PARIS
DISPATCH
As Bikers Throng the Streets, ‘It’s Like Paris Is
in Anarchy’
An ecologically minded experiment to make Paris a
cycling capital of Europe has led to a million people now pedaling daily — and
to rising tensions with pedestrians.
Liz Alderman
By Liz
Alderman
Oct. 2,
2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/02/world/europe/paris-bicyles-france.html
PARIS — On
a recent afternoon, the Rue de Rivoli looked like this: Cyclists blowing
through red lights in two directions. Delivery bike riders fixating on their
cellphones. Electric scooters careening across lanes. Jaywalkers and nervous
pedestrians scrambling as if in a video game.
Sarah
Famery, a 20-year resident of the Marais neighborhood, braced for the tumult.
She looked left, then right, then left and right again before venturing into a
crosswalk, only to break into a rant-laden sprint as two cyclists came within
inches of grazing her.
“It’s
chaos!” exclaimed Ms. Famery, shaking a fist at the swarm of bikes that have
displaced cars on the Rue de Rivoli ever since it was remade into a multilane
highway for cyclists last year. “Politicians want to make Paris a cycling city,
but no one is following any rules,” she said. “It’s becoming risky just to
cross the street!”
The mayhem
on Rue de Rivoli — a major traffic artery stretching from the Bastille past the
Louvre to the Place de la Concorde — is playing out on streets across Paris as
the authorities pursue an ambitious goal of making the city a European cycling
capital by 2024.
Mayor Anne
Hidalgo, who is campaigning for the French presidency, has been burnishing her
credentials as an ecologically minded Socialist candidate. She has earned
admirers and enemies alike with a bold program to transform greater Paris into
the world’s leading environmentally sustainable metropolis, reclaiming vast
swaths of the city from cars for parks, pedestrians and a Copenhagen-style
cycling revolution.
She has
made highways along the Seine car-free and last year, during coronavirus
lockdowns, oversaw the creation of over 100 miles of new bike paths. She plans
to limit cars in 2022 in the heart of the city, along half of the Right Bank
and through the Boulevard Saint Germain.
Parisians
have heeded the call: A million people in a metropolis of 10 million are now
pedaling daily. And Paris now ranks among the world’s top 10 cycling cities,
But with
success has come major growing pains.
“It’s like
Paris is in anarchy,” said Jean-Conrad LeMaitre, a former banker who was out
for a stroll recently along the Rue de Rivoli. “We need to reduce pollution and
improve the environment,” he said. “But everyone is just doing as they please. There
are no police, no fines, no training and no respect.”
At City
Hall, the people in charge of the transformation acknowledged the need for
solutions to the flaring tensions, and to the accidents and even deaths that
have resulted from the free-for-all on the streets. Anger over reckless
electric scooter use in particular boiled over after a 31-year-old woman was
killed this summer in a hit-and-run along the Seine.
“We are in
the midst of a new era where bikes and pedestrians are at the heart of a policy
to fight climate change,” said David Belliard, Paris’s deputy mayor for
transportation and the point person overseeing the metamorphosis. “But it’s
only recently that people started using bikes en masse, and it will take time
to adapt.”
Mr.
Belliard hopes Parisians can be coaxed into complying with laws, in part by
adding more police to hand out 135 euro fines ($158) to unruly cyclists and by
teaching school children about bike safety. Electric scooters have been
restricted to a speed of 10 kilometers an hour (just over 6 m.p.h.) in crowded
areas, and could be banned by the end of 2022 if dangerous use doesn’t stop.
The city
also plans talks with delivery companies like Uber Eats, whose couriers are paid
per delivery and are some of the biggest offenders when it comes to breaking
traffic rules. “Their economic model is part of the problem,” Mr. Belliard
said.
Probably
the biggest challenge, though, is that Paris doesn’t yet have an ingrained
cycling culture.
The abiding
French sense of “liberté” is on display in the streets at all hours, where
Parisians young and old jaywalk at nearly every opportunity. They appear to
have carried that freewheeling spirit to their bikes.
“In
Denmark, which has a decades-long cycling culture, the mentality is, ‘Don’t go
if the light is red,’” said Christine Melchoir, a Dane who has lived in Paris
for 30 years and commutes daily by bike. “But for a Parisian, the mentality is,
‘Do it!’”
Urban
planners say better cycling infrastructure could help tame bad behavior.
Copenhagen
— the model that Paris aspires to — has efficient layouts for cycling paths
that allow bikes, pedestrians and cars to coexist within a hierarchy of space.
Citizens are taught from a young age to follow rules of the road.
In Paris,
parts of the 1,000-kilometer citywide cycling network (about 620 miles) can
steer bikers into hazardous interactions with cars, pedestrians and other
cyclists. At the Bastille, a once-enormous traffic circle that was partly
appropriated from cars, a tangle of bike lanes weave through traffic. Cyclists
who respect signals can take up to four minutes to cross.
“Paris has
the right ideas and they’re absolutely the main city to watch on the planet,
because no one is near them for their general urban transformation visions,”
said Mikael Colville-Andersen, a Copenhagen-based urban designer who advises
cities on integrating cycling into urban transport.
“But the
infrastructure is like spaghetti,” he continued. “It’s chaotic, it doesn’t
connect up and there’s no cohesive network. If you can get that right, it will
eliminate a lot of confusion.”
Mr.
Belliard, the deputy mayor, said Paris would soon unveil a blueprint to improve
infrastructure. But for now, the tumult continues. On a recent afternoon, eight
cyclists ran a red light en masse on the Boulevard de Sébastopol, a major
north-south artery. Wary pedestrians cowered until one dared to try crossing,
causing a near pileup.
Back on the
Rue de Rivoli, cyclists swerved to avoid pedestrians playing a game of chicken
with oncoming bikes. “Pay attention!” a cyclist in a red safety vest and
goggles shouted at three women crossing against a red light, as he nearly
crashed in the rain.
Cyclists
say Paris hasn’t done enough to make bike commuting safe. Bike accidents jumped
35 percent last year, from 2019. Paris en Selle, a cycling organization, has
held protests calling for road security after several cyclists were killed in
collisions with motorists, including, recently, a 2-year-old boy riding with
his father who was killed near the Louvre when a truck turned into them.
A small but
growing number of cyclists say they’re too nervous to ride anymore.
“I’m afraid
of being crushed,” said Paul Michel Casabelle, 44, a superintendent at the
Maison de Danmark, a Danish cultural institute.
On a recent
Sunday, Ingrid Juratowitch had to talk her daughter Saskia safely across bike
lanes near the Saint Paul metro station while she held her two other young
daughters at a safe distance from the street.
“Be
careful, there are bikes coming from the left and right,” said Ms. Juratowitch,
who has lived in Paris for 14 years. She is increasingly reluctant to let her
children walk to school for fear of reckless riders. “There’s another one
coming. OK, now you can go!”
“From an
environmental point of view, we don’t want to see the city go back to cars,”
Ms. Juratowitch said. “But it’s not safe. It’s as if bikes and pedestrians
don’t know how to coexist.”
Saskia, 12,
chimed in. “It’s not the bikes, it’s the bikers,” she said. “They think the
rules apply to everyone except them.”
Liz
Alderman is the Paris-based chief European business correspondent, covering
economic and inequality challenges around Europe. She was previously an
assistant business editor, and spent five years as the business editor of what
was The International Herald Tribune. @LizAldermanNYT
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