Navigating Paris After Two Weeks

I came here on a bike loaded for wilderness-level touring. I couldn’t help it, because that’s the load-out I used in Iceland and the bike has been stored in a basement, untouched, since the Iceland tour finished almost two years ago. When I got here – to a rented apartment on Rue de la Fontaine au Roi – I stripped all the bags and gear off the bike and threw them in a closet, and have been going around with nothing but a phone, some Airpods, a house key, and a very sturdy bike lock.

Parisians seem to love the recumbent. Of the thousands of bicycles I’ve seen so far in the city, I haven’t seen a single recumbent, so it gets a lot of commentary. I understand why it would be rare: Paris has turned out to be what I would call an “expert level” place for bicycling, much more so than any other giant city I’ve been to in Europe, and you need to be very good on a recumbent to avoid injury in a place like this. Relatively speaking, Amsterdam, Brussels, Hamburg, Copenhagen, and London are all easier.

Back in the US, I’d say New York is relatively easy, and so is most of Boston and Chicago. In terms of danger I’d say that Paris is not top of the list – downtown LA occupies that spot for me so far – but it’s a strong second place. It’s not fear of deliberate violence I’m talking about, but the risk of accident, from the sheer press of people and the contempt they show for the rules. And it bears repeating: This is Europe. I have yet to experience bicycle touring in, for example, Rio de Janeiro or Bangkok. I’m sure Paris would be way down the list by then.

The weather is perfect, but the air quality is pretty bad. I’ve noticed that smog laws in Paris are treated as suggestions, especially by people on ancient scooters and mopeds. While biking around I’ve encountered entire city blocks that stink of car exhaust to the point of making me feel physically ill.

And I’ve gone to believe that the French take a dim view of laws and government in general, which I suppose is great where personal freedom is involved but is also a barrier to organization and urban planning, even daily logistics:

Will a shop respect its own posted hours? Maybe. Will you get warning when a street is closed for construction? Maybe. Will the bus actually stop where the schedule says? Maybe. Will the postman deliver your package? Maybe. Will there be a bike lane? Maybe. Will it be on the left, right, or middle or the street? Take a wild guess! Will there be a delivery truck parked right on top of it? Maybe. Will the train be on time? Maybe. What platform will it arrive on? Nobody knows until 20 minutes before it’s due to leave, ever, even if that train line has been operating for years, and even then it may be wrong.

Every intersection is a free-for-all hash of bicycles, people, cars, and scooters. Crosswalks are a suggestion. Crosswalk signals are less than a suggestion; they are ignored. On the other hand, people almost never honk their horns regardless of the thickness of the snarl or who is technically at fault, because the response they are most likely to get is, “screw you, this is France.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. What sort of organization would I expect, from a nation whose most truly defining era is still the French Revolution? Where laws, for the vast majority of its history, were used to funnel wealth upwards first – into the laps of clergy and kings – and organize people second? The nation I come from owes an incalculable debt to the same thinkers and activists that drove the French Revolution, and the influence shows, but I get the impression that the French had to swing a lot harder to knock their tyrants off their posts, and that impact is still echoing around in the culture here.

That’s a cerebral place to go, starting from a description of the air and the traffic… No doubt it’s subjective and I’ll have other impressions as the days continue.