Would cyclists melt away with bad weather? At the end of September and beginning of October in Paris, while long hot and sunny days gave way to more dreary and rainy weeks, some Internet users expressed concern about desperately empty cycle paths.
Like the General Delegate of the 40 Million motorists association Pierre Chasseray in a rather pessimistic tweet:
Deserted cycle streets on bad weather days?
Others relayed photos and videos of a desperately gray and empty street in Rivoli:
September 28, 2020, the day @Anne_Hidalgo discovers that Parisians cycle when the weather is nice and that on rainy days, cold, i.e. half the year, the rue de #Rivoli will be deserted and deserted, to the great joy of traders, cafes, etc. Amazing, right? https://t.co/wK0E2xAbTA
— jean-michel aphatie (@jmaphatie) September 28, 2020
Rue de Rivoli, an emblematic artery of the capital, once a temple of the car and now largely devoted to cycling, has been drastically emptied of its cyclists. All that would remain is a sad empty street and traders harmed by the municipality’s pro-cycling shift.
“I invite these people to film roads where there are no cars. Or better, train tracks, which are empty almost all the time. But do we delete them anyway? 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 photos captured on the spot by Internet users do not say much about the extent of the drop 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 attendance data from 3 Parisian cycle paths: Boulevard de Magenta, Rue de Rivoli and Voie Georges-Pompidou. These figures were gathered in the mornings of September 2020, from 8 a.m. to noon, from data recorded by the bicycle counters at Paris City Hall.
– 1st location studied: the north-south axis of Boulevard Magenta. There, we observe 28% fewer cyclists when it rains
– 2nd measurement point: on rue de Rivoli, there when it rains, we record -34% of cyclists on the east-west axis. In the opposite direction, this reduction amounts to -20%.
– 3rd place, the Georges-Pompidou route, where we observe a drop of approximately 29% in the north-south direction and 31% in the opposite direction
This sample of data thus tells us that the drop in use 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 decline nevertheless takes place in a context of a sharp increase in cycling in the capital. Parisian counters recorded a 120% increase in slope attendance between September and March 2020. A practice facilitated by the deployment of 170 km of “coronapistes” in Île-de-France after the first deconfinement.
“There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing”
A recent scientific publication also allows us to put into perspective the impact of rain on the habits of pedal enthusiasts in Paris. The study dissects weather data from several French cities in order to understand how often we actually get wet while cycling to work.
Verdict: in Paris, for a journey home to the office of around 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 Lille (59), a little more than the 15 wet days of Marignane commuters (13). And it’s very far from Brestois, wet 51 times a year.
For the spokesperson for the Collectif Vélo Île-de-France, rain or not, it’s all a question of good habits. “We equip ourselves. There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. When you go skiing you don’t complain about the snow. No, because you are equipped,” smiles Stein van Oosteren.
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