As Paris votes to make another 500 streets car-free, the first residents are moving into a newly-built town outside Cambridge, UK, where the bicycle, not the car, is king.

Following a referendum last weekend, Paris, the City of Lights, will soon be pushing ahead with Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s quest to make it into the City of Bikes as well, reports Bloomberg.

Asked if they approved of Hidalgo’s proposal to close 500 streets to cars and remove 10% of Paris’s existing parking spots, 66% of voters said yes. However, the turnout was low—only 4% of eligible voters cast ballots—raising questions about the mandate’s strength.

The mayor’s plan follows on earlier efforts that cleared 300 streets of cars in favour of bikes, pedestrians, and greenery, starting in 2020.

With car lanes and parking spots replaced by “a mix of paving and planted areas, tending towards a broad ratio of two-thirds paving to one-third planting,” these cooler and more porous “green streets” are designed to reduce the urban heat island effect and improve food resilience.

On this second go-round, “the aim is to pedestrianize five to eight streets per neighbourhood, with locals being consulted this spring to determine which streets would be most suitable,” Bloomberg writes. The work will receive an average budget of €500,000 (C$768,000) per street.

Across the English Channel, meanwhile, the first residents of a bike-centred development outside Cambridge are moving in, ready to carry out all their local activities and business on bicycles or their own two feet, with any cars pushed to the margins.

Built on a former Royal Air Force base outside the university town, the roughly three square-kilometre Waterbeach development feels very Dutch, with bike lanes lined with flower beds threading through it and cars relegated to parking spots behind the houses, writes Bloomberg CityLab.

Encouragement to become a life-long cyclist is built into the architecture and ethos of the place: “students will be expected to walk, wheel, or cycle to the neighbourhood’s primary school; only staff, who are likely to live farther away, and those with disabilities can drive in or do car drop-offs.”

Unlike many new greenfield housing developments in the United Kingdom that remain largely car-dependent, Waterbeach was shaped by unique circumstances, including heavy congestion on local commuter roads. That led Cambridgeshire County Council to require alternative local transportation options as a condition for approval.

The anything-but-a-car mentality meant that 16 kilometres of bike lanes were put in before any homes were built, while the shoulders of the road into Cambridge were widened for safer walking and riding.

Waterbeach is also in the sweet spot for size. With 6,500 homes in the works, the community “is slated to be big enough to justify building specific infrastructure to serve it, including bike lanes and public transit connections.”

The new town will be far less car-dependent than many of its peers for another reason: it was built on the property of the UK government, an entity “not solely interested in profit,” Bloomberg CityLab writes. For a developer, adding bike lanes can threaten profitability by using up buildable space, but a growing demand for walkable and bike-friendly communities in the UK is easing these concerns.