policies more generally. Overall, as one of the earliest and largest-scale
implementations of this kind of policy, Paris’s program offers a unique
opportunity to evaluate the long-term impacts of a large-scale policy and
can inform subsequent strategies implemented elsewhere in the world.
These efforts are even more relevant now that the European Parliament
has included an EU-wide speed limit reduction to 30 km/h in residential
areas and places with high numbers of cyclists and pedestrians (Ahrens
& Agustín, 2021).
To measure the effects of slow zones on human activity, we use rich
georeferenced data obtained from Twitter—a popular social media
platform on which users exchange information in short messa­
ges—between 2010 and 2015. We view Twitter as a reliable proxy for
human activity that allows us to extract meaningful information on
people’s mobility patterns (Jurdak et al., 2015a; Osorio-Arjona & Gar­
cía-Palomares, 2019). The key advantage of using social media to
measure human activity compared to other sources, such as interviews
and travel diaries, is that it provides data with extensive spatial coverage
and high spatial resolution. Our dataset consists of more than 11.7
million tweets from 310,651 users in Paris. Each tweet is attached to a
geospatial coordinate indicating the location from which it was sent,
which provides reliable information on how the users in our dataset
move around the city. Using these data, we construct measures of street
visitation that capture a street’s popularity and level of exposure to
people from distinct neighborhoods. Since slow zones are intended to
make areas more attractive to more people, encouraging more social
activity, effective slow zones should see higher numbers of tweets from a
larger group of people.
We estimate the effect of slow zones by exploiting two sources of
variation in the policy’s implementation. First and most importantly, we
exploit the fact that the slow zone boundaries are discrete and tend to
coincide with primary streets. We compare street segments immediately
within the slow zone boundary (our treatment group) to street segments
immediately outside the slow zone boundary (our control group). This
choice of sample ensures that treatment and control groups are com­
parable, lie in similar areas of the city, and share similar characteristics.
This design also allows us to compare street segments that belong to the
2
Cities xxx (xxxx) xxx
same street but lie on different sides of the boundary. We implement this
strategy using a 100-meter buffer from the slow zone boundary and
show that our results are robust to using buffers of different sizes. Sec­
ond, we leverage the staggered introduction of slow zones over time,
which allows us to compare treated street segments to the control group
before and after the slow zone is enacted and to show that there are no
differences between treatment and control groups before the creation of
slow zones.
Our results show that slow zones increase human activity by 36.7 log
points (an increase of roughly e.36 − 1 = 44% in total tweets). This effect
is sizable: it is comparable to the difference in log tweets per street
segment between a typical pedestrian path and a primary road. This
effect is explained by a 17.8 log point increase in the number of users
and an 18.9 log point increase in the number of tweets per user. This
suggests both that slow zones attract more people and that people tweet
more in these areas—perhaps finding them more attractive, comfort­
able, or “tweetable.” Finally, we construct a measure of the geographic
pull of each slow zone by counting the number of neighborhoods that
share Twitter users with each street segment. If at least one user visits
both a given street segment and a given neighborhood, we consider the
street segment to share users with that neighborhood.2 We find that this
measure, which we call “neighborhood connectedness,” increases in
slow zones, suggesting that slow zones draw visitors from more unique
city neighborhoods.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews
relevant existing literature. Section 3 provides an overview of the "zones
30" policy in Paris. Section 4 describes the data we use in our empirical
analysis, discusses identification, and presents our results documenting
the effects of slow zones on human activity. Section 5 offers concluding
remarks and directions for future study.
2. Literature review
Existing literature on the effects of slow zones has primarily focused
on road safety, speed reduction, and collision reduction. Overall, this
work shows that across multiple contexts, slow zones are effective in
increasing road safety. Papers have found significant decreases in
vehicle speed, dangerous driver behavior, and pedestrian discomfort
(Ekman, 1999; Lambert & Venter, 2015; Neki et al., 2021), though
others have found no effect on crash incidence (Ewing et al., 2013).
There has also been some work on the potential negative accessibility
impacts of slow zones—studies have shown that slow zones increase
retail stores’ sales (Yoshimura et al., 2022) but only have a minimal
impact on actual travel times, indicating that lowered speed limits likely
have a small negative impact on mobility and accessibility of drivers
(Archer et al., 2008). Other effects of slow zones remain inconclusive or
unexplored—while studies indicate a link between speed reduction and
lower noise pollution levels (Desarnaulds et al., 2004; Ögren et al.,
2018), evidence of the impact of reduced speeds on air pollution levels
remains inconclusive (Ahn, 2009; EEA, 2019; Keirstead et al., 2012),
and little attention has been paid to the impacts of slow zones on human
activity and visitation volume, which is the focus and contribution of
this paper.
The idea that human activity in streets is an important dimension of
city life that slow zones could significantly impact stems from previous
2
This measure is inspired by the “linkage strength” measure in Heine et al.
(2021), which calculates the strength of connection between neighborhood
pairs using shared users. In this paper, we follow a similar approach but look at
the unique number of neighborhoods connected to each street segment instead
of strength of connection between pairs. We do this in order to capture the
overall attractiveness or pull of an area hypothesizing that slow zones draw
people from more neighborhoods of Paris by being more attractive to Paris
residents generally, as opposed to being attractive to an inherently more diverse
group of people.
A. Salazar-Miranda et al.
work pointing at the importance of streets as both a physical and social
part of our living environment (Appleyard & Cox, 2006; Jacobs, 1961;
Whyte, 1980). These studies underscore the importance of streets with
buzzing activity as key indicators for good urbanism, motivating the
importance of leveraging slow zone policies to create safe and walkable
spaces. Literature on this topic suggests that high-speed and heavy
traffic hamper pedestrian volume and social interactions between pe­
destrians (Handy et al., 2008; Southworth & Ben-joseph, 2004).
Appleyard and Lintell (1972) study of traffic volume on residential
streets in San Francisco found that streets with lighter traffic saw higher
levels of social interaction across all of the dimensions that they
measured, including more congregation in streets, a stronger feeling of
community, and a higher number of adults meeting and talking on
sidewalks. A similar study in New York found that residents of higher-
traffic streets generally spend less time walking, shopping, and playing
