Velib - freedom bike scheme in Paris

Livingstone, according to the article, has his heart set on bringing in something similar in London. What do you reckon?

It is nice. Though you can feel it is still in the beginning stages because there have been a few problems. A friend of mine put his bike back in but it wasnt taken into account by the station. Also, i had a terrible time the other day with it. Left a friend's place at 3am, cycled half an hour to get home. No place to put the bike back. I spent an hour and a half looking for a spot for the damn bike and finally found one. I then proceeded to walk back to my place, which took about half an hour.

This one of the main problems they're facing with velib, that some stations have no cycles left in them while others are always full (like those around my place which sucks). They have cars that bring cycles back to stations where there are none but it isnt enough yet. Then again it is summer and half of Paris is on holidays so maybe that flaw will work itself out once everybody comes back from holidays.

They did this in Amsterdam in the 60s. Hence the song:

http://www.sfal.com/images/whitebike.jpg

The article says they all got nicked when it was tried in Cambridge - same happened in St Andrews back in the mid 90s.

ditto hemel hempstead - i only ever saw one of the custome green bicycles in hemel, hung on a lamppost.

something like that already exists in west london (W12) - there are stands in uxbridge road, askew road and, apparently, all towards the wetlands centre.

1 euro for 30 minutes seems a bit steep though - a bus is cheaper.

1 euro for 30 minutes seems a bit steep though - a bus is cheaper.

You can get a yearly pass for 29 euros though.

I've tried it once. Seems to be having teething problems, the software wouldn't let me have one at 2 stations, 3rd time lucky. Then there's the end-of-night problem alluded to above: by midnight most bikes in central Paris are gone, but if you do find one you'll have a devil of a time finding a place to park it near your home if you don't live centrally. The bikes are nice though.

Also, it's 1€ for 24h. So you know, you can spend the most of those 24h cycling and it wont seem as steep. And, as Zelda Zonk has said, yearly pass. A bus ticket is 1.50€ btw.

ah, ok. article says: "I signed off a €150 deposit on my credit card for the €1 ticket that gave me half an hour's cycle time." but i guess that's wrong.

a E1.50 bus ticket can, probably, get you more than 50% further than i'd like to cycle 8)

it also says "The first half-hour's pedal-time is free, with charges rising steeply afterwards.". i r confused.

You take a cycle. YUou gat half an hour. Then if you use it for longer it starts charging you extra money. This is to prevent people from taking a cycle in the morning and keep it all day long. IIRC it charges you 1€ for the 2nd half hour, 2€ for the third etc. However, you can put back your cycle after 30mins, wait for 5 mins and take it again.

*keeping it all day

Yeah, 1 euro for 24 hours, but only 1/2 hour rides at a time. A nice idea, but for me, home to office is probably more like 40 mins, so I don't know if I'll be using it much.

40mins + looking-for-a-free-spot time you mean :D

How to get around the problem of people nicking the bikes, assuming this gets imported over here, bearing in mind the failure of previous experiments? Can they be tagged in some way?

> How to get around the problem of people nicking the bikes

it appears they did it by making them ugly 8)

it says there's a E150 deposit that you have to pay. the one in W12 has a keypad on the posts so must require some kind of registration.

that ramped charging scheme actually sounds like a good idea. it's all about turnaround really, keeping maximum bikes available.

The ramped charging scheme is a good idea but the period's too short, considering that you might also have to scout around to find a spot to return the bike. Should be more like 45 mins.

Just looked at their website, it's good, you can click on each station and it'll tell you how many bikes are there, how many return slots there are. Can't really imagine a London-wide scheme like this, though. Paris is compact, whereas London is really spread out. London also not as well funded, Velib must have cost a fortune to put together, what with 20,000 bikes, hundreds of stations, complicated software.

This has been done in the US!
http://www.austinyellowbike.org/

they should provide a charging scheme for ramps where for 2€ you can do a big air jump off a ramp on those bikes.

maybe instead of the computer system they can just have old people manning those gates. e.g. those people who got the sack since the demise of the routemaster.

Velib didnt cost the city of Paris a single dime. OK, it didnt cost them any actual money, but they gave out 5000 (i think) advertisement spaces to JC Decaux in exchange of them funding the whole operation.