CITY Issue 51

CITY LIFE THE CITY LIFE Pedal Pushers Paris’s new free bicycle program has been hailed as a model for curbing urban congestion and cutting carbon emissions. But can these bikes also change the way we experience the City of Light? Anna McDonald takes ‘Vélib’ for a ride. THERE ARE NEARLY 11,000 NEW BICYCLES IN PARIS, AND I’VE ridden six of them. It was the sixth one that almost ended me. Or rather, I almost ended myself by way of it. Or, the swarthy man in the big Audi almost ended the both us, together. He had a look that The Economist once ascribed to Rush Limbaugh— the look of a man who eats steak for breakfast. I was casually crossing from the western entrance of the garden at Tuileries to the stone-paved mile leading to the Champs-Élysées. It was dusk, my last day in Paris, and the vista in front of me rendered itself too enveloping to notice anything in the periphery, least not big black sedans crossing the Concorde on their way to big dinners on Faubourg Saint-Honoré. I had gotten too comfortable on my bike to be afraid. He missed me by four inches, honked me off the road, and skidded me into an uneven construction site next to, of all places, the Paris Automobile Club, where bejeweled Alfa-Romeo and Renault lovers gathered to enjoy sundown apertifs. I stopped to tend my scuffed elbow and knee. They looked at me, indifferent. Vélib—the term a neological conflation of velo, for bicycle, and liberte, for freedom—launched this summer as a green initiative from the office of Socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoe, who is a long-time advocate for transportation alternatives, a survivor of an assassination attempt, and the first openly gay mayor of Paris. I had wanted to try these bikes for a year or more, ever since I heard they were coming, mostly because I come from a city where bikes aren’t free. My first bike in New York, a cheap Schwinn from a Long Island Target, was heisted piece by piece by what I imagine to have been a band of tween hoodlums in the East Village. My then-boyfriend had been a triathlete, and I had gotten the bike in part because I wanted him to think I was sporty. I wasn’t, but I became another kind of bike rider altogether— the poet kind, who didn’t care one way or the other for increased heart rate, but who, with a well-mounted basket and a keen sense for the romantic, rode for pleasure. Rode because the speed of riding was the perfect speed for seeing things, if not dwelling on them. But when the bike was taken, I never replaced it. Winter was coming. It appeared from time to time in my dreams. It was with this mindset that I arrived, alone, in Paris. Even before I dropped my bags, I walked to the first Vélib station in sight, located conveniently 100 feet from my rented apartment (I hadn’t planned this) on the Rue Saint-Honoré. A young, lithe Frenchwoman perched on one of the parked bikes with a cigarette pursed between her lips. Around her, men in pinstripe suits clicked their bikes into place at the station, snatched their briefcases from wire bike baskets, and darted into nearby apartments. A few people, some tourists, hovered around the station watching those who knew what they were doing. The system is so new that half of the onlookers were Frenchmen. (I could tell by their shoes.) That fact—that there wasn’t much of a learning curve difference between tourists and Parisians—was awakening, and felt rare. You can never know the ins and outs of a place like a local, particularly a French local, masterful and reticent as they are. The locals, of course, are bound to get good at handling them. And the bikes will change, too, gleaming here now in mint condition, aligned just so, with well-greased and intact chains and sturdy unvandalized seats. The bikes are a greytaupe color, a utilitarian color, as if they were saying that they were only there to do their jobs. In an American retail catalogue, the color might be called “European canvas tote bag” or “French earth.” I learned later that the official color is “gris souris nacre,” which, literally translated, means “pearl mouse grey.” And that is its color—and a good name for a city full of them—though I’ve never seen an opalescent mouse. I waited until the following morning to try the Vélib for myself. I got to the station early in case of any problems, which I feared there would be. Rumors abounded on American travel websites about access to the bikes with American credit cards. Without microchips, most of our cards are not recognized by such high-security European machines. With an American Express, one of the only acceptable non-microchip forms of payment, however, I signed up with ease for a day pass. The rides are almost free. All short rides—below 30 minutes—are free, and after that, you pay a few euros an hour. The bikes are meant for short rides; the idea is that you ride the bike to get somewhere, and you leave it at one of the 750 stations nearer to where you’re going. I liked the ease of the system almost immediately. I liked the construction of the bike itself, too: a simple three-speed gear shift, a relatively smooth seat adjustment lever, a good ringing bell that sounds like a cartoon light bulb moment, and a well-squared wire basket. It is only the basket that I worry about surviving, as I nudged one of mine up against a guardrail and watched it suffer an uncomely indenture. Everything else is bonafide sturdy, unsurprising since the bike itself is a relative behemoth, weighing in at nearly 50 pounds. If it’s true that you bring other people’s Paris to Paris with you when you go, then I had toted Henry Miller’s and M.F.K. Fisher’s. I spent my mornings and afternoons biking my way through entire arrondissements, starting with the ones those luminaries inhabited, weaving from street to street, mapless 36 CITY

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CITY Issue 51

Contents Letter from CITY Our Friends Action Wanted City Moment The City Life Fast Food Fit Field Trip The Suite Life Paint the Town Red Fresh Tracks After the Sunset One City, Many Destinations The Winning Photographer The Entries By the Numbers The Finalists Expert Opinion Amateur Hour Meet the Finalists Nowhere Man Dune Raiders Just Go Where To Buy It Socials Icon

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.