with their children around their neighborhoods and have fewer strong
relationships with their neighbors than residents of lower-traffic streets
(Alternatives, 2006). Sauter and Huettenmoser (2008) found that rela­
tive to streets with 50 km/h speed limits, streets with lower speed limits
see more socializing between pedestrians and more people doing
manual activities (e.g., gardening, painting) on or near sidewalks. While
these studies indicate that lowered speed limits create space for
enhanced social interaction in city streets, they rely on survey-, inter­
view-, and observation-based data collected across just a few streets and
have thus not been able to identify a causal link between lowered speed
limits and human activity. We contribute to this literature in two key
ways: (1) we analyze the impact of slow zone policies on a large scale,
comparing thousands of street segments across the city of Paris, and (2)
we use causal inference techniques in order to isolate the causal impact
of speed limit reductions on human activity.
This paper also complements a large body of literature that has used
social media data as a proxy for human activity to study mobility and the
use of urban spaces. Existing studies have used Twitter data specifically
to estimate home and work locations (Kurkcu et al., 2016; Steiger et al.,
2015), measure visitation to urban spaces (Hamstead et al., 2018; Hasan
et al., 2013), analyze social mixing in cities (Heine et al., 2021; Wang
et al., 2018), and identify land use patterns (Soliman et al., 2017),
among other applications. Several studies have used Twitter data to
measure visitation patterns to urban places, especially in urban parks
(Abbiasov, 2020; Hamstead et al., 2018; Roberts et al., 2017; Zhang &
Zhou, 2018). Twitter data has been found to be representative of
selected mobility patterns, such as the size of the mobility radius and
home-work pairs (Jurdak et al., 2015a; Osorio-Arjona & García-Pal­
omares, 2019). Jurdak et al. (2015a) document that while the reliability
of individual-level mobility patterns depends on an individual user’s
preferences and other contextual factors, aggregate mobility patterns,
such as overall activity in a given area, as we use here, are much more
accurate. In the US context, Kurkcu et al. (2016) and Hasan et al. (2013)
find Twitter-derived mobility patterns to be aligned with ground-truth
mobility patterns from the Regional Household Transportation Survey
in New York City and mobile phone data, respectively. Steiger et al.
(2015) find Twitter to be a representative proxy of workbase-placed
activities in the UK but much less representative of home-based activ­
ities. We build upon this literature by using Twitter-derived activity
visitation measures to analyze the impacts of a specific urban policy.
Despite the general representativeness identified by previous studies,
there are two significant issues with using geotagged tweets for under­
standing mobility patterns: (1) sampling bias and (2) location biases for
sending tweets (Jurdak et al., 2015b). Like any technology that captures
mobility dynamics, Twitter is subject to sampling bias. The Twitter user
population (relative to the US population) has large discrepancies,
which suggests that entire regions of the US may be significantly un­
derrepresented (Mislove et al., 2021; Wesolowski et al., 2013). Although
our study area is Paris, we might expect similar representativeness issues
to arise. Twitter tends to skew toward younger, minority, urban in­
dividuals (Maeve et al. (2013); Hargittai (2020); Malik et al. (2015)).
3
Cities xxx (xxxx) xxx
Further, it is unclear whether Twitter users send messages to a biased
subset of the complete set of locations that they visit (for example,
tweeting more from the home or workplace than from social gathering
locations) and how such preferences to send tweet messages from spe­
cific locations can impact the mobility patterns observed from geo­
tagged tweets. Relatedly, some have raised concerns regarding the low
sampling rate since Twitter users do not post every day for every activity
(Cui & He, 2021). These results serve as important qualifiers to our
study—our Twitter-derived activity measures serve as proxies for the
activity of specifically the Twitter population. They may not represent
the population of Paris as a whole.
3. The zones 30 policy
3.1. Institutional context
In the early 2000s, Paris began to promote sustainable transport
modes to enhance pedestrians’ experiences in the city. Through the
Pedestrian Paris Initiative, the city implemented a street-sharing pro­
gram that transformed streets by delineating the specific rights of cars
and alternative modes of transportation, including bikers and pedes­
trians (Avis et al., 2021). A key component of this program was the zones
30 initiative, which involved creating a series of slow zones throughout
Paris. In these areas, the city limited vehicle speed to 30 km/h and
implemented a series of physical changes to make streets more
comfortable and accessible for active modes of transportation. For
example, the city widened sidewalks and cleared them of obstacles,
encouraged tree planting and vegetation of sidewalks, and provided
infrastructure such as counter-flow bike lines and new crosswalk marks
to facilitate less-contaminating modes of transport. This policy also
added certain design features to streets; for example, the city converted
parking spaces into amenities such as cafe terraces, benches, greenery,
fountains, or bike racks. Fig. A1 in the Appendix illustrates these
changes using street view images from 2008 (before the policy) and
2020.
Fig. 1 shows the geographic distribution of the 141 slow zones
introduced in Paris, colored by year of implementation. Slow zones are
not exclusive to specific neighborhoods; they are scattered throughout
the city. All slow zones are located within the central area of Paris, with
95 located within 4 km of the city center and all 141 located within 6.5
km of the city center. The implementation of slow zones peaked in 2010
(43 zones were implemented that year), then plateaued between 2011
and 2012 (one implementation in total), and picked up again in 2013
and 2014 when the city implemented 34 zones. Between 2015 and 2017,
the city implemented an additional eight zones and then picked back up
with eighteen zones between 2018 and 2019. As the figure shows, zones
vary in size, ranging from 0.006 km2 to 1.347 km2. As a whole, the slow
zones cover 35 km2 (out of 105 in the Paris borough) and 49% of all the
street segments.
Although the zones 30 policy is a city-wide initiative, its imple­
mentation happened at the district level. This approach left some of the
decision-making about zone delineation and implementation to the
mayors of districts (arrondissements), who responded to local factors
such as public transit stations and routes, historical use of streets,
number of crashes, and the desires of their constituents.3 Most of the
slow zones were ultimately implemented in the east of Paris, where
constituents were more amenable to this type of policy. Our empirical
design was chosen in order to account for the fact that the location of
slow zones might have been influenced by political decisions specific to
each neighborhood and allows us to compare similar streets to one
3
There is some anecdotal evidence that emphasis was placed on locating the
slow zones near schools Garcia (2013); personal communication (November 16,
2021). However, empirically we see no significant difference in distance to
schools between treated and untreated streets—see Table 1.
A. Salazar-Miranda et al. Cities xxx (xxxx) xxx

