An Amusement & Diversion for The Genteel Cyclist. Daily.

Friday, July 6, 2007

The French bike is dead. Long live the French bike!


Here's more on the massive program Paris is rolling out in two weeks. The City of Lights is putting 20,000 bikes on the street, which will be rentable daily, monthly, or yearly at pennies on the hour. While similar programs in cities like Amsterdam have sputtered, the French have actually coined a word and a social movement--"Velib"-- to fuel the situation.

There are other reasons to believe that it will work this time. For starters, it's already working--in Lyons.

Today, Lyon's program seems to have lost its training wheels; it now has 4,000 bikes that are ridden 20,000 times a day; more than 40 percent are used by office workers.


It's not clear why so many Parisians lack bicycles and would need to rent them--until you consider how many obsolete Peugeots there are on the streets of America, where the French bike industry came to die in the 1980s.

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