The Everywhere blog

These days a trip to your favorite city can be a far cry from the whirlwind tour you might expect. Population explosions, traffic jams, and all-around congestion can put the brakes on even a simple walking tour. But bicycle tourism is where it's at these days. And luckily, big cities are becoming more savvy to the ways of cyclists.

Take Paris, for example. Last summer Paris launched an entirely new, self-service bicycle transit system called Vélib'. Tourists and locals can pick up and drop off bikes at one of their 1,451 locations.

Everywhere contributer, Mikael Colville-Andersen, shares his experience of cycling through Paris in his article, The Birth of Parisian Bike Culture.

In San Francisco, whenever friends come to visit me, the first thing they want to do is rent a bike and cruise across the Golden Gate Bridge, and who can blame them, it's gorgeous! And it doesn't stop in Paris or San Francisco. Barcelona organized a similar bicycle transit system they're calling Bicing. And in Copenhagen, where a third of the population commutes to work on bicycles each day, a similar self-service system was set into motion for tourists and locals looking to ride around the city for a while. (Everywhere contributor Susan Ranney wrote about it in Issue 03: Copenhagen: City of Bicycles.)

It doesn't stop with just bicycles. There are plenty of sure-fire ways of successfully getting from A to B without participating in the perpetual urban traffic jam. So if you have any bicycle ventures to tell us about, or alternate modes of transportation you use while navigating through a city, tell us about them!

(Photo: Velo Libre, by Mikael Colville-Andersen)