Fig. 1. Figure shows the geographic distribution of the 141 slow zones introduced in Paris during our study period, colored by year of implementation. Slow zones
where the implementation year data is missing are colored in grey. The Paris borough is shown with a dashed line.

another and thus alleviate concerns regarding selection. that they are entering a 30 km/h zone. The speed limit signs are
Access to slow zones is clearly demarcated by road signs and infra­ accompanied by road design changes, including road furniture like
structure, encouraging high levels of compliance. Examples of road speed bumps and rumble strips that reduce the speed of cars inside these
signage include signs along the road to inform pedestrians and drivers areas. These areas are also highly regulated by the police, who charge

Fig. 2. Figures show the street segments assigned to the treated (in blue) and control group (in red). The treated groups consists of street segments whose centroids
are 100 m or less from within the slow zone boundary, and the control group consists of street segments whose centroids are 100 m or less from outside the slow zone
boundary. Main streets, excluded from our sample, are shown in grey. Figure (a) shows the full city of Paris. Figure (b) shows a closer-up view of treated and control
street segments surrounding the zones of Verneuil (top) and Maubeuge (bottom). (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is
referred to the web version of this article.)

4
A. Salazar-Miranda et al. Cities xxx (xxxx) xxx

Table 1
Summary statistics of street characteristics.
Samples

All Paris Treated sample Control sample Mean difference

Street fundamentals:
Street segment length............... 47.685 59.306 39.911 19.396
[57.015] [53.844] [48.440] (0.000)

Location:
Log distance to city center.......... 8.173 8.021 8.017 0.004
[0.588] [0.632] [0.563] (0.767)
Proximity to transit stops........... − 0.000 0.371 0.430 − 0.059
[1.000] [0.839] [0.806] (0.001)

Public amenities:
Proximity to parks................... − 0.000 0.513 0.525 − 0.012
[1.000] [0.577] [0.614] (0.376)
Proximity to schools................. − 0.000 0.365 0.382 − 0.016
[1.000] [0.585] [0.647] (0.227)
Proximity to landmarks............ 0.000 0.317 0.338 − 0.021
[1.000] [1.115] [1.049] (0.380)
Number of landmarks.............. 1.334 1.391 1.304 0.087
[1.033] [0.968] [0.957] (0.452)

Demographics:
Proximity to population............ − 0.000 0.458 0.439 0.019
[1.000] [0.610] [0.601] (0.159)
Proximity to income................ 0.000 0.461 0.450 0.011
[1.000] [0.594] [0.604] (0.388)

Note.—Columns 1 to 3 report the sample means and standard deviation (in square brackets) of the street characteristics in 2010— the baseline year. Column 4 reports
the mean difference between treated and control samples and p-value (in parentheses). Proximity measures are computed using a gravity measure with a quadratic
decay function.

