Biclou, episode 31 - Would cyclists melt with bad weather?
At the end of September and the beginning of October in Paris, when long hot and sunny days gave way to more dreary and rainy weeks, some internet users worried about hopelessly empty cycle paths.
As the General Delegate of the 40 Millions d'Automobilistes Pierre Chasseray association in a rather pessimistic tweet:
The cold arrives and the bikes disappear to the rhythm of the declining mercury.
Only a few downtown bobos remain proud of their desperately empty cycle paths alongside dying shops.
Our cities are becoming ecolobobos ghettos with a superior air ...
- Pierre Chasseray (@PChasseray) October 5, 2020
Deserted cycle streets on bad weather days?
Others relayed photos and videos of a desperately gray and empty street in Rivoli:
Can we have the rue de Rivoli cycle counter on Monday, September 28?
Just for info ... pic.twitter.com/tX5eKrxq6o
- DELARUE Emmanuel ♦ ️ 😷 (@DELARUEEm) September 28, 2020
September 28, 2020, the day that @Anne_Hidalgo discovers that Parisians ride their bikes when the weather is good and that on rainy, cold days, i.e. half the year, the street of #Rivoli will be deserted and deserted, for the most great joy for traders, cafes, etc.
Astonishing, no?
https://t.co/wK0E2xAbTA
- jean-michel aphatie (@jmaphatie) September 28, 2020
The rue de Rivoli, emblematic artery of the capital, once a temple of the car and now largely devoted to cycling, is said to have been drastically emptied of its cyclists.
All that would remain is a sad empty street and traders injured by the municipality's pro-bike shift.
“I invite these people to film roads where there are no cars.
Or better yet, train tracks, which are empty almost all the time.
But do we remove them for all that?
No, annoys Stein van Oosteren, spokesperson for the Collectif Vélo Île-de-France, and look, it's raining, there are no pedestrians on the sidewalk, are we going to remove it? ?
Especially since these few sequences and pictures captured on the spot by Internet users do not say much about the extent of the decline in cycling in rainy weather.
A drop in attendance of around 20 to 35% when it rains
So what do the numbers say?
To get a better idea, we collected and analyzed traffic data for 3 Parisian cycle paths: Boulevard de Magenta, Rue de Rivoli and Voie Georges-Pompidou.
These figures were gathered on the mornings of September 2020, from 8 a.m. to noon, from the data recorded by the bicycle counters of the City of Paris.
- 1st place studied: the north-south axis of Boulevard Magenta.
There, we observe 28% fewer cyclists when it rains
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- 2nd measurement point: on rue de Rivoli, there when it rains, there are -34% of cyclists on the east-west axis.
In the opposite direction, this decrease amounts to -20%.
- 3rd place, the Georges-Pompidou route, where we observe a drop of about 29% in the north-south direction and 31% in the reverse direction
This sample of data thus indicates to us that the drop in frequentation of cycle paths in rainy weather would rather be of the order of 20 to 35%, far from the massive desertion feared by some.
This slight decrease is nevertheless part of a context of strong increase in cycling in the capital.
Parisian counters recorded a 120% increase in the use of the slopes between September and March 2020. A practice facilitated by the deployment of 170 km of “coronapistes” in Île-de-France after the 1st deconfinement.
"There is no bad weather, only bad clothes"
A recent scientific publication also makes it possible to relativize the impact of the rain on the habits of pedal enthusiasts in Paris.
The study analyzes weather data from several French cities in order to understand how often we get really wet when cycling to work.
Verdict: in Paris, for a trip home to office of about 30 minutes, or 9 km, 5 days a week, cyclists are wet only 27 times a year.
This is less than the 35 wet journeys of the people of Lille (59), a little more than the 15 wet days of the vélotafeurs de Marignane (13).
And it is very far from Brestois, soaked 51 times a year.
For the spokesperson for the Collectif Vélo Île-de-France, rain or not, everything is a question of good habits.
“We equip ourselves.
There is no bad weather, only bad clothes.
When you go skiing you don't complain about the snow.
No, because you are equipped, ”Stein van Oosteren smiles.
Find a new episode of our Biclou series every week on the Parisian's Facebook page.