bicycling in Paris

Here’s a custom, and a “don’t” - twenty-seven years ago, we enrolled in a weeklong bike tour with Blue Marble, which I don’t think is operating any more. We started off riding through downtown Paris, heading eventually for the Champagne region. We were told by the group leader to follow him, and not stop, even when we were riding through an enormous, uncontrolled intersection, at morning rush hour. Traffic initially kept its distance as the group pedaled in a line, but then as the last person in the group made his way through, one car started driving AT him, but we later learned the driver had planned to pass one tenth of a second after he biked past, missing him by a centimeter. He stopped on his bike, in traffic, certain that the car wasn’t going to stop.

Well, the car did stop, mere inches from the bicyclist, which held up traffic for everybody, although nobody got run over, either. Although this was nearly 30 years ago, my guess is this custom is still in place, and the “rule” is in effect even more nowadays than back then: on a bike, Don’t stop - hold your ground, and rest assured that no car will make a good ornament of you. Keep riding at a steady, predictable pace, Just don’t be surprised when cars seem to be heading at you; they are actually heading just barely to the side of you.

After that, we’ve never ridden in downtown Paris again, but did rent bikes at Versailles, which was the perfect way to tour the grounds around the palace, and cover a lot of it.

Yes, there are organized bicycle tours. We took one by Paris Charms and Secrets and enjoyed the stories they told us as well as the places we saw (although it was 4 years ago). We took it on Sunday so there was probably less traffic.

You cannot bicycle in parks -- I saw a couple of smug tourists with those tweedly little tiny wheeled suitcase bikes get pulled over and ticketed in the Luxembourg Gardens. You certainly cannot bike on the Coulee Vert which is often a rather narrow walking path. I see bikes on the metro but it is difficult and pretty abusive to everyone else and of course you have to carry them up and down stairs. More common to see bikes on the RER.

You can look for French Mystique. He is an American expat who offers private bike tours in the countryside as well as customized tours in Paris.

https://www.frenchmystiquetours.com/all-our-tours

Bicycles or scooters are not allowed in the Metro, bus, or tram with the exception of folded bikes and scooters.

Bicycles can use the bus lanes in Paris, but the bicyclists go the speed of the buses. Bicycling in the city has evolved in the past thirty years, but these are city cyclists getting to work and elsewhere, not road cyclists.