fines of up to 135 euros for speed violations.
The high compliance induced by slow zones can be seen from an
overall reduction in the number of vehicles passing through these areas.
To document this, we use data from the Paris Open Data portal on
vehicle counts at the street segment level. These data are obtained from
fixed sensors located throughout Paris, covering 714 street segments
during 2014 and 2015 (1.3% of our sample). The sensor data shows that
the volume of cars fell by 41% in slow zones relative to other areas of the
city, which suggests that slow zones had bite and affected driving
patterns.
3.2. Defining treatment and control
Our analysis focuses on the 80 slow zones implemented between
2010 and 2015 since this is the period for which we have geo-referenced
Twitter data. A list of the implemented slow zones was obtained from the
Paris Open Data portal, including the zones’ polygon boundaries and the
year and month in which each zone was built. We exclude two small
zones built in 2007 and 2008 and 24 zones implemented after 2015 since
we lack geo-located Twitter data for these periods. Finally, 36 zones are
missing the year of implementation. In our main empirical analysis, we
treat these zones as if they were implemented in 2010 (the year in which
most of the policy was implemented). In Section 4.5, we verify that our
results are robust to excluding them from the sample.
Our unit of analysis is the street segment, which is the part of a street
that lies between two consecutive intersections. To construct the treat­
ment and control groups, we implement the following procedure. First,
we obtain the street network for Paris from OpenStreetMap—an open-
source mapping platform that collects geographic information. We
then calculate the shortest Euclidean distance from the centroid of each
street segment to its closest slow zone boundary. We define our study
group to be street segments whose centroids fall within 100 m of the
boundary of each pre-2015 zone: street segments whose centroids are
100 m or less from within the slow zone boundary are our treated group,
and street segments whose centroids are 100 m or less from outside the
slow zone boundary are our control group. We chose a distance of 100
m, the typical block size because it provides a tight window for sharp
comparison between similar streets while allowing enough walking
distance for pedestrians to perceive decreased traffic levels. For
robustness, we also define 75-meter and 125-meter windows. Street
segments very close to the border also increase the risk of confounding
spillovers from the slow area to the control group. To account for this
and the possibility of drawing inaccuracy in the slow zone boundaries,
we exclude from our sample streets whose centroids lie within 25 m of
either side of the boundary.
Fig. 2 shows the streets assigned to the treatment group (in red) and
control group (in blue). Panel (a) shows the entire city of Paris, while
panel (b) zooms to the slow zones of Verneuil (top) and Maubeuge
(bottom). Streets shown in grey are classified as main streets and are
excluded from the analysis.4 We exclude main streets for two reasons:
First, our identification strategy assumes that the boundary of slow
zones is random. However, main streets might have been used to define
slow zone boundaries. By excluding them from the sample, we account
for this non-random assignment in slow zone boundaries. Second, slow
zones include primarily secondary and tertiary streets, which are the
streets where it is feasible to reduce the speed of cars. Thus, by dropping
main streets from the sample, we make treatment and control groups
more comparable.
Since we define the treated and control street segments as immedi­
ately adjacent to one another, we expect them to be similar across many
4
We use the streets marked as “primary” or “secondary” by OpenStreetMap
to exclude main streets.

