“We think it could change Paris' image – make it quieter, less polluted, with a nicer atmosphere, a better way of life.”
Jean-Luc Dumesnil, aide to the mayor of Paris
PARIS – Paris is for lovers – lovers of food and art and wine, lovers of the romantic sort and, starting this summer, lovers of bicycles.
On July 15, the day after Bastille Day, Parisians will wake up to discover thousands of low-cost rental bikes at hundreds of high-tech bicycle stations scattered throughout the city, an ambitious program to cut traffic, reduce pollution, improve parking and enhance the city's image as a greener, quieter, more relaxed place.
By the end of the year, organizers and city officials say, there should be 20,600 bikes at 1,450 stations – or about one station every 250 yards across the entire city. Based on experience elsewhere – particularly in Lyon, France's third-largest city, which launched a similar system two years ago – regular users of the bikes will ride them almost for free.
“We think it could change Paris' image – make it quieter, less polluted, with a nicer atmosphere, a better way of life,” said Jean-Luc Dumesnil, aide to the Socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanok.
Anthonin Darbon, director of Cyclocity, which operates Lyon's program and won the contract to start up and run the one in Paris, said 95 percent of the roughly 20,000 daily bike rentals in Lyon are free because of their length.
Cyclocity is a subsidiary of outdoor advertising behemoth JCDecaux, which runs much smaller bike businesses in Brussels, Belgium; Vienna, Austria; and the Spanish cities of Cordoba and Girona.
The Cyclocity concept evolved from utopian “bike-sharing” ideas that were tried in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, usually modeled on Amsterdam's famous “white bicycle” plan, in which idealistic hippies repaired scores of bicycles, painted them white and left them on the streets for anyone to use for free. In the end, the bikes were stolen and became too beat-up to ride.
A number of U.S. cities, including Portland, Ore., have experimented with community-use bicycle programs.
JCDecaux developed a sturdier, less vandal-prone bike, along with a rental system to discourage theft: Each rider must leave a credit card or refundable deposit of about $195.
To encourage people to return bikes quickly, rental rates rise the longer the bikes are out. In Paris, renting a bike will be free for the first 30 minutes, $1.30 for the next 30 minutes, $2.60 for the third half-hour, and $5.20 for the fourth half-hour of use and every 30 minutes after that. That makes the cost of a two-hour rental about $9.10.
Membership fees in Paris will be steeper than in Lyon, from $1.30 for one day to about $38 for a year.
The Paris-JCDecaux deal is a complex, 10-year public-private partnership.
JCDecaux will provide all of the bikes, at a cost of about $1,300 apiece, and build the pickup/drop-off stations, each of which will have 15 to 40 high-tech racks. A centralized computer will monitor each bike's condition and location. The company will pay start-up costs of about $115 million and employ about 285 people full time to operate the system and repair the bikes. All revenue from the program will go to the city, and the company also will pay Paris a fee of about $4.3 million a year.
In exchange, Paris is giving the company exclusive control over 1,628 city-owned billboards, including the revenue from them, for the same period. About half the billboard space will be given back to the city at no cost for public-interest advertising.
