Public Action in Times of Crisis: Trajectories of Cycling Policies in Four French Cities

Abstract

Abstract French local authorities developed over 500 km of pop-up cycling infrastructure to face the Covid-19 pandemic. These experiments raise questions about the impact of a crisis situation on public decision-making and policies. This chapter reports on a comprehensive analysis of the roll-out of the Covid cycle lanes in four metropolises—Paris, Lyon, Montpellier, and Rennes—with a particular attention to the factors of continuity or interruption pre-and post-crisis. It retraces the involvement in collective action of the different actors during the crisis peak, the reactions sparked by these measures, and the status of the temporary infrastructure in the local mobility policy landscape a year after it was introduced. It shows that the crisis has served more as an accelerator than as a course changer for public policies introducing elements of change for the future by slightly modifying the actors’ interests, representations, and instruments.

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