5
A. Salazar-Miranda et al.
dimensions that may impact Twitter activity, such as proximity to
amenities, transit access, and resident income. To verify this assumption
and ensure there are no systematic differences between the two groups
that could confound our results, we examine how street segments in the
treatment and control groups differ in the following characteristics:
street fundamentals (street segment length), location (distance to the
city center and proximity to transit stops), public amenities (schools,
parks, and landmarks), and demographics (income and population).5
Columns 1–3 of Table 1 report the sample means and standard de­
viations (in square brackets) of the street characteristics in 2010—a
period preceding the full operation of most slow zones. The first column
reports these statistics for all the street segments in Paris; the second and
third columns restrict the sample to the treated and control street seg­
ments, respectively. The fourth column reports the mean difference
between treated and control samples (p-values in parentheses).
We document significant differences in street segment length be­
tween treated and control groups. For this reason, we pay particular
attention to controlling for segment length throughout our empirical
analysis. The remaining rows show that the treated and control street
segments are comparable in all other characteristics. The only exception
is proximity to transit stops, where treated street segments have lower
access to transit. However, this difference is extremely small (0.059
times the standard deviation in the sample). If anything, this would
presumably bias our estimates against finding a positive effect of slow
zones on human activity. The fact that we only observe minor differ­
ences between treated and control groups suggests that the border
discontinuity approach provides a suitable control group.
4. The effects of slow zones
4.1. Measuring human activity
We examine the impact of slow zones by testing whether their
enactment affects human activity on streets. To measure human activity
for each street, we use data from Twitter—a popular social media
platform on which users exchange information in short messages. The
key advantage of using Twitter to measure human activity is its exten­
sive spatial coverage and high spatial resolution. Twitter is widely used
in Paris, and the georeferenced messages provide near real-time infor­
mation on how people move across the city, allowing us to study the
‘pulse’ of the city by tracing users’ movements.
To download the Twitter data, we queried all user messages (or
tweets) within a bounding box surrounding central Paris using the
Twitter API. Each tweet provides the location coordinates (latitude and
longitude) of the person at the time of the posting, a timestamp, and a
unique username identification consistent across years. Location co­
ordinates are based on the Global Positioning System (GPS), which until
2015 offered location accuracy of 7.8 m or less with 95% confidence
5
We compute proximity using a gravity measure with a quadratic decay
function. In particular, we add up the squared inverse of the Euclidean distance
of each street centroid to all parks, schools, landmarks, and transit stops. For
population and income, we computed a weighted sum of the log of population
and income of all IRIS neighborhoods (statistical units comparable to a US
Census block group, where IRIS stands for an acronym of ‘aggregated units for
statistical information’) weighted by the square inverse distance between the
street centroid and the neighborhood centroid. In calculating proximity to
landmarks, we include all spaces determined to be historic monuments by
France’s Ministry of Culture for more details. In order to ensure that our results
aren’t only capturing individual, highly-visited landmarks such as the Eiffel
Tower, which if contained within slow zones could skew our results, we also
manually verified that Paris’s most popular landmarks (Eiffel Tower, Les
Invalides, Arc de Triomphe, Palais Garnier, Sacre-Coeur, Louvre Museum,
Cathedrale Notre-Dame de Paris, Pantheon) fall outside of slow zones. The only
exception is Sacre-Coeur, contained in the Butte Montmartre zone. Our results
remain unchanged when we repeat our analysis excluding this slow zone.
6
Cities xxx (xxxx) xxx
(Swier et al., 2015). Our analysis focuses on 10,585,302 geotagged
tweets posted between January 2010 and April 2015, originating from
within Paris.6 We focus on the 2010–2015 period for two reasons: (1)
most of the zones were implemented between those years, and (2)
during this period, accurate georeference information is available for a
much larger subset of tweets.7 We match each tweet to its nearest street
segment within a 200-meter radius, which allows us to create measures
of human activity at the street segment level.
For each street segment, we compute several complementary mea­
sures of street activity. We first look at the total number of tweets and
unique Twitter users per street segment. Higher total tweets and unique
users indicate increased general activity. We hypothesize that if slow
zones attract more people and create more generally buzzing and
vibrant streets as they are intended, they will see higher overall activity
as more people visit them. Higher tweets and users could either indicate
that more people are visiting, that the people who visit tweet more often,
or both. While our data cannot tease these apart, both visiting more and
tweeting more often (indicative of a user finding a space more attractive
or “tweetable”) can serve as proxies for social attractiveness. We then
look at tweets per user. More tweets per user indicate that the same user
is either returning to a given place more often, spending more time
there, or finding the location more attractive and “tweetable.” This
serves as a complementary measure of attractiveness and buzziness to
overall activity. Finally, we ask whether slow zones serve as “connec­
tors,” bringing together people from geographically diverse parts of
Paris. To do so, we construct a measure that we call “neighborhood
connectedness” by counting the number of IRIS districts (comparable to
US Census tracts) that people who visit each street segment also visit
during the 5-year study period.8 This measure captures the ability of
streets to attract people from different neighborhoods without relying
on home location estimation methods, which can be unreliable and
require significant amounts of data per user.
4.2. Graphical evidence
We begin our analysis by exploring whether human activity varies
across the boundaries of slow zones. To do this, we calculate human
activity for street segments in the treatment and control groups, bin the
data according to the street’s distance from the slow zone boundary, and
plot activity against distance to the boundary. Fig. 3 shows average
differences in our Twitter-derived social outcomes between the treated
and control street segments. There appears to be a discontinuity in our
Twitter measures across the slow zone boundary: street segments within
the slow zones (shown in blue) see more total tweets, more unique users,
and higher levels of visitor diversity than street segments outside of the
slow zones (shown in red).
4.3. Regression analysis
To explore the patterns from Fig. 3 more systematically, we turn to a
regression analysis of the differences in human activity between the
treatment and control street segments.
6
We start with 14,189,655 tweets scraped from Paris. We remove tweets
associated with Instagram and FourSquare (which often give location at a
neighborhood or city level) and tweets associated with authors that both send
more than 200 geolocated tweets between 2010 and 2019 and receive a score
greater than 0.8 from the botometer API, indicating high likelihood of bot ac­
tivity. For more information on the Botometer, see https://botometer.osome.iu.
edu.
7
In April 2015, Twitter changed their geolocation policy so that less precise,
noisier geolocation data is attached to each tweet. After this policy change,
tweets tagged at a broad area, such as “Montmartre” or “France,” would be
associated with a bounding box or a central point in the area instead of the
precise latitude and longitude coordinate from which the tweet was sent.
8
The population of IRIS districts ranges between 1800 and 5000.
A. Salazar-Miranda et al. Cities xxx (xxxx) xxx

Fig. 3. Twitter activity at the boundary of slow zones. The figure reports Twitter activity inside the slow zones (in blue) and outside slow zones (in red) aggregated in
bins and then plotted by their distance to the slow zone boundary (in meters). (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred
to the web version of this article.)

Table 2
Relationship between slow zones and Twitter activity.
Dependent variable: log number of tweets

(I) (II) (III) (IV) (V)

Slow zone 0.156*** 0.218*** 0.230*** 0.300*** 0.367***

(0.059) (0.066) (0.064) (0.080) (0.098)
Observations 58,758 58,503 58,503 56,720 24,915
Clusters 737 697 697 682 572
R-squared 0.52 0.64 0.65 0.70 0.80

Controls:
Polynomial in geography ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Neighborhood FE by year ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Slow zone FE by year ✓
Slow zone boundary FE by year ✓
Street FE by year ✓

Note.—The dependent variable is log number of tweets recorded between 2010 and 2015. Slow zone is an indicator equal to 1 if a street’s centroid falls within the cut-
off and equal to 0 otherwise. The treated groups includes all streets larger than 25 m that fall within 100 m from the edge of the slow zone boundary and 100 m outside
of it, respectively. Column 1 includes a cubic polynomial in geography (latitude and longitude) of the slow zone boundary. Columns 2 and 3 include neighborhood and
slow zone-fixed effects by year, respectively. Column 4 controls for slow zone boundary fixed effects by year. Column 5 controls for street-fixed effects by year. All
specifications control for the log of street segment length. The coefficients with *** are significant at the 1% confidence level; with ** are significant at the 5%
confidence level; and with * are significant at the 10% confidence level. Robust standard errors, adjusted for clustering by neighborhood, are in parentheses.

