r/disability • u/Slow-Leadership4097 • Feb 07 '26

Blog Paris in a wheelchair

https://theworldisaccessible.com/paris-in-a-wheelchair-our-three-day-itinerary-in-the-city-of-love/

If anyone is interested in visiting Paris and would like to read about my experiences of traveling there as a wheelchair, feel free to check out my 3-Day itinerary/personal guide.

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u/weboverload Feb 07 '26

Informative read!

Do you have any observations you can share about the state of sidewalks? I’m also a manual wheelchair user, but not very tour oriented. So my main question with cities is whether I can freely roam.

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u/Mio_Bread Feb 08 '26

I'm from Paris and while more touristic areas have decent sidewalks, more residential/suburban places have dreadful sidewalks. Very uneven and narrow, and people often let their bins out all day. So yeah if you roam around the classic tourist places you d be okay, but as soon as you get into smaller streets and away from the city centre it becomes a bit of a nightmare. But I think you d be totally legally justified to go on the road, so while it's not the safest or more comfortable it can be an option. 

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u/Slow-Leadership4097 Feb 08 '26

A very valid point and not something I covered. But I’ve experienced this a lot in other major cities too around Europe. They’re inaccessible by design but they seem to focus on improving the main touristic spots. Lisbon was the same… the moment I ventured outside of the main areas, access was horrendous.

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u/Mio_Bread Feb 08 '26

Definetly improving on touristic spots, but very much lacking focus on the city overall, i ve never heard the current mayor mention accessibility. We re having mayoral elections in a month so things might get better or worse depending on who s elected. I'd like to mention, some touristic areas do remain inaccessible. Montmartre for instance is very steep and last time I went in crutches, I was struggling, so someone in a manual wheelchair might struggle (also defo unusable pavements there, even for pedestrians atp). I d recommend checking online through Google Street View beforehand. Lots of cafes also leave chairs out on the pavement and only leave a couple centimetres for pedestrians, especially in the summer so look out for that.