Velib

bell. This is actually used and is helpful in getting past people walking in the bike lanes.

Gear Shift Control: 3 speeds. Won't get you going too fast but fine for the city.

When returning the bike, make sure it "clicks" into place. The status light should go green-yellow-green if properly returned. Before checking out the bike, make sure this is not bound tightly or you won't be able to click it out. There is a locking receptacle here for locking the bike.

Status Light:

Green - Bike available (or return registered with Velib system)
Yellow - waiting to confirm return status
Red - Bike or post unavailable (damaged or no communicaiton)

Adjustable Seat: If you see this seat facing backwards it cause someone had a problem with the bike last time it was used (best to avoid these)

Watch our for missing or very loose chains! The status light will often be "green" so always inspect and select the bike you want before using the terminal to rent.

Questions or Problems: There is a phone number here if you have any problems with renting, returning, or using the bikes.

extra tire tube in case you have problems ;-)

check both tires... even slightly under-inflated can be dangerous

before checking out the bike, lift up rear tire and make sure chain engages the wheel...

check the brakes - they should be nice and stiff. Soft brakes are really dangerous

unlock button: this button can be activated when the bike is checked out via a credit card. It's not used when you have a 1 year abonnement (using your navigo card will automatically unlock the bike so this button is not used for that).

Basket and lock. In the basket there is a cable. The cable can be passed through something (a bike rack) then locked into the lock found on the main frame of the bike). Once locked, you can remove the key. To unlock, press the key in slight to turn, then the cable will pop out.

Hover over the bike and see different tips on how to use the Velib bikes... (and avoid bad bikes)

velibobsession.blogspot.com/

Steps to rent:

1. Find a bike that is not broken and note it's terminal number (on the top of the bike post). Now that the Velib system has been around for a while, bikes are not always in the best shape. JCDecaux has basically abandoned the system and most bikes are now quite dangerous to ride if they can be ridden... Things to look for:
- Chains: loose, missing, or broken
- Brakes: check the tension by squeezing both brake handles
- Tires: feel the tire making sure it's got enough air (note that the bike in the picture has a bad tire)
- Seat: verify that the adjustable seat is able to be adjusted
- Gear Shift: just look for broken handles, components
- Lift up the back wheel and turn the pedal to make sure the mechanics are in order

NOTE: It's become common practice now to place the seat in the reverse direction when the bike is found to be in need of repair. So, if the seat is facing the other way just skip it (regardless of the green light status)

If there's a line you should pick out a few bikes. It's nice to have another person to ride with (one to stand in line, the other to pick out bikes).

2. Go through the complicated process on the two screens to rent a bike. It's annoying so if you're in Paris alot then just get a 1 year abonnement and link it to your navigo metro pass. Then you can just grab a bike very quickly by placing the metro pass over the card reader found on the terminal.

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Comments

Dominique Guillochon says:

Very nice..i am going to paris soon...and will be using those..nice tips...and good shot... with the leaves on the ground!
Merci !
Posted 25 months ago. ( permalink )

Breff says:

This is a good example of a bike not to take. See the rear inner tube draped over the back mudguard! You won't be getting far on this one! Also before taking the bike lift up the back wheel and turn the pedal to make sure the mechanics are in order. You'll often pick up problems not evident to the eye such as a wobbly wheel or bent chainguard.
Posted 11 months ago. ( permalink )

austinevan says:

my bad Breff - I didn't even notice! That explains why I'm having such a difficult time with the Velib system - I'm so lame!
Posted 11 months ago. ( permalink )

Breff says:

I wouldn't worry about it. With a good sense of humour (extra tire tube - lol) you can get over anything!
Posted 11 months ago. ( permalink )

-fCh- says:

Being so saddened by the following piece in NYTimes, I thought I'd search for Velib on Filckr.

Am I the only one detecting a certain level of schadenfreude here?

October 31, 2009
Reality Deals Setback to Paris Bike Program
By STEVEN ERLANGER and MAÏA DE LA BAUME

PARIS — Just as Le Corbusier’s white cruciform towers once excited visions of the industrial-age city of the future, so Vélib’, Paris’s bicycle rental system, inspired a new urban ethos for the era of climate change.

Residents here can rent a sturdy bicycle from hundreds of public stations and pedal to their destinations, an inexpensive, healthy and low-carbon alternative to hopping in a car or bus.

But this latest French utopia has met a prosaic reality: Many of the specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each, are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many others are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides, their wheels bent and tires stripped.

With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche.

“The symbol of a fixed-up, eco-friendly city has become a new source for criminality,” Le Monde mourned in an editorial over the summer. “The Vélib’ was aimed at civilizing city travel. It has increased incivilities.”

The heavy, sandy-bronze Vélib’ bicycles are seen as an accoutrement of the “bobos,” or “bourgeois-bohèmes,” the trendy urban middle class, and they stir resentment and covetousness. They are often being vandalized in a socially divided Paris by resentful, angry or anarchic youth, the police and sociologists say.

Bruno Marzloff, a sociologist who specializes in transportation, said, “One must relate this to other incivilities, and especially the burning of cars,” referring to gangs of immigrant youths burning cars during riots in the suburbs in 2005.

