Paris city bike rental
Last weekend I visited Paris and I discovered Velib, a city wide bicycle scheme. I thought this city planned access to bicycles is a fantastic way to tour Paris.
I first saw something like this in Helsinki. But I don’t think it was a grand success as many of the bikes were vandalised or stolen by drunken swedes on the Viking line. Honest. :)
I also came across a cycling scheme in Barcelona called Bicing. Unfortunately I couldn’t figure it out how to rent a bike.
Which leads me back to Velib. It was quite complicated to work out as a tourist to get a short term one day hire with a 150EUR deposit. Their system works, but it was fairly convoluted.
Informed by my CTC newsletter, Velib celebrated its first birthday on 15th July. A lengthy PDF document is linked by CTC exploring the myths of Velib. I made a copy of the Velib PDF too.
Now for my comments. The bike design is excellent.
Velib bicycles use a Revo-shift Lever and Bell Crank (SL-3S35-E) from Shimano. A hub gear solution that’s very reliable and easy to maintain. I chose this very configuration with my Helkama bicycle.
Interestingly on the bell crank, they fixed a steel frame around the part:
This is a very good idea as I damaged my “bell crank” whilst wrenching it out of a bike holder on a train to Guildford. The bell crank once damaged kept falling off and I had to get the boys at Halfords (their 15GBP a year bike care plan is amazing good value) to retap the bolt to fix it.
- The free tourist maps from the metro do not show Velib locations which is a sin.
- Sometimes stations are full or closed and it would be good if there was some system where you could see on a map the inventories of nearby Velib stations
- It’s easier to cycle in Paris than in London
- I met a local who says it isn’t good for him as there are often not enough bikes, so he bought his own bike. That’s fair. I think Velib should be a “backup solution” for most Parisians. Good for strikes. ;)
Anyway, well done to the French. Velib is definitely the best example of a successful alternative city transport scheme.
July 20th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
I still don’t think you can say that hub gears easy to maintain, as your experience seems to show.
You didn’t mention the cost of the Velibs, we should have tried to park up our bikes as often as possible as under 30 minutes is free and there after the charge is 1 euro per half hour.
July 21st, 2008 at 9:51 am
In my experience if I had a guard around the bell shank I would not had been able to knock it in the train.