Bordeaux was a pretty reasonable place for non-car travel. Within the city, the downtown is relatively compact, but you can still put in several miles if you exclusively walk. Being able to take the tram to the Cité du Vin/Les Halles Bacalan from downtown was quite nice. The TBM website and app are quite useful. I bought our e-tickets through here. Not a huge savings, but convenient. With the 24-hour pass, we basically treated the tram like a hop-on/hop-off tourist vehicle. We still walked a lot, but it was nice to save a mile here and there.
I had wanted to try out the bicycles, but between our two wine museums and walking plans, we didn’t get around to it. I will say, people bike really fast nowadays with the e-assist. SMS and I have held our own in Copenhagen and the Netherlands, for example, but I do think there’s a slightly unforgiving nature to city biking. Don’t mess up!
[Weirdly, I just went to look for pictures from the Berlin part of our Euro trip in Sept 2017 and neither SMS nor I have pictures from that part of our trip. So weird. I need to look at my old laptop. Anyway, the reason I looked is that I nearly got run over in Berlin by a biker speeding by a crowded, tourist-heavy doner shop and I accidentally stepped into the bike lane. He was mad. Now, I’m mad. Where are the pictures? A mystery for another day]
While Bordeaux’s tram extends to the suburbs, it does not extend into nearby wine towns. You have to buy SNCF tickets, which are somewhat frequent but I would strongly advise planning your itinerary at least the evening before so you know when to go. Outside of rush hour, the trains become a lot less frequent so you could end up wasting time.
In addition, on the Left Bank, they had buses instead of trains for the afternoon routes. These were slower, less obvious on where to wait for the buses, and the app geotags were incorrect. And that’s why we missed our Margaux bus, sad but also, lol. I think that is a temporary arrangement while track maintenance is underway. Even still, the transportation is sporadic. We didn’t look at rideshare options as we weren’t in a rush, but I would bet they were expensive and scarce.
In St. Emilion, we had the best time on the e-bikes. They were an awesome way to get around and outside of Chateau Grangey, the group that followed us definitely had bike envy. They arrived in a small van with a driver, which still seems like a nice arrangement! For us, renting in St. Emilion was the best.
There is a nice, much longer bike route that connects Bordeaux to St. Emilion via the Piste Cyclable Roger Lapébie but that was too much biking for us- 51km and an estimated 3 hours each way. If there had been a bike shop with multiple locations that offered the ability to drop-off/pick-up at different places, that would have been a different story. But it didn’t exist, so we planned the train to St. Emilion, walked into town, rented our bikes, biked around to three wineries, returned the bike, walked to the train and just had an absolutely fantastic day.