Bike-o-rama

From the moment we arrived in Strasbourg, we could tell this city is serious about bicycles. It was after sunset but the side-streets were teeming with cyclists. This was helpful in a way because it meant that we had an excuse to drive very slowly, which we needed to do anyway in order to navigate confusing, narrow one-way streets in the dark. No place that we have visited in France -- not even Paris and its snazzy bike-rental program that gets so much press -- is so clearly bike-friendly as Strasbourg, with its 400-kilometer "réseau cyclable" (cyclable network). By the way, that Paris program is quite cool, but it exists in other places as well -- we have one in Orléans, for instance, but of course Orléans isn't as fun to report on as Paris. Not that we're bitter.

Anyway, back to Strasbourg. It seemed that bikes were everywhere we looked. Dave set about trying to document this by capturing street scenes, such as the one above; and traffic signs, such as the one shown here warning cyclists that there is a school exit and demonstrating that bikes are simply regarded as part of the traffic.

But another interesting measure of how pervasive cycling is in Strasbourg is given by photos in which we had not intended to highlight bikes. For instance, this picture was just Dave trying to get a shot of the three girls running up a set of stairs. To get it, he dashed to the top, turned around with the camera, and snapped without waiting -- and there's a cyclist in the picture. In the picture below, we noticed the street sign, which means "street of the sisters," and had Molly and Betsy pose beneath it -- in front of the bike, which was unavoidable.