I bought a bicycle so I could move around Paris without risk from COVID-19. A month in, I’m not sure the safety tradeoff is working in my favor.
Paris, it turns out, is no Amsterdam. While Mayor Anne Hidalgo has opened many new bike lanes and so have surrounding suburbs, many are just lines on the street, not exclusive lanes with a divider. Sometimes they just disappear in mid-road.
All kinds of other traffic shows up in them,
Or blocks them,
Or occupies them with other modes of transportation.
Bikes are also easily stolen, as you can see in this amazing video report from Le Parisien. The journalist locks the bike in a high-theft neighborhood, watches it get stolen and tracks it down. Don’t try this at home, at least not if you live in Paris.
I was undeterred. Even though masks are required on trains and buses, and even though the seats on both are disinfected regularly, I preferred to rather travel solo. Which pretty much means a bicycle, since we are carless. I got a good deal at a place recommended by a Dutch friend.
The ride home – the store was across town — was exciting. Unlike driving a car in Paris, which I’d learned to do by trial and error, I had no instinct for cycling. When to be bold, when to shrink back. Early on, I mostly shrank back. Neither cars nor other cyclists seemed to care where I was or what I was doing. Cars were passing by six inches from my knee. Once I found myself in a bike lane that was occupied by cars – going in the other direction!
I tried to use the same principle as in driving: Follow the crowd.
Once the panic started to subside over the following weeks, I realized my bike was a wonderful way to stop thinking about the deluge of bad news. On Sunday, France reported more than 52,000 new COVID-19 infections. That’s more than half the latest figure for the out-of-control U.S., which has five times the population.
And France is reeling from the brutal knife killing of a junior-high-school teacher by an 18-year-old Chechen refugee, a Muslim. The refugee, inflamed by Islamist activists angry that the teacher had shown the class cartoons of a defiled Prophet Mohammed as part of a course on free speech, was himself killed by police. The government has cracked down, either too much or not enough, depending on your point of view.
And then there is the looming U.S. presidential election. Enough said.
On a recent Saturday, I decided to ride my bike around much of northern Paris, to see how navigable it was and to test my skills. Even on a weekend, there were plenty of obstacles.
Traffic was so bad in one intersection, in eastern Paris, that riders had to get off to get through.
Heading south from there, the road was blocked to traffic. How nice! I thought. They must have done it for the bicycles.
It turns out, though, that there was a demonstration. It was Saturday, I should have seen that coming. As usual, there were as many cops as demonstrators. But it did mean another dismount.
It was clear sailing after that. I took a straight shot along the rue de Rivoli, which is closed to most car traffic now, and up the Champs-Elysées, which had a very well demarcated bike lane. The whole trip took only an hour and a quarter, including picture-taking stops. (Another reminder of what a small city Paris is)
As I’ve gotten used to biking, I’m also enjoying its recreational and exercise aspects. A bike trip to the Bois de Boulogne, in western Paris, proved to be a totally safe expedition, especially on a gray, rainy Sunday when almost no one else was out and car traffic was prohibited. And the fall foliage was a balm to the spirit.
So was a stop on the way home: To the bakery, for a fresh baguette. Transported à vélo, of course.
