Last Tuesday, Paul Varry, a developer and an active travel campaigner from the north of Paris, died on the streets of the French capital when he was run over by a 52-year-old man driving an SUV. Varry, at 27, was allegedly hit intentionally by the driver, after they had had an altercation about the car being in a cycle lane; the driver has now been charged by the Paris public prosecutor’s office with murder.
This is a tragedy. A moment like this brings home the occasional reality of cycling. “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic,” is often misattributed to Stalin, and it applies here. When one looks at the blunt statistics of cyclist deaths and accidents, it seems far away, vague, but when one hears of a specific death like Varry’s, it brings it all home.
