VIDEO. No, rain doesn’t empty bike paths

Will cyclists melt due to bad weather? In late September and early October in Paris, as long, hot, sunny days gave way to duller, rainier weeks, some online users expressed concern about desperately empty bike lanes.

As the general representative of the Association of 40 Million Motorists, Pierre Chasseur in a rather pessimistic tweet:

Empty cycling streets on bad weather days?

Others shared photos and videos of a desperately gray and empty street in Rivoli:

The Rue de Rivoli, the capital’s emblematic artery that was once a temple to the automobile and is now largely dedicated to cycling, has suddenly become deserted of cyclists. All that will be left is a sad, empty street and traders affected by the council’s shift towards cycling.

“I invite these people to film roads where there are no cars. Or better yet, train tracks that are empty almost all the time. But will we remove them anyway? No, annoying Stijn van Oosteren, representative of Collectif Vélo Ile-de-France, and look, it’s raining, there are no pedestrians on the sidewalk, are we going to remove it?

Moreover, these few frames and photographs taken on the spot by Internet users say little about the scale of the decline in cycling in rainy weather.

Attendance drops by approximately 20–35% during rain.

So what do the numbers say? To get a better idea, we collected and analyzed data on usage of three Parisian bike paths: Boulevard Magenta, Rue de Rivoli and Voie Georges-Pompidou. These figures were collected on the morning of September 2020, from 8 am to noon, based on data recorded by bicycle counters at the Paris City Hall.

– 1st study location: north-south axis of Magenta Boulevard. There, when it rains, we see 28% fewer cyclists.

– 2nd measurement point: on the Rue de Rivoli, there, when it rains, we register -34% of cyclists on the east-west axis. In the opposite direction, this decrease is -20%.

– 3rd place, Georges-Pompidou route, where we see a drop of approximately 29% in the north-south direction and 31% in the opposite direction.

So this sample of data tells us that the decline in wet weather bike lane use is likely to be on the order of 20-35%, which is a far cry from the mass desertion that some fear.

However, this slight decline comes amid a sharp increase in the number of cyclists in the capital. Parisian counters recorded a 120% increase in slope use between September and March 2020. This practice was facilitated by the deployment of 170 km of “coronapistas” in the Ile-de-France after the first deconfinement.

“There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.”

A recent scientific publication also looks at the impact of rain on the pedaling habits of Parisian riders. The study analyzes weather data from several French cities to understand how often we actually get wet while cycling to work.

Verdict: In Paris, the commute home to the office is about 30 minutes, or 9 km, 5 days a week, cyclists only get wet 27 times a year. This is less than 35 rainy trips in Lille (59), just more than 15 rainy days for passengers in Marignane (13). And this is very far from Brestois, it rains here 51 times a year.

For the Collectif Vélo Ile-de-France representative, whether it rains or not is all a matter of good habits. “We arm ourselves. There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes. When you ski, you don’t complain about the snow. No, because you are equipped,” smiles Stein van Oosteren.

Every week on the Le Parisien Facebook page you will find a new episode of our Biclu series.