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Yippie !

It’s sumer time in Paris and we are about to experience a revolution in urban transportation !

See these purple dots on the Google map (wow !), it’s where you can take ze bike ! It’s like an alien invasion ! Oh mon dieu, what iz happening ?

Paris - Vélib - location de vélos à Paris

Concept is cool : the equivalent of drag and drop for the internet savvy: you pick up a bike at one of the many vélib stations in Paris (plenty of choice, as you can see above) and drop it next to where you go.

It didn’t work well in Amsterdam, where bikes ended up in the canal, but here it’s already a success.. I saw a bunch of velib users already flocking up Rue de Vaugirard.

Launched this weekend, the initiative has good reviews with French Bloggers.

Here are 5 reasons to like Vélib by Arnaud Vincent - “Why I love Vélib” (my approximate translation, désolé):

- It’s not “onerous” (it’s cheap!)
- I do sports
- I contribute to traffic disengorgement
- I am more happy on the bike
- It’s easy !

Yeah, it’s easy like riding a bike.

Yet success is phenomenal, despite the Tour de France’s competition. But no illicit chemicals here. It’s genuine Parisian sweat, my friends. Some report 120 000 bikes were rented in just 3 days (10 600 bikes are available).

Some even believe an army of Vélib Zombies are taking over the city. Some anarchy scenes were reported around Place de la Bastille.

Of course, many voices have found a reason to rant about minor technical glitches that inevitably occurred. Vélib : not powered by Ubuntu… Dommage.

I can almost hear them : “who cycled in dog shit ? why are vélibs so heavy ? I want an electric vélib ! I want my traffic jam back !”, etc.

Fortunately, the Vélib website has a full section to educate us on the Vélib attitude (err, don’t ride on the sidewalk, keep your cool and respect the pedestrian).

So today we learned that : the Authorities of Paris did a great job creating a mess, and French bloggers did a great job reporting the chaos.

I can’t wait to try it too.

In the meantime, here are a few pics I took rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré today, including a connection error at one booth.

Vive le vélo. Vive la France.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 9:00 pm and is filed under In Europe, Real Questions, Things you find on the web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.