New Study Shows How Paris Pedaled Its Way to a Cycling Revolution | Momentum Mag

Not long ago, Paris was known for its traffic jams, not its bike culture. The city’s grand boulevards were lined with honking taxis, delivery vans, and inching commuters. Cycling through central Paris meant weaving between buses and scooters—a bold choice reserved for the fearless few.

Fast forward to today, and the transformation is astonishing. The French capital has quietly—and quickly—become one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world. What started as a series of emergency “coronapistes,” or pop-up bike lanes, built during the pandemic has evolved into a permanent cycling network spanning hundreds of kilometres. Paris is now a place where parents ferry kids to school by cargo bike, where commuters glide past the Seine on protected lanes, and where the sound of gears clicking often replaces the blare of horns.

And the numbers prove it’s more than a passing trend. A new study reveals that cycling traffic in Paris has increased by 240% between 2018 and 2023, while car traffic has steadily declined. In central districts, more than one in ten trips are now made by bike—a remarkable shift for a metropolis once synonymous with gridlock.

“Paris is an incredible example of how a city can transform when political will meets smart data,” says one of the report’s lead authors. “We wanted to understand exactly which factors made this happen.”

#cycling #paris

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New Study Shows How Paris Pedaled Its Way to a Cycling Revolution

^{Ron Johnson (Momentum Mag)}