Velo'v: Lyon's Rentabike
by Warren McLaren, Sydney on 08.20.05
Pardon, mon Français is a bit rusty, so I’ll defer to the more reliable Guardian newspaper and assume they got the details right. During the past 3 months the French city of Lyon has been experimenting with a bicycle rental program. And I guess you could say it's been a rideaway success. The 1,500 silver and red bikes have 15,000 urbanites signed up, ready to use them. On average, each bike is released from it's computerised stand 6.5 times a day. With a prepaid card you can extract a bike from one of these ‘smart’ racks knowing that it's ready to roll - the rack will only yield a bike if its brakes, tyre pressure, gears and lights have already been digitally checked and approved, and you’ve swiped your prepaid card for access. The cost of the card? A paltry 5 Euro per year ($6 USD), and if your ride is less than half an hour it's free! If all the bicycles are taken from the set of racks, nearest your set-off point, you can ask it where the nearest available bikes are located. Commonsense and technology finally merge - I’m delightfully astounded. And in the next two years they expect to have rolled out a total of 4,000 bicycles. Amazing. Read Jon Henley’s Guardian article here, where he says even the Dutch are impressed, or allez directement à ::Velo’v
Wow! That's simply amazing. That's the sort of thing that makes me slap my head and wonder why I didn't think of it. I would love to see that here in New York City, where the main reason a good number of people don't bike is the problem of storage: the street is insecure, if you're even lucky to have anywhere out there to lock your bike to, and who wants to carry their bike up and down stairs to store in their apartment each day? Sure, you could get a cheap bike and just let it be stolen once in a while, but it'd have to be pretty cheap and get stolen only 2-3 times a year for it to be worth it.
But a system like this where security and maintenance is the city's or the company's concern, and they provide places to park the bikes - why, I'd bike to work almost every day with a setup like that! It'd be the perfect way to get a break from crowded subways or grab a quick ride for fun...
Pardon, mon English is a bit rusty. Bordeaux has a bicycle rental program for free since 2002 for all inhabitants of the city.
Having seen them on the hoof, the bikes are neat and heavily used. They look very practical complete with a generator hub, fenders, and a built-in lock. Unfortunately, the system doesn't recognize US (or Dutch) credit cards. When a colleague asked at the tourist information center, the reply was along the lines of "Ce n'est pas pour touristes."
I saw a report on this on Radio-Canada's evening news. Apparently the system is very popular and Velov builds the racks and makes the bikes available to the public at no cost to the city except the advertising spaces on the things it builds.
Hey, we're famous ;)
(I live in Lyon)
The bikes are heavy, slow, the brakes don't brake, and a good proportion are half destroyed because people have no respect...
Still it's a very good idea, and very useful !
But don't believe the hype : just because our mayor had his ass photographed on a bike doesn't mean Lyon is a bike-friendly or tree-hugger city ; on the contrary they create very few new bike lanes, most of the existing ones are quite dangerous or nonsensical, and they even removed some bike lanes to make way for more cars...
This is representative :
http://lyoncyclable.free.fr/images/kruger_3.jpg
However there is hope since in the upcoming election the opposing party is trying to rally the cyclers'votes by proposing new safer lanes...