Paris

Paris’ bicycling infrastructure a model that Phoenix, Los Angeles should copy, officials say

From CronkiteNews.com

By Zach Bradshaw/Special for Cronkite News

PARIS – The City of Light has become a “gold medal” example of modern bicycle infrastructure, making transportation during the Summer Olympics more accessible than ever.
Improvements to existing infrastructure has allowed the French capital city to also be widely known as the capital city of biking.

“It’s pretty great,” said Hannah Warmerdam, a Paris-based bike tour guide who works at Holland Bikes Tours & Rentals in Paris. “I mean, the biking infrastructure in France restarted in Paris.”

Since 2010, the city has devoted over 400 million euros, about $434.8 million, to retrofitting roads, developing parking solutions and strengthening the bicycle infrastructure. Many projects were carried out in preparation for the Olympics.

“The challenge was to ensure that this cycle network was built for the Olympic Games,” said François Wouts, director of the city’s Roads and Transport Department. “Therefore, an ambition linked to reaching each of the competition sites, but also to be able to serve the whole.”

As Los Angeles prepares to host the Olympics in 2028, Paris city officials say L.A. should make strides toward better bicycle infrastructure.

“I think that in Los Angeles there must be roads sized very largely and on which we could certainly take a little space of the volumes to the automobile and reallocate it to soft travel like the bicycle, like what we finally did in Paris,” said Christophe Najdovski, the Deputy Mayor of Paris in charge of greening public spaces, green spaces and biodiversity.

Photo by Svetlana Gumerova on Unsplash

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Paris Is Becoming a Cycling City, for Better or Worse

From CNTraveler.com

On a sunny afternoon this spring, I rode a bike from Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the sixth arrondissement to Châtelet in the first to meet a friend. The feeling of sliding along the Seine was incredible—wind against my skin, the fresh feeling that comes with breezing past a body of water—until I reached my destination, where I stumbled upon the usual scene: four cyclists struggling to return their rides to a completely full bike rental station. Another biker and I spent 15 minutes finding another station with free spots—and another 15 to walk back to the first station, near where we had to be. We complained, but simply had to laugh. How typical this had become, just another Sunday for the cyclists of Paris.

Short or big, rusty or brand-new, sometimes with a ringing bell that alerts and annoys, bicycles are inescapable in the capital. This epitome of Frenchness, often associated with rather stereotyped Parisian accessories—up there with the baguette, the béret, and the Marinière shirt (that striped pattern, you know the one)—has become indispensable in the City of Light. As the city has been increasing its investment to make Paris more bike-friendly, the use of bikes by Parisians (about 11% of commutes) surpassed the use of cars (about 4%) for the first time in 2023, according to the Institut Paris Région, a research center for urban development in the the Île-de-France region.

Photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash

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More people travel by bicycle than by car in Paris, according to new report

From MomentumMag.com

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