Climate News 25:22
Contrary to historical stereotypes, the French are polite.
I’ve just spent 4 weeks cycling through the cities and countryside of France observing and thinking about the interaction between cyclists and cars, and it’s a very different culture to what we’re used to in Australia. Rather than playing “let’s see how close we can get to the cyclist at speed”, French drivers tended to drive slower, give more room and actually stopped to let us cross when we were waiting at the side of the road, regardless of whether there was a marked crossing. This took some getting used to. It’s not that France has Dutch or Danish levels of cycling infrastructure, though it is improving rapidly. It’s more that there seems to be a recognition that sharing the road is a “thing”. It reminded me of Cambridge, where I used to live; there, the infrastructure wasn’t a patch on the Netherlands, but the sheer number of cyclists forced car drivers to adjust. Also noticeable was that most cars are still small by comparison to the Australian tank, allowing for easier eye contact with cyclists at points of contention, and that about half of the bikes on the road were e-bikes (with a healthy proportion of cargo bikes). This suggests people who may not traditionally have thought of themselves as cyclists (e.g. older people, families) are swapping four wheels for two, further diversifying French road sharing culture. This is not to suggest everything is perfect. Parisian shared road culture (as opposed to the growing off-road network) favours the aggressive cyclist willing to stare down traffic, but because car speeds are generally slow it’s definitely rideable. By the time I finally saw a school street in action at the end of the trip, I was so used to seeing the cyclists everywhere confidently sharing the road with cars, the picture of parents picking up children from school on their bikes on a closed street looked like the most normal thing in the world.
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