One of the most celebrated forms of sustainable travel is cycling and nowhere is this more true than in Paris. The wind blowing through your hair as you glide beside the Seine with the twinkling skyline soaring past. At least, that is how my friends describe it to me. In all honesty, the fear of ending up sandwiched between two cars has consumed me entirely and so I have been forced to seek sanctuary in something altogether more reliable: my own two feet.
Far from limiting my ability to explore sustainably, this has opened the city up to me in ways I never anticipated. Paris is a beautifully well-connected city and its metro system, labyrinthine as it is, can deliver you almost anywhere within thirty minutes. According to the UK’s National Rail, train travel produces roughly two thirds fewer carbon emissions than cars or planes, making the metro an easy ally of SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and SDG 13 (Climate Action). Yet my only qualm with the metro was not the endless exits you must navigate as if competing in Temple Run, but rather the simple fact that you cannot see Paris whilst travelling beneath it.
I resolved this problem the only way I knew how. Inspired by a walk I once did in London with friends where we traced the entire Circle Line over seven hours and 40,000 steps, I set myself a new goal in Paris: to walk the length of every metro line.
It is a revelatory way to discover a city. By following an Instagram-curated list of tourist spots, you miss almost everything worth finding. On foot, I stumbled upon hidden food gems tucked into quiet side streets, wandered through residential neighbourhoods, and gradually came to understand the rich diasporic communities that make Paris so vibrantly itself: Sri Lankans in the 10th arrondissement, Vietnamese in the 13th and North Africans in the 18th. Exploring market stalls, eating street food and talking with people from so many different backgrounds allowed me to genuinely immerse myself in Paris’ celebrated multiculturalism, embodying the spirit of SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) through cultural exchange and human connection.
Walking is not merely good for the planet; it is good for the community around you. Each metro line I walked, I walked with a different group of people. Eight hours of shared pavement has a way of forging bonds that no coffee catch-up ever could. Conversation deepens into philosophy somewhere around hour five and by hour eight you are laughing at the edge of delirium. These connections, built in motion rather than over a table, feel genuinely Parisian in spirit. And on a student’s budget, it is arguably the most economical side-quest one could pursue: free, enriching and carbon-neutral by definition.
With sixteen metro lines as my target and my days in the City of Love dwindling, I intend to reach the finish line exactly as I started it: on my own two feet.
