Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

The great Parisian bike boom

Okay, so this dataset isn’t the most recent, but it’s interesting nonetheless. At the end of 2023, Le Monde reported that Paris had seen a doubling of cycling traffic compared to the year before. For a typical week and based on 128 sensor locations across the city, this is what that increase looked like between October 2022 and 2023:

But the data gets even more interesting when you compare it to vehicular traffic. Here’s vehicular traffic vs. cycling traffic for three principal boulevards in the city, namely l’avenue de Flandre, le boulevard Voltaire and le boulevard Magenta:

These three boulevards were chosen because they all have bi-directional lanes for both cars and bikes, meaning they roughly privilege both forms of mobility equally. And what you are seeing in the above chart is that bike traffic exceeds car traffic by fairly large margins during peak weekday periods.

This is a mobility accomplishment that benefits both cyclists and drivers.


Charts via Le Monde

One response to “The great Parisian bike boom”

  1. Kurt Wallace Avatar
    Kurt Wallace

    Hi Brandon,
    I ran a bike consulting company for a long time, working with major employers like Google around the country. I love how you’ve kept your fingers on this key change in Paris in recent year. We were just there around the same time as you and noticed how these trends have deepened since the Olympics – your charts above would be even more profound, I’m sure. Thanks for your eye on this aspect of why Paris kicks ass.

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