Many people believe that living on the Web grants them membership in an exalted class to which old laws cannot possibly apply. This sort of arrogance takes your breath away, until you realize just how brilliant a corporate strategy it is. If you stopped to reckon with every 80-year-old zoning law or tried to change the ones that you knew your customers would violate, you’d never even open for business.

When the laws of the system become easier to understand and open to being changed, the current agents controlling the system, and potentially abusingit, lose power. That’s what Docracy is doing, and I believe it is some of the most important work that any startup is working on right now.

Julien Bargeton, deputy mayor in charge of transportation, said the city needed to move past the car. “In a dense city, the car can’t be the favored transportation mode,” he said. “There is room for cars in the city of tomorrow, but they can’t take up all the room, as they do today, with public spaces that are widely reserved to car traffic, even though 60 percent of Parisians don’t own a vehicle.”