NICE ENOUGH FOR NICE?
The most striking contradiction of the Tour de France is that there are 14 times as many motor vehicles on the race as there are riders on bikes. In 2019, approximately 2,500 were accredited, including team cars, photo and TV bikes, VIP vehicles, press cars, dozens of extraordinary-looking contraptions within the publicity caravan, and hundreds of trucks transporting the whole shebang around France for three and a half weeks. The Tour is, in short, hardly an advert for the environmental benefits of the bicycle.
This contrast will look even more stark when the race lumbers into Nice at the end of August for the grand départ. Over the past decade, the Provençal city has reinvented itself as “Nice Smart City”, installing 3,000 information sensors that allow it to reduce water consumption, cut energy usage, cope more easily with issues relating to waste and, at the same time,
