This was filmed Rue Gabriel Perri, near Maison Kouts
It’s not so black and white. Yes asshole behaviour. But also: the sidewalk is very narrow, there are many shops, people living in the neighborhood are likely to not have any garden or tiny balconies etc. The (other) real culprit is the street designer / city planner. You can see on the other side of the street that despite it being a very narrow, multimodal busy place… they did NOT sacrifice all (free?) streetside parking in favour of more “living space” for pedestrians. Likely recorded during heat wave, with unlivably overheated Appartments and not enough trees/parks in the area…
FWIW saw a scooter parked this way, not on a bike lane but in front of a bike garage. I put a paper on it saying “This is not a parking spot, next time I’m moving it myself” with the intent of being polite but firm. Since then they never parked there anymore. Sometimes people don’t even realize.
Wow, this is awful.
I’ve ridden bikes in many cities (London, Paris, Toronto, Montreal, Seville), never saw anything close to this bad.
How standard is this in Saint Denis?
train horn time
France is a tad crazy about driving and parking, or at least it was when I was there last. It’s kinda like NYC but no rules. I saw a bakery delivery truck back up to corner and back into the lead car, ramming over and over until the next 5 cars where pushed into eachother and he could park in the corner spot.
Cars all over the sidewalks and in the median toward the tower. Noone giving right of way, you had to just take it or you’d never get in.
TIL hell exists, and it’s called France.
Beautiful country, good food, strong on protests. The car situation is a bit strange. The service industry was a bit off-putting, but I was a tourist and well, most US tourists are awful. Maybe half the people there were nice and helpful.
When I was in Paris some years ago, I was amazed how anti-foreigners it felt when it is easily top 5 international tourist destinations in the world. No public bathrooms anywhere, do the French never need to go?!
I went to the louvre and wanted to buy the 3DS museum guide software. I looked for it in the gift shop, it was available in one or two languages but not English. When I asked, the seller laughed at me like I’m an idiot, “oh we haven’t had English copies of it in months! what did you expect?”
What did you think I expected? I expected the most famous museum in the world to keep stocking something which is clearly selling out frequently!
The whole city felt like it didn’t want tourists there. It was such a strange feeling.
As a born and raised parisian, public bathrooms was an issue to us too. Lot of right wingers where against because drugs addicts use them, apparently it was better to see peoples urinate in publics gardens.
Finally the city council started building new sanisettes https://www.paris.fr/pages/les-toilettes-publiques-a-paris-27216
There are very nice if you have a penis otherwise god bless you if you need to sit on this. The propreté de Paris clean them twice a day but we are french, we love to turn things dirty… Still better than the public garden.
I am sorry you had a bad experience I have family that visit almost every years and it is luck related, most of them have meet very nice peoples but I know we can be jerks…
Thanks. Honestly the people weren’t the problem, it was moreso the way the city was managed and regulated. Again, it is in the top 5 (potentially top 1) tourist destinations in the world, you’d think the city would make it a priority to make tourists feel welcome from the infrastructure up. Again, pubic toilets alone can be the first and last straw. Every tourists needs to go at some point, it should not be a pain point.
Maybe I had inflated expectations, I don’t know. I’m not much into traveling anyway, I was with family and enjoyed my time with them, but everywhere we went felt surprisingly less welcoming than I expected. Except Disneyland, but that’s neither here nor there :P
It has been long enough that I don’t trust my memory on this, but I think it was really common to have no English signage anywhere…? This is not the Parisian people’s fault, this is the fault of business owners bafflingly choosing to alienate tourists, and the city regulators not caring either. In any other city I’d accept it, local businesses might not want the tourist traffic for plenty of good reasons, but this is freaking Paris!
French people seem to be extremely hostile to anything and anyone remotely not French.
In their defence, though, they also seem to be extremely hostile to anything and anyone remotely French.
Maybe it’s not much of a defence, now that I think about it.
An friendship ended over something this petty
A friend and I were sitting on the curb, legs stretched out over the bike lane. I saw a bike coming and I picked up our bag and got up. He didn’t move and got mad at me for doing that “without warning” right before the cyclist rode between us (that was the only path they had). Ex-friend then turned their ire towards the cyclist calling them rude and whatnot. Fortunately the cyclist kept riding. I was finally able to tell them the bike is why I moved. And dude just tried to justify they could sit there if we had just curled our legs, saying there was enough room for the bike to pass. Bro. The entire lane is for the bike. We were just taking advantage of the fact there were no bikes around when we sat down. I had thought he would have the same response I had when the cyclist came. Apparently not and he ranted about it the whole way home. I blocked him when he drove off.
ETA: he was problematic before that and the weed wasn’t worth it
Good riddance.
Where I live, they wouldn’t be there long after the first 30 kg e-bike plows into them at 40 mi/hr.
OP should devote a day off to doing hourly sweeps while getting belligerent about it.
This isn’t mildly infuriating. It’s just regular infuriating
This must be quite a more tolerant region of friends because the the 2 French people I know would have immediately resorted to violence. Totally valid as well.
I’d love to get a group together, and go along just throwing scooters out of the path and into the road.
And the guy in the chair too.
This is the most polite behaviour I’ve seen towards people blocking bike paths in Paris
What would happen if you knocked over all the unattended bikes on “accident”
I can kind of understand the sitters, but the parked motorcycles are just wrong. (Also they really should have better dedicated places for people to sit, but c’est la vie as they say)
Complete opposite here. I understand the parking, that’s just standard asshole Behavior. That I get. I’m used to it. The sitting is just fucking bizarre. Why? Just why? They brought a chair for fucks sake. Out into the street. They passed the wide open sidewalk while carrying their chair. It makes no sense.
I expected more horses in Saint Denis.
