in Saint-Denis, a school risks being asphyxiated by five motorway ramps – Liberation

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–The expansion of a motorway interchange has begun near a school group in Seine-Saint-Denis, but parents and residents tirelessly point out the health risks. Built as part of the Olympic Games, the work even worries UNICEF.–

A few meters from the kindergarten playground, heaps of earth and a cut road symbolize the lost battle after several years of struggle. In the Pleyel district, in Saint-Denis, a motorway interchange is going to be enlarged. It feeds the A86, an axis engraved in the landscape of the city for forty years. Instead of the current three entrance and exit ramps intended for cars, the future octopus will have five. The Pleyel-Anatole-France school group will find itself surrounded by tentacles, one of which will lead to the corner of the nursery school.

Work began last year and Hamid Ouïdir still can’t believe it. “We enclave 600 children aged 3 to 12 in an infernal circulation. This project will suffocate them,” protests this local representative of the Federation of Parents’ Councils of Seine-Saint-Denis (FCPE 93) and father of two students at the school.

In this month of January, some residents opposed to the project are always present to show the neighborhood, “disillusioned but not desperate”. Petitions, proposals for alternative projects, legal recourse and actions before the school did not make it possible to find a satisfactory solution in their eyes. “Yet we move, we respond to public inquiries, we take our time, we have attended all their theater”, gets annoyed Marc Poulbot, a resident near the highway and whose great-grandfather was headmaster of the school. The small group camped…

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