Between Enchanted Interlude and Legacy: The COVID-19 Health Crisis and the Governance of Cycling Infrastructure Policies in Paris Region

The COVID-19 pandemic opened a window of opportunity for the development of cycling. In May 2020, several French local authorities started implementing pop-up cycling lanes to anticipate the end of the lockdown. The implementation of these temporary infrastructures disrupted governance practices in a short timeframe to provide solutions to the crisis urgency. This article aims at analyzing the effects of the health crisis on the governance of cycling infrastructure policies in the suburban areas of Paris Region. It investigates the transformations of stakeholders’ cooperation that happened during this short period between spring and autumn 2020, and their legacies in the following two years. It explores two case studies of first and third ring intercommunal entities in Paris Region. This research shows that the health crisis enhanced both the acceleration and amplification of the cycling infrastructure development identified in pre-existing plans. The role of the national State was crucial to this dynamic, as it was strongly involved in the stakeholders’ coordination, even though it took a step back after the crisis peak as the regional mobility authority rose as the main coordinator. The health crisis also was an opportunity to implement a multilevel governance of cycling infrastructure policies that the stakeholders built on afterwards to develop a flagship project of the regional cycling policy: the cycling express network.