One city is clean and beautiful, the other dirty and ugly. One has an indomitable spirit, the other has lost all spontaneity.
Private transport is.
Only a fool would use a car to negotiate the Place de la Concorde. Only a ninny with an absurdist British sense of humour and an unfeasibly large helmet would cycle to work. I often cycle to work, threading through constipated streets where white vans park insouciantly in the middle of the road and, in the traffic jam behind, drivers lean on their horns. It's hard not to get proprietorial about the metro because money has been properly lavished on it and because people with good taste designed its stations. Ken Livingstone never had.