A couple of summers ago, Paris embarked on what seemed like a wonderful idea:
The local authority in Paris has deposited 20,000
heavy-duty bicycles in 750 or so special racks around the city and
anyone who wants one simply swipes his or her ordinary travel card and
pedals off wherever they want to go.
The bike does not have to be returned to the same
pick-up point – you can take a bike from a rack near the Eiffel Tower,
cycle to the Pantheon and leave it in the nearest Velib stand there.
Mathieu Fierling, the deputy director of the scheme, believes it will suit Parisians and tourists alike.
for public transport and for Velib. You can set up a subscription for
just one day or for a whole week and the subscription fee is minimal -
one euro ($1.38; £0.68) to anyone who wants a one-off go or 29 euros
($40; £20) for a year's subscription."
Seems like a great idea. But as an economist would have predicted, people don't take care of other people's property quite as carefully as they take of their own. There was no deposit involved with the bikes, just a inexpensive user fee. The outcome isn't pretty (HT: Jeff Bliss):
They have been used 42 million times since their introduction but vandalism and theft are taking their toll.
The company which runs the scheme, JCDecaux, says it can no longer afford to operate the city-wide network.
Championed by Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, the bikes were part of an attempt to "green" the capital.
Parisians took to them enthusiastically. But the bikes have suffered more than anticipated, company officials have said.
Hung from lamp posts, dumped in the River Seine, torched and
broken into pieces, maintaining the network is proving expensive. Some
have turned up in eastern Europe and Africa, according to press
reports.
Since the scheme's launch, nearly all the original bicycles have been replaced at a cost of 400 euros ($519, £351) each.
It evidently worked better in Lyon, a smaller town. Maybe norms and a different culture restrained people there from abusing the bikes and the system.
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It's awfully similar to an experiment that Berry College did years ago. It was a kind of campus bike system (no user fee, though).
Similar results. Students didn't take care of the bikes.
I first saw this back in the early 1990s at a sculpture park in the Netherlands. It worked really well there because [a] it was a closed system – there was nowhere to take the bikes, so people didn't. [b] They were paying to go to the park and gallery, and presumably thought they had some kind of investment in the scheme. [Also they were, you know, highbrow and all]. And possibly [c] the bikes were ugly and low performance, so had little real value compared to the hassle of stealing them. Then I came across a similar scheme in Copenhagen a few years later – this time I saw no bikes in the city centre where they were supposed to be except one mangled example locked to its stand. Probably goes to prove your point – although I see on the web [http://www.bycyklen.dk] the scheme is still running, now in its 14th year…
"It evidently worked better in Lyon, a smaller town. Maybe norms and a different culture restrained people there from abusing the bikes and the system."
I could definitely see this working in Korea and Japan, possibly a few other places in the world. But you're right Russell, it'll fail mostly everywhere.
such programs have worked in small towns. There are bicylcle programs in the colorado ski towns of Crested Butte and I believe also Telluride and are maintained by a group of volunteers.
These programs have proved successful in smaller towns as they are often close knit where everyone knows everyone, so there is a built in element of trust that does not exist in large cities.
Looks like Iowa City, IA also has a similar program – http://www.bikelibrary.org
The tried this at my school (Birmingham-Southern College) last year. The bikes were donated by Regions Bank and they were for the purpose of 'going green'. Essentially, what you would expect to happen did and now there really aren't any left.
We have a similar system in the U.S., its called public housing. Have no fear the government has found ways to allow low-income people to qualify for mortgages on detached single-family dwellings, though. Oh, never mind.
The problem is information, and I suspect it's what made the difference in Lyon. In a smaller town, there are fewer people to monitor; no doubt they were better at figuring out who the vandals were and dealing with it in some fashion.
One way the company could succeed would be to add a tracking mechanism, so that they could know who had the bike last and when it had been returned to one of the racks. If someone took a particular bike from one location and it never showed up at another location, the subscriber could be located and forced to either return the bike, pay a big fee, or both.
I think that would have a greater chance of success.
There is a similar program in place in Washington, DC, except that they put a $450 hold on your credit card, and if the bike isn't returned within 3 hours, you are liable for the charge. So far, that works far better.