Our empirical strategy estimates the following regression model:
Outcomei,t = β⋅SlowZonei,t + γ⋅Xi + δt + αn(i) + θs(i) + εi,t , (1)
where Outcomei,t corresponds to one of the outcome variables of interest
for segment i at time t. SlowZonei,t is an indicator equal to 1 if the street
segment lies within one of the slow zones at time t and 0 otherwise. Xi is
a vector of covariates that includes the length of the street segment and a
cubic polynomial in latitude and longitude.9 δt are year-fixed effects that
account for common time trends and αn(i) denotes neighborhood fixed
9
This is intended to control for unobserved spatial variation in our outcomes,
and helps counteract potential issues with residual spatial autocorrelation. See
Dell (2010) for more details on this methodology.
effects, which ensures that we are comparing treatment and control
segments within the same neighborhoods. θs(i) denotes street fixed ef­
fects. When included as a covariate, street fixed effects ensure that the
effect of slow zones is identified by comparing street segments that are
part of the same street (and therefore share common features) but
happen to lie on different sides of the slow zone boundary. εi,t is the error
term of the regression model. We report robust standard errors clustered
at the neighborhood level. These standard errors allow for serial and
spatial correlation in the error term εi,t across street segments in the
same neighborhood within a given year and over time. This specification
nests alternative clustering approaches that only allow for spatial cor­
relation across street segments in the same neighborhood during a given
year or for observations that belong to the same street segment to be
serially correlated over time.
This is a spatial regression discontinuity design-inspired approach.

7
A. Salazar-Miranda et al.
Table 3
Relationship between slow zones and different measures of human activity from Twitter data.
(I) (II)
Log number of tweets Log number of users
Slow zone 0.367*** 0.178**
(0.098) (0.086)
Observations 24,915 24,915
Clusters 572 572
R-squared 0.80 0.82
Controls:
Polynomial in geography ✓ ✓
Neighborhood FE by year ✓ ✓
Street FE by year ✓ ✓
Note.—Columns report the estimates of Eq. (1) for different outcome variables using the specification from column 5 in Table 2. All specifications control for the log of
street segment length and control for street segment fixed effects. The coefficients with *** are significant at the 1% confidence level; with ** are significant at the 5%
confidence level; and with * are significant at the 10% confidence level. Robust standard errors, adjusted for clustering by neighborhood, are in parentheses.
The identifying assumption is that treated street segments only differ
from the control group in that they are within a slow zone. This is
achieved by comparing street segments near one another but on oppo­
site sides of the same slow zone boundary (or, in our strictest specifi­
cation, segments of the very same street). Therefore, treated and control
street segments are similar in terms of the spatially-correlated charac­
teristics that attract people and encourage social media activity—for
example, neighborhood character, amenity density, accessibility, and
proximity to landmarks. This assumption is supported by our street
characteristics analysis (Table 1), which shows that treatment and
control street segments are not significantly different in terms of the
characteristics we measured. Under this assumption, the difference be­
tween treated and control street segments is the treatment itself; our
control variables and fixed effects control for all unobserved spatial
differences that affect social media activity other than the presence or
absence of a slow zone. Thus, the coefficient β can be interpreted as the
causal impact of the slow zone policy on social activity.
Table 2 shows the estimates of Eq. (1), focusing on streets that fall
within 100 m of the slow zone boundary. All models use the log number
of tweets as the dependent variable. Column 1 reports estimates using a
cubic polynomial in the latitude and longitude of the centroid of each
street segment. This polynomial controls flexibly for any geographic
features that vary continuously over space.10 Column 2 shows the results
controlling for neighborhood-fixed effects, which compare streets in the
same neighborhood. All fixed effects are by year, accounting for overall
trends over time in Twitter usage. Column 3 exploits a sharper com­
parison between street segments that fall on opposite sides of the same
slow zone, and column 4 goes even further by comparing street segments
that fall along the same specific slow zone edge. The estimates in column
4 show that Twitter activity is 30 log points higher (or 34.9% higher) in
streets that are up to 100 m within a slow zone’s edge relative to the
streets that are up to 100 m outside of it.
Column 5, our strictest specification, controls for street name fixed
effects, comparing segments of the same street that lie on opposite sides
of a slow zone. This full set of street fixed effects ensures that the esti­
mates are captured by comparing segments that belong to the same
street and therefore share many common features. The estimates in
column 5 show that Twitter activity is 36.7 log points higher (or 44.3%
higher) in streets within 100 m of the slow zone border relative to the
same street before the slow zone enactment.
We have focused on measuring street activity using the log number of
tweets in each street segment. In the next exercise, we explore com­
plementary measures of street activity: the log number of Twitter users
10
See Dell (2010).
Cities xxx (xxxx) xxx
(III) (IV) (V)
Log number of tweets by user Log tweet density Neighborhood connectedness
0.189** 0.181* 37.783***
(0.073) (0.105) (13.805)
14,502 24,915 24,915
559 572 572
0.60 0.75 0.74
✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓
in each street segment and neighborhood connectedness. The latter
captures the variety of neighborhoods that visitors to each street
segment also visit. The log number of Twitter users complements our
previously used measure (log number of tweets) by adding the infor­
mation on how many unique visitors an area sees—the “gravity” or pull
of the street segment. Neighborhood connectedness serves as a proxy for
social mixing—high neighborhood connectedness indicates that the
visitors to a given street segment are either from a geographically
diverse range of places within Paris or visit a geographically diverse
range of places, as opposed to visitors to a street segment mainly staying
within its surrounding area. This implies that the street segment serves
as a draw to a wide range of Paris residents and provides an opportunity
for mixing and interacting between people who may not otherwise be
exposed to one another.
Table 3 shows the estimates of Eq. (1) for different outcome vari­
ables. For brevity, we focus on the specification from column 5 in
Table 2, which is the more demanding specification. Column 1, equiv­
alent to column 5 in Table 2, shows that street segments up to 100 m
inside of slow zone boundaries saw a 36.7 log point increase in the
number of tweets (equivalent to a 44% increase) relative to street seg­
ments in the control group. Columns 2 and 3 show that slow zones also
experienced a 17.8 log point increase in the number of users (19.5%
increase) and an 18.9 log point increase in the number of tweets per user
(20.8% increase). This finding implies that more Twitter users visited
slow zone street segments and that those users were more active in those
street segments (likely spending more time there) after slow zone
implementation. Column 5 shows that street segments in slow zones also
experienced an increase of 37.78 in neighborhood connectedness after
slow zone implementation. This implies that visitors to slow zone street
segments visited 37.78 more neighborhoods than visitors to those seg­
ments before slow zone implementation, indicating connections be­
tween slow zone street segments and more geographically diverse parts
of Paris. This effect is large in magnitude, considering that the average
value of neighborhood connectedness across street segments during our
5-year study period is 62.
4.4. Effects by cohort and pre-treatment differences
We now explore the effects of each slow zone cohort separately. This
approach allows us to understand whether there were pre-treatment
differences between treated and control groups in each cohort. Fig. 4
plots the estimates of Eq. (1) separately by cohort for the groups of slow
8
A. Salazar-Miranda et al. Cities xxx (xxxx) xxx

