The International Engineer

April 29^th, 2023

I’m still not over the emotional loss of losing my bike, so I thought it would be perfect to write about it. I wrote a previous post on biking in Grenoble, but I never thought that I would be writing this post.

Last week, my bike was stolen outside the train station. When I went to find it in the morning, it was gone. What’s really interesting to me is that I was under the impression bikes were safe in Grenoble. There’s an organization called Metrovélo which provides cheap, standard bikes all over the region for renting. Mvélo bikes are very recognizable. They are all bright yellow and plain; people park them everywhere and places like the train station have hundreds of these yellow bikes scattered everywhere.

In the US, especially where I live in NYC, I would never get a bike. It would be stolen almost immediately because there is no safety net like there is in Grenoble where all bikes look identical. But as it turns out, even these bikes are not safe from bike theft.

To be fair, I was not the most savvy biker. I locked my bike with a U-lock, preventing the spokes from turning. So when my bike was locked, nobody could ride away with it. But what I didn’t realize, was that my bike could be lifted and taken…probably to be dismantled into parts and resold.

So after everything happened and I realized the bike was gone, I went to Mvélo to pay the fine (220 Euro). And interestingly enough, they told me that I had to get an official statement from the police saying that my bike was stolen. Only then could I go back and pay the fine. Which is typical French emphasis on legal documentation. The only problem is getting an appointment with the police. It requires a form and then the appointment can only be made weeks later. So by the time I get the legal statement, my bike would have been stolen two weeks prior. And from this, it’s very clear that the notice is purely for documentation. There is no realistic hope of the police recovering the bicycle by now.  

There is a silver lining in everything however. I’m lucky that I didn’t have an accident on my bike during my time here. As someone new to biking, there were many times when I was honked at by a driver or narrowly missed a collision of some sort. And in my French culture class, the professor discussed a 15-year-old immigrant girl who met with a fatal bike accident two weeks ago.

Importantly, the idea of following “laws” is not emphasized here as much as the requisite paperwork and documentation is. In other words, traffic laws are completely disregarded. You will often see cars run a red light or a biker seeing a red signal and furiously cycling across it before the cars begin to cross the intersection. And so as a biker, I began taking the same liberties which landed me in trouble on a few occasions! Thankfully, I never had an accident in the short time I had my bike. So one way to think about it is I had the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, my mistake cost me a lot of money. But to move forward, I’m reminding myself to be thankful it wasn’t anything more than money.