The episode in detail
The Velo-City congress: how Paris tipped the debate towards urban planning
Velo-City is the international congress organised by the ECF (European Cyclists’ Federation), based in Brussels, which lobbies the European Commission on cycling. Before the Paris edition, the format stayed technical: cycle track widths, surfacing, signage. Engineers’ subjects. Isabelle Lesens, appointed director of the Paris congress, imposed a shift: treating cycling as a tool for urban transformation. The question was no longer “how wide should the track be” but “how does cycling transform the city”. This repositioning continued through every subsequent edition.
An improvised bid, a result that marked the congress
Paris’s bid to host Velo-City was put together in a rush, shortly after Bertrand Delanoë’s election. The file, written under difficult conditions, was not brilliant. Paris won for a simple reason: it was Paris. But the execution went far beyond the promise.
“We took these congresses through an intellectual turning point. We globalised the whole thing. And it became what it became.”
Isabelle put together a scientific committee of established urban planners, brought in radio journalist Teddy Follenfant to host the plenaries (against the accountants’ wishes), and secured an exclusive preview of the trailer for The Triplets of Belleville, still unreleased in cinemas at the time. The SNCF, which had offered covers for dismantled bikes, was redirected towards making work towels that clip onto the bike, an item congress-goers used for years afterwards. The RATP hosted an evening at a tram depot in Issy-les-Moulineaux.
Two-way cycle tracks: why Paris is getting it wrong
Isabelle Lesens is critical of Paris’s current cycling infrastructure. Her main criticism concerns two-way cycle tracks running alongside roads, which have become the norm in Paris. In a dense urban fabric with junctions every 50 to 100 metres, she considers this layout a “total heresy”.
“Two-way tracks in a very dense urban fabric, with countless junctions, don’t work. It’s extremely complicated to manage, so it doesn’t get managed.”
She does draw distinctions, though: she was the one who built Paris’s first two-way track, along the Seine at Bercy, where the linear layout made sense. In the 15th arrondissement, where she sits as an elected councillor, she systematically opposes two-way tracks. The Boulevard du Général, Paris’s longest two-way cycle track, illustrates the approach’s failure, in her view: imposed despite the district council’s opposition, it produces regular collisions.
Junctions: the blind spot of Paris’s cycling infrastructure
Beyond two-way tracks, Isabelle points to a structural problem: junctions are never dealt with properly. Cycle tracks stop or deteriorate at intersections, even though these are the most dangerous points in the network.
“The weak points are the junctions. And those are never dealt with. In plenty of places, it’s Russian roulette every time.”
She also accuses the city council of chasing mileage figures at the expense of quality. More tracks do not mean better infrastructure. And because Paris is the capital, its choices get copied across France, including the bad ones. Isabelle does acknowledge one improvement, though: a dedicated cycling engineering team now exists, competent and listened to, which was not the case ten years ago.
From temporary cycle tracks to the suburbs: how cycle tracks widened the range
Despite her criticism, Isabelle notes that the infrastructure has transformed cycling habits. Under the Tibéri mandate, the first cycle lanes had already doubled the distance she would naturally travel by bike. With today’s cycle tracks and the temporary cycle tracks made permanent, she no longer hesitates to cross Paris or ride as far as Saint-Denis, Sceaux or Villejuif.
“Before, an ordinary Parisian never cycled out to the suburbs. Now, with the temporary cycle tracks that remain, I don’t hesitate to go quite far.”
This matches what many cyclists across the Paris region report: even imperfect continuity in the network frees up uses nobody anticipated.
60 years of cycling: from the forest to custom-built
Isabelle’s passion for cycling goes back to her teenage years. In her next-to-last year of secondary school, she went out cycling in the forest almost every evening, for the silence and to hear nature settling down for the night. The arrival of traffic noise broke that ritual. Years later, out of work, she rediscovered cycling out of necessity: the unemployment office was too far to walk to. Her first town bike led to her first cycling trip, where she found that a women’s bike slowed her down compared with her travelling companions. She then had a custom bike built, which she kept for 35 years, until a careless mechanic destroyed it. Its replacement: another custom-built bike, the second chapter of the same love story.
“When I think about the first one, I cry. Everyone who loves cycling talks about their bike the way they’d talk about their wife. It’s something very powerful.”