He said he believed there was social revolt behind Vélib’ vandalism, especially for suburban residents, many of them poor immigrants who feel excluded from the glamorous side of Paris.

“It is an outcry, a form of rebellion; this violence is not gratuitous,” Mr. Marzloff said. “There is an element of negligence that means, ‘We don’t have the right to mobility like other people, to get to Paris it’s a huge pain, we don’t have cars, and when we do, it’s too expensive and too far.’ ”

Used mainly for commuting in the urban core of the city, the Vélib’ program is by many measures a success. After swiping a credit card for a deposit at an electronic docking station, a rider pays one euro per day, or 29 euros (about $43) for an annual pass, for unlimited access to the bikes for 30 minute periods that can be extended for a small fee.

Daily use averages 50,000 to 150,000 trips, depending on the season, and the bicycles have proven a hit with tourists, who help power the local economy.

But the extra-solid construction and electronic docks mean the bikes, made in Hungary, are expensive, and not everyone shares the spirit of joint public property promoted by Paris’s Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë.

“We miscalculated the damage and the theft,” said Albert Asséraf, director of strategy, research and marketing at JCDecaux, the outdoor-advertising company that is a major financer and organizer of the project. “But we had no reference point in the world for this kind of initiative.”

At least 8,000 bikes have been stolen and 8,000 damaged so badly that they had to be replaced — nearly 80 percent of the initial stock, Mr. Asséraf said.

JCDecaux must repair some 1,500 bicycles a day. The company maintains 10 repair shops and a workshop on a boat that moves up and down the Seine.

JCDecaux reinforced the bicycles’ chains and baskets and added better theft protection, strengthening the mechanisms that attach them to the electronic parking docks, since an incompletely secured bike is much easier to steal. But the damage and theft continued.

“We made the bike stronger, ran ad campaigns against vandalism and tried to better inform people on the Web,” Mr. Asséraf said. But “the real solution is just individual respect.”

Between 2007 and 2008, the number of infractions related to Vélib’ vandalism rose 54 percent, according to the Paris police.

“We found many stolen Vélib’s in Paris’s troubled neighborhoods,” said Marie Lajus, a spokeswoman for the police. “It’s not profit-making delinquency, but rather young boys, especially from the suburbs, consider the Vélib’ an object that has no value.”

Sometimes the bikes are also victims of good old adolescent anarchic fun. These attitudes are expressed by the “freeriders,” and a bicycle forum, where a mock poll asks riders whether the Vélib’ can do wheelies, go down stairs and make decent skid marks.

It is commonplace now to see the bikes at docking stations in Paris with flat tires, punctured wheels or missing baskets. Some Vélib’s have been found hanging from lampposts, dumped in the Seine, used on the streets of Bucharest or resting in shipping containers on their way to North Africa. Some are simply appropriated and repainted.

Finding a decent one is now something of an urban treasure hunt. Géraldine Bernard, 31, of Paris rides a Vélib’ to work every day but admits having difficulties lately finding functioning bikes.

“It’s a very clever initiative to improve people’s lives, but it’s not a complete success,” she said.

“For a regular user like me, it generates a lot of frustration,” she said. “It’s a reflection of the violence of our society and it’s outrageous: the Vélib’ is a public good but there is no civic feeling related to it.”

Still, with more than 63 million rentals since the program was begun in mid-2007, the Vélib’ is an established part of Parisian life, and the program has been extended to provide 4,000 Vélib’s in 29 towns on the city’s edges.

So despite the increasing costs, Paris and JCDecaux are pressing on. The company invested about $140 million to set up the system and provides a yearly fee of about $5.5 million to Paris, which also gets rental fees for the bikes. In return, the company’s 10-year contract allows it to put up 1,628 billboards that it can rent.

Although JCDecaux will not discuss money figures, the expected date for profitability has been set back. But the City of Paris has agreed to pay JCDecaux about $600 for each stolen or irreparably damaged bike if the number exceeds 4 percent of the fleet, which it clearly does.

In an unsuccessful effort to stop vandalism, Paris began an advertising campaign this summer. Posters showed a cartoon Vélib’ being roughed up by a thug. The caption read: “It’s easy to beat up a Vélib’, it can’t defend itself. Vélib’ belongs to you, protect it!”
Posted 2 months ago. ( permalink )

Breff says:

Wikepedia: Schadenfreude is pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. (I didn't know this).

Thanks for posting the article, very interesting!
Posted 2 months ago. ( permalink )

austinevan says:

It's an odd article. I find broken bikes once in a while but generally the bikes are good (and I ride them everyday). I've come across a few broken bikes but it's a minor problem. I think that Schadenfreude is the culprit! Especially when it's the French who experience misfortune - it seems to make non-French (Americans in particular) quite giddy.

The reference to car burning is strange as well. This happened over 3 years ago and people can't seem to let it go. It's as if it happens every night (which it doesn't). I've never seen a car being burned and I've lived in Paris for 4 years. Then again, the French do this as well.
Posted 2 months ago. ( permalink )

-fCh- says:

Thank you for clarification. Who needs newspapers when even a short Flickr exercise yields better insight? Over here, in the US, the newspapers are dying, yet it has not occurred to any of them that in order to survive they may just need to say the truth...
Posted 2 months ago. ( permalink )

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