This is an installment of Pandemic Purchases, a special series of personal essays about the items bought in the last year that brought the most value and joy to our lives and work while living in lockdown.
During France’s first national lockdown last March, a period which feels at once like a distant memory and a fresh trauma, I knew within the first few days of paranoid scrolling what my deconfinement (end of lockdown) purchase would be.
Every morning, as the streets hushed and birds chirped in what seemed like surround sound, I’d sip my coffee and follow my friend Elie Obeid on Instagram as he traversed an empty Paris by bike making deliveries for Flying Circus, a bakery-turned-delivery service. As one of few categories of workers permitted to circulate on the streets of Paris at that time, Obeid had the city to himself. The uneven cobblestones of the Champs-Elysées unfurled before him as his, and only his, terrain. He pedaled leisurely down the avenue, circled a desolate Place de la Concorde and continued over to an eerily deserted Rue de Rivoli, a thoroughfare normally choked by car traffic that runs in front of the Louvre. Not even in the darkest hours of night has the French capital ever appeared so still and peaceful.
The sound of my friend’s racing bike rolling smoothly against the concrete was a healing incantation, evidence of life outside; evidence of a city thriving without all the usual bodies and vehicles to pollute it. With every stretch of open street he shared, the greater the thrill for me as I imagined having a bike of my own to cruise across Paris. I imagined getting out onto the road, reviving my stiff and underused legs and reveling in some form of what my friend must have felt for three months: freedom. The city wouldn’t be quite so empty by the time I’d purchase a bike and get comfortable but I was eager not only to rediscover my home in an entirely new way, but also settle an unquiet mind after sequestering in a mix of terror and hypochondria.
The end of lockdown in May 2020 was a new beginning: I vowed never to take outdoor time for granted, whether that was watching the Canal Saint-Martin’s lone swan show off or escaping the city for an afternoon of hiking in the Fontainebleau Forest, 45 miles south of Paris. And I vowed to be less dependent on public transportation which was overcrowded and often unpleasant even in the best of times.
Still, the question remained: why did it take me fifteen years of living in Paris and a pandemic to get my own bike? The barriers to biking I had built in my mind were built on fear: of getting hurt, of getting stranded with a flat tire or a faulty break, of getting inordinately attached to the thing and having it stolen under my nose (bicycle theft in Paris is rampant, reportedly up 62% from 2019).
I often think back to an incident in 2007, shortly after the Vélib bike-share program rolled out across the city. A leisurely Sunday stroll through the Marais was disrupted by the urgent, wailing honk of the 96 bus as it came dangerously close to a helmet-less Vélib rider, who, in my recollection, was joyriding as if she were alone on the road. Ten seconds later, the rider was sprawled out in the middle of the Rue de Turenne, partially covered by the bus. I never learned whether the woman survived but it made me think twice about abandoning my metro card for a bike—borrowed or otherwise—as long as there was more work to be done to establish road awareness among drivers, cyclists, and even pedestrians.
But as my group of friends has broadened in recent years to include avid cyclists who only take public transport if absolutely necessary and regularly head out of the city for long rides, my tune began to change. For one, they reminded me how differently they experience the city. I also didn’t need to feel capable of riding from home to the outskirts of Paris right away, they assured me. I could work my way up to longer distances. Finally, I was reassured by the city’s radical transformation into a much safer place to bike. Since 2015, the city has invested 150 million euros (approximately $178 million) in its transformation into a Scandi-style cycling capital. The 50km (31 miles) of additional, COVID-prompted bike lanes have become a memorialized cycle playground, currently being made permanent by Mayor Hidalgo who is more than happy to let this crisis accelerate her plan to eradicate cars from the city (and I can’t blame her). The government also ran a 20-million-euro ($23.8 million) package to promote cycling which included 50-euro ($60) grants for bike maintenance and repairs.
With the pandemic reinforcing my desire for distance, I went straight to Le Peloton café in Paris, run by Paul Barron and Christian Osburn of Bike About Tours. They sold me a slightly used Dutch bike that they had purchased in 2019 for their rapidly expanding fleet—a sign of booming business. When tourism shriveled, they knew it made more sense to give the bikes new homes than keep them locked up in a garage for what could be a frightening amount of time without clients. Paul gave me a crash course in caring for the bike, outfitted me with a quality helmet and lock, and sent me on my way.
With more dedicated lanes and without the usual density of tourists (and their Lime scooters) to share the road with, my adaptation to urban biker has been relatively smooth. Thanks to my bike (currently nameless but I’m accepting recommendations), I have become one more awakened soul and a valuable statistic to prove the efficacy of the mayor’s vision for Paris. But more than that, I feel a renewed connection to my city. All it took was a global calamity to bring this need into sharp relief.