They could also booby trap the bikes, so that vandals would be killed or maimed. With shaped charges, the damage to the bike itself could be minimized.
The question you really have to ask yourself is when the government comes to convert your home into "public housing" will you take up arms finally?
I live in Lyon and I use the Velo'v (the name of the biking system in out city) on a daily basis. I am extremly interested to see why this worked better here than in Paris.
One clue can be that the great majority of the bike stations are located in the inner city of Lyon which is far smaller than Paris and the gains in time from taking the bike to move around the city are considerably higher compared to taking the public transportation of your personal car. Size therefore can have a big impact. In Paris it takes a lot of time to get anywhere, by bike, car or public transportation, so I think people have less incentives to switch to bikes.
There is also a strong economic disincentive to damage the bike. You have to make a 150 euros deposit in order to be able to take a bike and this deposit will automatically be cashed if you don't return the bike in 24 hours. So I wouldn't want to hang it in a tree for that price:) Maybe mostly stolen bikes end up like this, which leads me to the question of vandalism in Lyon compared to Paris, but here also, size could matter.
Adam: They do have your name when you take the bike, you have to be signed up for the system and have a smart card. It's not clear how people are getting around this, that would be interesting to know.
Superheater et al: I don't see what there is to get upset about. You're still welcome to bring your bike, or car, or use the bus or train instead. This attempt is based on the belief that, for many people, storing the bike (and having to use it even if it rains) is the hurdle, rather than the actuall pedalling. Unlike many of the smaller scemes mentioned here, this one wasn't based on any utopian model of good citizens, they were clearly budgeting for some upkeep — it only hit the news now, they've already replaced half the bikes.
When I was in college 20 years ago, we had a bike sharing system where people who wanted a bike just cut any lock that might be on it and took it. After a couple repetitions of this, I just started bringing my bike into class and later, into my office. This Parisian system sounds like it might have saved the cost of the locks.
@improbable
My bet is that they aren't tracking when those people are returning the bikes. CL's comment about the system we have here in DC sheds some light on the difference that makes; also on putting time restrictions on use of the bike and backing it up with fees.
They are indeed tracking when people are returning their bikes. Each bike is actually equipped with a GPS, and the machine you "plug" it back into knows exactly where you took it and when that was…
When you look at the numbers, the rate of attrition isn't really that high. I mean, replacing 7,500 bikes over the course of 42 million uses means an average of 5,600 rides per replacement bike. If you rode your bike with normal care every day for 5,600 days (15.33 years), it might very well be in need of replacement. Heck, if you left it in a public place, even locked up, you'd be lucky not to have had it stolen (though I presume the incredible ugliness of these bikes is a deliberate attempt to deter theft).
It sounds to me like the company that agreed to manage the program just wants out of the deal, because the billboards they got in return aren't worth the cost of upkeep on the bikes, or because they're angling for a cut of the profit.
@Mathieu Bedard
Interesting. Then perhaps the vandals are simply people who managed to get the bikes off of the racks without paying in the first place?
Probably. I believe it is also very common for people to be bullied off their rental bike.
I thought about trying one of these when I was in Paris, but I noted that the places people wanted to leave from tended to have no bikes left, and the places people wanted to go were full and you could not return the bike. So you could get stuck with a bike and no place to bring it back to.
I seem to remember that one-off users had a deposit held on their credit card, perhaps the losses came from people paying with a ride card that did not do that.
I tried to use this service in Marseille once when it all started.
The first "dispenser" I walked to couldn't connect to the server to allow me to take a bike. I thought it was ok you know, networking doesn't always work.
The second "dispenser" told me no bikes were available, when all spots were filled and 8 bikes were available, and all in seemingly good shape mind you. But you know, I thought it was ok, sometimes these things break you know.
Third dispenser had no bikes available. It really didn't.
At the fourth dispenser I was already at destination.
So I decided that I would not use this service in the future because I have no time to waste in the morning with these things, trying to figure where there are bikes available, and where there are free spots to leave the bike.
Lyon may be small compared to Paris, but I wouldn't normally call a city that size small. Norms probably have a lot to do with it. Maybe riots. How many of those paris bikes were destroyed in the riots? Weren't they burning 100+ cars a night!