Fig. 4. Effect of slow zones by cohort. For each cohort, the figure reports pre-treatment differences between treatment and control (first bar), post-treatment dif­
ferences between treatment and control (second bar), and a difference-in-differences estimator of the effects of slow zones (third bar). The whiskers provide 90%
confidence intervals based on robust standard errors clustered at the neighborhood level.

Table 4
Relationship between slow zones and Twitter activity for different samples.
Dependent variable: log number of tweets

(I) (II) (III) (IV) (V) (VI) (VII) (VIII)

<75 Meters of boundary <125 Meters of boundary Tertiary & pedestrian streets Excluding missing years

Slow zone 0.297*** 0.313*** 0.277*** 0.286*** 0.200*** 0.227*** 0.277*** 0.429**
(0.028) (0.045) (0.024) (0.040) (0.016) (0.023) (0.090) (0.204)
Observations 63,856 30,239 95,649 47,017 256,461 116,971 18,134 7300
Clusters 12,426 5876 18,303 9037 43,125 19,672 3136 1268
R-squared 0.68 0.77 0.66 0.76 0.61 0.73 0.69 0.77

Controls:
Polynomial in geography ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Slow zone boundary FE by year ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Street FE by year ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

Note.—All models include tweets recorded between 2010 and 2015. Columns report the estimates of Eq. (1) using log number of tweets as the dependent variable for
different samples. Odd-numbered columns are comparable to column 4 of Table 2 and even-numbered ones are comparable to column 5. Columns 1 and 2 modify our
control and treatment group to include street segments within 75 m of the slow zone boundary. Columns 3 and 4 repeat the same exercise but include street segments
within 125 m of the slow zone boundary. Columns 5 and 6 restrict the sample to residential and tertiary streets. Columns 7 and 8 exclude streets missing the slow zone
treatment year. Robust standard errors, adjusted for clustering by neighborhood, are in parentheses.

zones created in 2010, 2013, and 2014.11 We provide estimates of the
difference between treatment and control groups both before the
treatment was enacted (first bar) and after it (second bar). This exercise
takes the year in which a slow zone was created as part of the pre-
treatment period. For example, for the 2010 cohort, we consider base­
line differences between treatment and control in 2010 as their pre-
treatment differences. We follow this approach because most slow
zones were created towards the end of the year, which implies that for
most of 2010, the slow zones were not operating.
The figure shows three key findings. First, for all cohorts, we cannot
reject the null that there were no differences between treatment and
control before enacting slow zones. In fact, for 2010 and 2013, the pre-
treatment differences are quite small (and precisely estimated for 2010).
This finding suggests no systematic targeting when deciding the
boundaries of the slow zones and lends credence to our identification
strategy. Second, we estimate a positive post-treatment difference for all
cohorts, which suggests that slow zones increased human activity in
treated areas relative to the control ones. These differences are sizable
and significant for the 2010 cohort. However, they are imprecisely
estimated for the 2013 and 2014 cohorts, which is to be expected given
that fewer slow zones were enacted during these years. Third, the figure
also reports a difference-in-difference estimator where we subtract the
pre-treatment differences from the post-treatment ones to account for
any baseline differences between treated and control groups. Here too,
we obtain a positive difference-in-difference estimate for all cohorts,
although the estimates for 2013 are imprecise. Overall, these findings
support the interpretation that slow zones had a causal effect on human
activity and that our estimates do not reflect pre-existing differences
between treatment and control groups. This is particularly the case for
the 2010 cohort, which represents 54% of slow zones and yields the
most precise estimates. This aligns with evidence suggesting that more

11
There were no slow zones implemented in 2011 or 2012. In addition, we
exclude 2015 because there is not enough Twitter data available to trace its
effects over time.

