'In London," said Michel Noë before we set off on our cycling excursion around central Paris, "you have to be too much, you know, the Mad Max. The attitude, the clothes, all of this. You have to be a little bit crazy. In Paris, it is different. Here we have not the helmets, the Lycra. It's much more relaxed."

And it's true. I pulled on my black helmet, slipped on my black waterproofs, appliquéd all this with fluorescent strips and sashes. Then, the pièce de resistance. I gave Michel the look that I employ to withering effect as I cycle to work in London, one which says: "I have drunk several espressos and, by the look of my wild eyes and barmy demeanour, you may conclude that I have eaten a handful of amphetamines."

I appeared, no doubt, completely bonkers and, yet, to my mind, quite voguish in a proto-Hitler Youth kind of way. For his part, Michel looked worried: "Now you are him! The Mad Max! This is how you roll in London. I see it now!"

By contrast, everybody else on this tour was dressed as though they were going to appear in Five Go Cycling in Dorset. Some wouldn't have looked out of place in pleated skirts and straw baskets filled with fresh produce. And that was just the men. Not that the women were any more butch. They looked as though they wouldn't be up for giving a bus driver the finger or a choice piece of Anglo-Saxon if they were involved in an altercation at Highbury Corner. I was the only one in a helmet. Amateurs, the lot of them!

Michel runs a cycle shop near the Place de la Bastille. It's called Paris à Vélo: C'est Sympa!, and is devoted to promoting the apparently insane notion that cycling in a city not noted for its laid-back, courteous motorists, can in fact be a pleasant option. Thanks to the far-sighted, clean-air policies of recent Parisian mayors, including the present incumbent Jean Tiberi, there are many cycle lanes, chief among which are two grands axes running through the city (one going north-south from La Villette to the Htel de Ville and on towards Montparnasse, the other an east-west axis from the Bois de Boulogne to the Bois de Vincennes). Cyclists can also use widened bus lanes.

When Ken Livingstone becomes mayor of London, he should go on a two-wheeled tour of Paris with M Tiberi, and apply the lessons learned there to his traffic-choked, mostly cycle-unfriendly metropolis.

In Paris, as in Britain, there are former railways that have become green corridors for cycling citizens. True, most of the vast boulevards opened up by Baron Haussmann are not tremendously pleasant for cycling, and those vast showpiece intersections of choreographed traffic, such as the Place de la Concorde, are only to be approached by cyclists with higher degrees in urban traffic management and nerves of steel.

Noë and his team of cycling guides have been trying to introduce tourists to a different, almost secret city of quiet back streets from the one that visitors might experience on tour buses. It's not quite the series of villages that the company's website suggests, but it does make Paris seem like a relaxed, peaceful place, which is a great achievement. However, true Parisians probably don't care for our tour leader Christianne and her multi-lingual charges choking up their otherwise tourist-free zones. At one point, we sat in a quiet courtyard called le village St Paul, which, following corporate policy, Christianne was keen to tout as an example of village Paris. I felt like an interloper in an otherwise secret, silent domain.

For our three-hour tour, called the Heart of Paris, the most touristy of the tours on offer, Christianne rode at the front of our happy band of sit-up-and-beg Peugeots with a leader's flag stuck on a large staff in her pannier rack. She conducted the tour in French, English and German, which was very impressive for all 10 of us, even for the three flying Dutchmen and the sluggish Swedish woman. Christianne took us gamely the wrong way up one-way streets and past open-jawed, truncheon-toting security guards at the Louvre. I liked her style.

At the back of our group rode the appealingly taciturn Philippe, who had a little flag all of his own, and whose job it was to make sure stragglers didn't get lured into the sick world of poncy chocolatiers and recherché bistros. With Christianne at the front and Philippe at the back, it was like being at primary school again, which in a way was very reassuring, especially for the Swedish woman, who was no Eddie Merckx. That said, Philippe didn't join us for our mid-cycle coffee, though we didn't take the rejection personally.

After we negotiated the busy Rue Saint Antoine, we plunged into the Marais, soon stopping at the lovely Place des Vosges for a briefing. This square consists of 36 symmetrical houses (one of which Victor Hugo and his friend Les Miserables lived in) with a ground-floor arcade.

At this point, Christianne championed the conservation achievements of André Malraux, cultured culture minister in the 60s. If it had not been for him, she claimed, much of the Marais, with its ancient squares and medieval buildings, would have been bulldozed in favour of skyscrapers.

