Où est mon vélo?!

For you readers who happen to be mayors of large cities, this is for you. In the first week of the affordable public bicycle program in Paris there were 350,000 bike rentals. I would call that a success. It would be great to know what percent of those renters would have driven instead versus those who would have walked or taken the bus.

You can pay €29 for a year subscription to all-you-can-use bicycles. To translate that into American, it’s just like all-you-can-eat, but also a little bit the opposite. You can also pay one time rental fees by the hour. There are 750 racks around the city and 10,000 bikes in circulation so far. Because of the small fee the system seems less prone to people abusing or losing the bikes - as is the case with many of the free bike systems.

I can’t really see why this wouldn’t be a good idea for most, if not all, cities. Maybe even becoming a new form of common public transportation? Now I want to go to Paris even more than before.

Oh yea, and I borrowed the photo from the First Post article both to show the bikes, which are cool, and also because that woman’s shirt is such an aggressive green.

- shawn

[source: the first post]