9
A. Salazar-Miranda et al.
financial resources were allocated to the program initially (Personal
Communication, November 16, 2021).12
4.5. Robustness checks
To explore the sensitivity of our results, Table 4 reports a series of
robustness exercises. Columns 1–2 and 3–4 modify our control and
treatment group to include street segments within 75 and 125 m of the
slow zone boundary, respectively. Different distance thresholds are
useful because smaller distances ensure that the control group is more
similar to the treatment, while larger distances allow for the inclusion of
more data. Columns 5–6 restrict our sample to residential and tertiary
streets, ensuring that the set of streets in the control and treatment
groups are also comparable in type. Finally, columns 7–8 exclude from
the exercise slow zones for which the year of implementation is missing
(recall that in the main estimates, we treated missing slow zones as if
they were implemented in 2010). All panels show similar point esti­
mates to those in Table 2.
5. Concluding remarks
This paper provides the first large-scale, causal analysis of the im­
pacts of “slow zones”—low-speed-limit urban areas gaining popularity
worldwide—on social activity. We exploit the sharp spatial and tem­
poral variation in a traffic speed policy implemented over five years in
Paris to identify the effects of slowing cars and making streets friendlier
to pedestrians on human activity. We find that street segments within
treated slow zones exhibit higher levels of human activity (as proxied by
social media data) and attract individuals from a broader range of Paris
neighborhoods than otherwise-similar street segments outside slow
zones. The fact that this policy implemented in Paris effectively en­
courages activity in newly regulated areas offers a precedent for other
cities in the future as they consider implementing similar policies to
reduce the speed of vehicles. This evidence is especially critical as the
social activity impacts of slow zones have remained largely unexplored
in all international contexts.
As slow zone policies gain popularity worldwide, it is essential to
consider how these results are generalizable to other cities. Paris’s policy
is very similar to other European cities in that it involves a speed limit
reduction to 30 km/h and complementary pedestrian-friendly street
improvements. The results presented here can thus provide a baseline
expectation for slow zone impacts in similar, large European cities that
gradually implemented speed limit reduction in select parts of the city.
Replicating this study in different cities under different policies would
add nuance to the relationship between speed limit reduction policies
and street activity identified in this paper.
The slow zones enacted in Paris could have led to increased human
activity through various channels, including higher activity coming
from 1) a reduction in cars and the negative externality that this imposes
on pedestrians (e.g., pollution and noise), 2) higher accessibility via the
increased provision of bike infrastructure, 3) the endogenous creation of
amenities in these areas due to increased demand, 4) increased the
aesthetic attractiveness of the built environment and perceived safety or
a combination of these factors. All of these channels co-exist in the
12
There are two additional interpretations of the stronger effects estimated for the 2010 cohort. One the one hand, the effects of slow zones could diminish with the
area of the affected regions. For example, a policy reducing speed limits across an entire city may not see the same effects per street segment as a policy targeted at
specific areas. On the other hand, it could be the case that the areas of Paris where the first batch of slow zones were built have the greatest potential for increasing
human activity. Instead, subsequent slow zones may have been enacted in more marginal areas of the city.
10
Cities xxx (xxxx) xxx
current context, and untangling them is an interesting question for
future work.
This paper opens three additional questions for future research: First,
it is important to understand whether slow zones have spillovers in
surrounding areas. For example, one could imagine that slow zones
operate partly by taking away visitors from nearby areas, reducing
human activity in their vicinity. If this is the case, slow zones would have
a smaller impact on aggregate human activity at the city level since they
would mostly change where human activity takes place without neces­
sarily increasing its level. On the other hand, slow zones could have
positive spillovers and contribute to a vibrant environment in their
immediate surroundings. In this case, the city-wide effects of slow zones
on human activity would be larger than those implied by our boundary
design. It is worth pointing out that, independently of the nature of
spillovers, slow zones play an important coordinating role by concen­
trating human activity in the same areas, leading to higher levels of
mixing between different Paris neighborhoods. Second, our estimates on
the effects of slow zones capture the bundle of both slowing cars and
making streets friendlier to pedestrians. Future work can focus on dis­
entangling the independent role of these two policy tools. In particular,
knowing whether these policy tools must be used together or can be
substituted for one another is important for prioritizing resources when
designing these interventions. Future research can also try to understand
whether slow zones endogenously affect the built environment and the
location of amenities. For example, do slow zones attract businesses and
restaurants in the long run? Do people residing in these areas invest
more in their homes and the aesthetic qualities of the neighborhood?
Finally, we studied the pull of slow zones from different geographic
areas of Paris. It would be interesting to study the pull of slow zones from
different socioeconomic groups within Paris and, thus, their ability to
host diverse social interactions and foster social mixing—a related but
substantively different question. We refrained from doing this primarily
because of Twitter’s low sampling rate; it is difficult to reliably estimate
users’ home locations and thus infer socioeconomic and demographic
characteristics. This question could be explored in future work using a
denser dataset or one that contains socioeconomic information.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Arianna Salazar Miranda: Conceptualization, Data Curation,
Formal Analysis, Visualization, Methodology, Writing original draft,
Writing - review & editing. Cate Heine: Conceptualization, Data Cura­
tion, Formal Analysis, Visualization, Methodology, Writing - original
draft, Writing - review & editing. Katja Schechtner: Provided Re­
visions. Fabio Duarte: Project Administration. Carlo Ratti: Funding
acquisition.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare no competing interests.
Data availability
The authors do not have permission to share data.
A. Salazar-Miranda et al. Cities xxx (xxxx) xxx

Appendix A

Fig. A1. Figure shows the visual changes in some slow zones using images collected from Google Street View. Each row corresponds to a different slow zone. Images
on the left were taken in 2008 (prior to the intervention) and images on the right were taken in 2020.

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