"Forty years ago, this neighbourhood was in complete disarray," Christianne told us in a series of major north European tongues. "The thinking was to redevelop, to destroy, but Malraux said, no." The result was that some of the most ancient and royal buildings in Paris have been restored, waves of artists and otherwise trendy people have moved in, and now the area provides a pleasing small-scale counterpoint to some of the more bombastic architectural hoopla of the 1e and the 8e arrondissements to the west. "This has become emblematic of provincial France," said Christianne gnomically before explaining. "Every little French city now has a central restoration project like the one that Malraux unleashed."

About my bicycling person, I carried a Palm Pilot, one of those new-fangled portable screens which, such is the nature of technological progress, we will be carrying to supply our newspaper and other reading needs in a few years, no doubt. I had down-loaded into this device the Lonely Planet's guide to Paris from the Internet in order to find out how well it compared with their quirky books or indeed Christianne's commentary. Frankly, it didn't. At the Place des Vosges, for instance, the information supplied by the Lonely Planet download is schematic and has not a hint of personality. This is a shame, surely, because part of the appeal of such guide books as the Lonely Planet series is to carry around a witty cognoscento to foreign climes, some insightful smart-arse to be downloaded from one's bag at the relevant moment. But at present, this electronic guide offers just the facts, which are necessary but by no means sufficient. At the moment, too, the Palm Pilot map pages are unusably terrible.

The Palm Pilot techno johnnies will clearly have to finesse this thing before it becomes, as I'm sure it will be, de rigueur for people who find mobile phones two years past being even passé. For instance, cyclists will need a bracket to hold the Palm Pilot on the handlebars so they can glance at the thing as they pedal along. What's more, for road safety reasons among others, the Palm Pilot will ultimately need to be voice activated. At the moment, you see, you have to use a pointer that resembles an eyebrow pencil in order to negotiate the various screens, but this, I found, is extremely dangerous while simultaneously riding a bicycle in central Paris.

But the desire for quirky, engagingly-written critical guides in an electronic form is something that the Lonely Planet people should look into immediately. Christianne, by contrast, was wonderfully eccentric and bitingly critical, as all guides, verbal or written, should be.

It was the Sabbath, but as we cycled through the Marais the smells of Jewish cooking filled the air. Much of it had north African origins and was brought to Paris by Ashkenazy Jews. There were queues for kosher falafels and pickles at little windows. As we rode on, we took in the local colour. This area is gay and Jewish, though not often both at the same time. As we pedalled along in pairs, crocuses burst open in well-tended public gardens, forsythia bloomed blamelessly and daffodils expressed themselves as only they know how. I felt full of the joys of spring as well as three pastries.

After taking in some other sights - the fountains next to the Pompidou Centre that pay homage to Stravinsky's Firebird, the fragrant parterres of the Palais Royal that delight everyone with a nose, the red-light zone of St Denis that has its fans, the troubling Burren columns in the Louvre courtyard that I can't imagine loving, not to mention a surprisingly buffed-up Notre Dame and the building that houses Berthillon's extraordinary ice creams - it was time to trade in our bicycles for walking feet.

We rode back to the Bastille, waving in unison as we went past the house of Yves Montand and Simone Signoret in the Dauphine Square. After three hours, I felt properly oriented and yet not at all exhausted - this was one of the easiest cycle rides I have ever been on.

Why don't we have cycling tours in our capital city to match these Parisian excursions? There are lots of possible options, one would have thought, for a go-ahead firm to exploit. Off the top of my head, how about these? The trip around Tower Bridge through Wapping and Limehouse, down through the Greenwich foot tunnel, back through Rotherhithe and Shad Thames. The literary loop around Highgate and Hampstead Heath. A dawn pedal around the City. Why don't we have such supervised tours of such equally fascinating areas as those that cycling Parisian tourists can enjoy?

Why? I'll tell you why. Because London is so ruined by the car and so unwelcoming to everybody but two-wheeled Mad Maxes. It has to change.

Other cities to cycle in

1 New Orleans Laid Back Tours (800 786-1274) take you around in tricycles and bicycles that look like the ones Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda had in Easy Rider.

2 Rome Enjoy Rome (06 445 18 43; info@enjoy rome.it). Tickets (L30,000) include bike and helmet. Don't forget Rome's seven hills. Challenging.

3 Chicago Bike Chicago (00 121 800 915) includes a stop for a "real Chicago-style hot dog". Tasty.

4 Cambridge Cambridge Corners' website gives admirably detailed information for easy cycles inside the city and in the countryside.

5 Amsterdam Yellow Bike (00-31-206206940). Each trip includes coffee. Nice.