In early June, we visited one of our favourite European locations, the Czech capital of Prague. In terms of old town beauty and history, you certainly can’t go past it.
The central “Old Town” of Prague is particularly noted for its mostly traffic-free streets and malls, making it a very pleasant place for people to walk and bike around.
As mentioned in our previous discussions on bike share schemes, Prague is one of several European cities where Lime Bikes are available for hire; indeed, there were no shortage of them around the city. That was quite handy when we needed to get across the other side of the central city reasonably quickly; just use the Lime app, find some bikes, scan and go…
Prague is an interesting mix of different types of cycle-friendly routes. In some cases, there would be protected cycleways behind car parking.
Separated walk / cycle pathways were also noticed in some locations, particularly along the river banks.
On some quieter routes, cycle “sharrows” would indicate that riders could take the lane (even if occasionally that could be a challenge along some streets…).
Like many other European cities, there could also be quiet “play” streets for all users to share equally.
And similarly, we saw examples of one-way streets where cyclists could still bike contra-flow in the opposite direction.
Mind you, that wasn’t always the case – one time we suddenly had to rush across town to a new location after getting the wrong address. But with so many one-way streets not allowing contra-flow, it ended up taking a lot longer to get there…
As you can see from some of the photos above, the cobbled surfaces could also be rather challenging to ride on. And there were a few busier streets that weren’t always fun to ride alongside traffic. Still, cycling in Prague continues to be a work in progress with an ever-growing network of cycling routes around the city.
Have you visited Prague before?