Rediscovering the Romance of the Bicycle in Paris

velo.jpg 

Spiegel reports on Mayor Delanoe and his deputy Denis Baupin of the Green Party as they attempt to turn back the clock to a simpler age. On July 15th, Paris will introduce a citywide system of public bike rentals called Vélib, intended to give pedal power to the people:

The high-tech idea is to let Parisians as well as tourists rent bikes from public stations with nothing but a chip card. No fewer than 750 self-service stations equipped with over 10,000 rentable bikes will go into service in July. The city’s Socialist-Green administration has been promoting the idea that bicycles produce no emissions, remain mobile in traffic jams, and — most importantly — are easy to park. They want people in Paris to choose the bicycle over the car, the bus or the subway. Cycling isn’t even slower than driving, since car drivers in Paris move through the avenues and boulevards at an average speed of just five kilometers an hour (3.1 mph).

The Vélib debut comes after a number of private and government initiatives encouraging people to ride. Three hundred cities in France celebrated the "Festival of the Bicycle" in June, and only a week later bicylists took to the streets naked in an internationally-organized protest ride to promote clean transportation and underscore the vulnerability of cyclists in cities.

This vulnerability is something Baupin and Delanoe also want to address, because riding a bike through Paris still requires a measure of courage. Trapped between a solid wall of motor traffic and breakneck motorcyclists — or kamikaze scooter drivers — bicyclists in this city of two million need strong nerves as well as strong calves, all the more so because the average French cyclist tends to navigate the streets in a Jacobin spirit of revolt. Red lights aren’t considered a stop signal; 71 percent told the newspaper Le Parisien that they just zip through the intersection. One-way streets are mainly symbolic. The French cyclist is assertive and reckless, like the Parisian motorist, who tends to behave like a truck driver even when he sits behind the wheel of a Citroën.

But the city has invested heavily in its bicycle infrastructure over the past three years. This measure is part of a larger strategy to spoil the fun for car drivers, a strategy that has earned Deputy Mayor Baupin the reputation of being a "dangerous madman," or even a "Khmer Vert."

The "man who declared war on cars" (as the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur calls him) can understand the anger of the drivers: "It’s about more than a means of transportation, after all," says Baupin. "It’s about their place in society." Still, the technocrat and advocate of metropolitan transit ("I drive in a car with a hundred seats: It’s called the metro") is convinced that it is only by such means that problems like air pollution and congestion can be avoided.

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

New York Bike-Share Exhibit, Experiment and Design Charette

|
Together with Storefront for Art and Architecture, the New York Bike Share Project is producing a splashy exhibition of European bike-share programs, running a free-bike-rental experiment, and hosting a design charette. The big question is whether New York can install a bike-share system, and if so, what it would look like. We’ll be having New Yorkers stopping by […]

Paris Embraces Plan to Become City of Bikes

|
The Velo’v public bicycle system in Lyon, France. By the end of 2007 the city of Paris will have 1,450 bike stations offering 20,000 bicycles. The Washington Post reports: On July 15, the day after Bastille Day, Parisians will wake up to discover thousands of low-cost rental bikes at hundreds of high-tech bicycle stations scattered […]

Happy Birthday, Vélib

|
Here’s another transportation policy success story from France. The Vélib bike-sharing system celebrates its one-year anniversary today. In April, Streetfilms’ Elizabeth Press was in Paris to learn more about it. Here is her video and report: On July 15, 2007 Paris debuted the world’s largest self-service "bicycle transit system" called Vélib outdoing previously designed bike […]

The London Model is Dead. Time to Look at Paris.

|
David Haskell, executive director of the Forum for Urban Design, and organizer of last week’s New York Bike-Share Project demonstration in Soho, says it’s time for New York City to ditch the London model and take a closer look at the traffic-reduction techniques Paris has implemented without congestion pricing. An op/ed in today’s New York […]

Paris Set for Invasion of Self-Service Bicycles

|
Expatica.com reports: Paris is bracing for a transport revolution later this year with the arrival of more than 20,000 self-service bicycles thanks to a deal between city hall and one of the world’s leading suppliers of urban advertising. A contract signed Monday with JCDecaux gives the French firm access to more than 1,600 hoardings and […]