Biking the Loire: A peek at seemingly simple French bike-friendliness

Part of what made the Loire bike ride so enjoyable was the bike-friendliness of everything beyond the marked route.

I usually stick to writing about the ride, but this time I wanted to also flag some of the ways the towns and roads have been made so easy and safe to bike.

Take, for example, the photo at the top. We saw this all over Tours, in Saumur … basically on lots of one-way streets. That red circle with the white bar is the European symbol for one way, do not enter. And then there is that second sign: except bicycles.

I can hear all those people sputtering “but, but … you can’t do that! I was taught to only ride in the same direction as traffic!” And I’m not saying it works everywhere. But on low-speed roads, even in a city of 135,000 like Tours, a contraflow bike lane does. (And yes, there generally was a demarcated lane for those cyclists.)

The result? It made it so easy to get around … and we saw so many people using bikes for their daily needs.

Now I get that this might be a hard lift in the U.S. But what about these other ideas?

This road has a different twist. Just one car lane for traffic going in either direction! Drivers move to the side –into the sharrows — to pass each other, but otherwise those sharrows signal bike lane, thanks to the different pavement color. Again, low speeds.

I’ve seen something similar by Princeton University’s graduate college.

Next…

This seemed like a cheap way to slow traffic on empty country roads: little bump-outs to create a pinch point. Drivers have to move to the center, which means they generally have to slow down.

But because the bump-outs are offset from the curb, cyclists can continue straight.

Sometimes we saw these being used to buffer parking spots. Other times they were used to narrow the road at a pedestrian crossing, which both slowed traffic and created a pedestrian refuge island.

Would the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Federal Highway Administration and the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices approve? Or deem all this hostile to cars?

Beyond the roads, how about these large protected bike parking cages in the middle of a residential neighborhood? That’s in addition to similar locked parking areas at train stations and the bike racks at the end of our little street.