A suburb with sprawling urban planning where the car remains king, Seine-Saint-Denis is seeing more and more cycle paths flourishing along its roads, a timid development of soft mobility accelerated by the holding of the 2024 Olympics.
“The cycling policy for the Olympic Games in Seine-Saint-Denis is a big boost for the creation of cycle paths (...), it has saved several years”, welcomes Louis Belenfant, director of the Collective Vélo Île-de-France, which brings together user associations.
In order to reduce the carbon footprint of the Paris Games, some of the main sites of which are located in Seine-Saint-Denis, the organizers have promised that all competition venues will be accessible by bike. A challenge in Seine-Saint-Denis, a popular department where the bicycle network does not have the network of Paris intramural.
According to a map from the Paris Region Institute, in 2023 Seine-Saint-Denis had 700 kilometers of cycle roads (all types combined) compared to 1.100 for the city of Paris, despite an area representing double the capital. Cycling is also much less widespread there.
In the final sprint of the last months before the Games (July 26 – August 11), cycle paths have grown along certain main axes of Seine-Saint-Denis. On the part of the network for which it is responsible, the departmental council thus carried out the development of 18 kilometers of roads for the Olympic Games, including 10,5 in permanent development and 7,5 in temporary development.
“We had already mobilized during and after the Covid crisis, which had really marked a boom in practice. There we specifically put ourselves in battle order for the JOPs so that we could go to each of the Olympic sites by bike, at the forefront of which are the Stade de France and the Olympic Aquatic Center", located in Saint-Denis, Corentin Duprey, vice-president in charge of mobility at the departmental council, told AFP.
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Local stakeholders swear they have learned the lessons of the “coronapists”, hastily created during the pandemic and which often consisted of traces of paint on the road. Failing to have found their audience, some of them had to be abandoned in the department.
As in Paris, the erosion of roads by cycle paths does not only make people happy. In the spring, a petition was launched on the internet demanding a moratorium on their installation in the town of La Courneuve, which gathered 1.500 signatures.
Its initiators denounce infrastructures that appeared without consultation and are unsuitable for the needs of the territory. Almost empty of cyclists, the targeted paths however generate numerous traffic jams.
“As long as we don't have jobs nearby, a sufficiently solid transport network, we can put in cycle paths, it won't be enough to create a real soft mobility policy (...) People tell us +we need our car+,” says Amine Saha, opposition municipal councilor (DVG) in La Courneuve.
“The baggage handler from La Courneuve who goes to work in Roissy does not go there by bike. He needs his car to take the A1 motorway and go to his place of work,” he describes.
Defending itself from "doing kilometer for kilometer" of cycle path, the departmental council highlights the more qualitative and secure side of its developments in recent years, intended to bring new audiences in Seine-Saint-Denis to cycling. .
“I don't think there is a Grand Soir du vélo, believes its vice-president Corentin Duprey. It's a process, a path, it doesn't happen in a snap of the fingers. We create the conditions in terms of infrastructure and parking offers.
