Though I ride defensively and obsessively obey traffic laws, I have had a rough go of it in the U.S. Nothing more serious than the occasional fractured bone, a lot of lacerated skin, a ruined helmet here and there and a violent balletic thrust over a car door, but also a lot of panic misses and wtfs with drivers and infrastructure (pot-holes and cracks especially). So it was in France that I was prepared for the same. Given the self-congratulatory declarations in the U.S. that drivers in other countries are much worse, I was even prepared for things to be even more harrowing. It was not to be. France has generally included the bicycle in its infrastructure and, perhaps, the bicycle is in the consciousness of the typical French driver more so than in that of the U.S. driver. It is tempting to believe, too, that the typical French vehicle, which weighs no more than a megagram and is relatively low to the ground, puts the bicycle more in the line of sight of the driver.
Though the cities could be harrowing, sometimes due to aggressive driving and sometimes due to infrastructure hacked in after-the-fact, nearly all the cities we went through had clearly marked bicycle lanes, often separated from traffic and often contiguous. This is certainly a work in progress, but one that the French seemed to be taking seriously. Suburbs were even better, probably because the infrastructure was less-often hacked-in. Where the French really shine, though, is in the rural areas.
France has a fairly rigid hierarchy of roads, which makes the job of determining cycle routes much easier -- one knows from a quick glance of the map the amount of traffic to expect, the width of the shoulder and the number of lanes.
"A" roads: non-starters. Traffic flows at 120km/h and, anyway, bicycles aren't allowed on them.
"D" roads, of which there are three unofficial categories. On Michelin maps, these are red, yellow and white. Any self-respecting road map will show these distinctions in one color combo or another:
- red: these roads are heavily trafficked and scary as hell. On the occasion that we were forced onto such a road, we were mostly met with respectful drivers and a wide shoulder (up to 2m), but on a 4-lane highway with tractor-trailers barreling at 100km/h that is little solace. Red "D" roads nearly always save vast amounts of time -- they're shorter, flatter and the asphalt is in better condition -- but we went far, far out of our way to avoid them.
-yellow: despite our preference for white roads, sometimes those roads don't connect together without a little help from yellow roads. Though cars travel much faster than on white roads and the roads often had shoulders of less than 10cm, they were much less trafficked than red roads. Given the respect afforded by French drivers -- they slowed down and gave the legally-enforced 1,5m berth -- we were always comfortable on yellow roads. Infrastructure, particularly the thoroughness of distance markers, was substantially better on yellow roads. The markers usually gave the name of the road, distance to the next town, distance from the last town and the km itself. All of this was extremely helpful, particularly when we were puzzling over our maps. If the road was on a climb, these markers also gave percent grade for the next km, the distance to the top of the climb and the altitude. Generally this level of granularity was given on climbs above 500m elevation (often 700m) and with a grade of at least 4%.
-white: these roads were our bread and jam. We went out of our way -- sometimes adding hundreds of vertical meters of climbing and tens of kilometers of riding -- to stay on them. These roads sometimes made it difficult to follow a prescribed route because so many other white roads intersect with them, but French infrastructure is phenomenal, so even on these roads every km was marked. Sometimes this was only a number painted on the road (usually more), but it was plenty to allow us to keep ourselves oriented. These roads rarely have shoulders and typically have no lane markings, but cars drive slow on them and nearly always give well over the 1,5m minimum car-cyclist passing distance. A huge advantage of white roads is what you get to see: meadows, small small villages, horses out to pasture, undisturbed views of mountains and valleys, wildlife and lots of cow-poop -- since there are so few cars, the roads are used as cattle trails. Riding in the rain in such circumstances...well...one keeps one's mouth closed.
"C" roads & "Z" roads: these roads are very rare. "C" roads are mostly back roads into villages. "Z" roads were supposed to have been phased out long ago, but we came across one here and there. They are side roads to the back roads. Regardless, they are a good way to get an occasional short cut into a village or to another road. They have no km markings and they're often only 2m wide with no shoulder. They sometimes don't even appear on maps. As such, they're mostly roads for locals who know the area well.
