Velib in Paris
We now know, or anyway have been told, that to save the polar bear from fire and brimstone we must wash out our sardine cans, drink the tapwater, eat beans, turn off the standby lights and get on our bikes.
Le last Weekend in Paris for me coincided with the arrival of Velib – a ‘self-service bicycle transit system’. Throughout the city, ten thousand bikes are now tethered at 750 locations. They’re ugly cumbersome things - a cross between a moped and a walking frame – and their intrepid users look fearful for their lives as they wobble down the cobbles. Paris apparently has 371 kilometres of cycling lanes. For a euro you can buy a one-day Velib card, a weekly card for 5 or an annual one for 29. The first half hour’s then free and it’s an additional euro for every half hour after that. What you owe is on the bike’s meter when you thankfully return it to a parking stand.
Apparently the system’s worked well in Strasbourg, Rennes and La Rouchelle. Is it feasible for London? Somehow I doubt it and not just because here motorists hate cyclists, and taxi drivers view it as sport to mow them down. I suspect many Londoners might steal, vandalise, abuse and misuse these city bikes. There’d be bits of Velib adorning parlour walls like the antlers of stags. Lots of them would be dredged from the bed of the Thames. They’d provide under-the-kitchen-sink pipework for otherly qualified immigrant plumbers. Yobs would make a show of twisting them like liquorice to boast their macho strength. Naughty boys would vandalise their meters and scratch obscene imprecations about rival football clubs. It just wouldn’t work. There’s something wrong with us Londoners when it comes to shared property: supermarket trolleys, phone booths, trains, buses. We don’t love our city in the civic way Parisians seem to. Probably because it’s uglier, wildly expensive, uncohesive and unkind. Under the rule of law, we accommodate and tolerate but we don’t do sharing.
Mind you Parisians don’t do bike helmets. I don’t know what the projected accident figures are. By the end of the year they’ll apparently have 20,600 Velib bikes at 1,451 ranks. If each bike gets used 5 times a day that’s a lot of wobbling round the boulevards.