Velib Celebrates 100 million trips

Translating from a City of Paris press release:

In Paris, where we celebrated the 100 millionth Velib trip since July 2007, the popularity of the service hasn't diminished. There are 170 thousand subscribers and almost 100 thousand rentals a day at the 1700 stations that cover the capital. According to JC Decaux, the service has seen "a massive increase in recent months" thanks to a cloudless spring.

The city and its concessionaire share other satisfactions: a net reduction in vandalism. Shortly after the launch of the service, stupified users deplored the impressive number of bikes with flats, twitsted, stolen or broken. According to JC Decaux, the vandalism was reduced by 2/3 between 2009 and 2010. Is the anti-Velib violence no longer in fashion? "Shared bikes have arrived as part of the urban landscape" says M. Asseraf. Mme Lepetit prefers to see the change as the result of "public ad campaigns emphasizing civic spirit and responsibility."

All the stations haven't benefited from this enlightenment, as the residents of Barbes (18th arrondissement) or in proximity of the beltway can attest, but the city refuses to release the vandalism statistics by neighborhood "because this will stigmatize" explains the mayor.

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Getting a Velib Annual Membership. Part 2

You will recall that my husband and I received our Navigo cards and were eagerly awaiting the arrival of our annual Velib memberships. This would allow each of us tie our Navigo card to our Velib account and use the Navigo card to unlock the Velib directly. As easy as a visit to the local pub, "put it on my tab," I'd be saying electronically. [for the record, this is literary metaphor, I’ve been to a pub about twice in my entire life.] No more lengthy interactions with the Velib kiosk. No more having to remember the number of the Velib locking post that has the bicycle I have so carefully selected as problem-free. Did I mention that some of the Velib stations are so big that half of the bicycles are on the other side of the street or around the corner?

Imagine my excitement when my letter from Velib arrived. The day had finally come! I opened the letter to find that my application had been denied.
The Velib annual application requested a €29.00 fee, to be paid with a check. Thinking that a postal money order would suffice, my husband had purchased one from the local post office and included it with my application. Velib returned the postal money order explaining that they do not accept cash.



Now I have a €29.00 postal money order made out to Velib. I can't get my money refunded from the post office because we had thrown out the receipt (1. why would I want to keep the receipt? 2. why can't the Post Office give me money back without a receipt when the postal order is from me and I'm standing right in front of them with a passport?)

So we request a checkbook from our bank. An online request of course. In order to expedite the checkbook, we selected "pickup at our branch". 3 weeks and 3 trips to the branch later we finally receive our checkbook. So we resubmit our applications with the €29.00 checks enclosed.

A week later we are again denied. Now we learn the significance of the RIB. The "Relevé d'Identité Bancaire" is a piece of paper with 4 numbers on it. The bank ID number, the branch number, the account number, and a 2 digit RIB key, essentially a checksum calculated from the other 3 numbers. There is some other redundant information on the piece of paper like the name of the bank and their telephone number, but the essential data is contained in these 4 numbers. We entered all of these numbers in the specified fields on the Velib application form, the one which we printed out and submitted. So when the application instructions asked to include the RIB, my husband thought he had done it. But no, for some inexplicable reason it is necessary to include the special piece of paper the bank gives you copies of with the same 4 numbers on it.

All of this wasn't entirely obvious to our French friends either. We asked them to look at the letter and see if they could tell what we were doing wrong. Only upon patient cross-examination did they discover that my husband had not sent in the RIB bank slip of paper in addition to filling out the required filled.

"Of course! How could you be so stupid? Of course you must send in the RIB!"

"But it contains the same information that I entered on the form," my husband protested.

"But you must include it!"

OK, so we send in the applications again. This time with the pre-printed form, the €29.00 personal check, and the the all important RIB piece of paper.

Finally our annual memberships arrive. Two separate accounts, one for each of us. The letter tell us that we must now activate our membership by going online within 45 days. I picture someone at Velib headquarters who has been specifically designated to wait the 45 days for my account to expire. He's just sitting in a room with a clock and a calendar counting down. He's going to press a big red button which has been directly wired to my account if I don't stop him.

I sign in with my special ID number I've been assigned and my secret PIN, which must be entered twice into two separate boxes. I'm not sure why one isn't enough.

Et voila! I am signed in to my account. Velib thinks my name is Chase Robin, not Robin Chase, which will cause a moment's confusion the next time I try and sign in because in order to sign in I must enter my assigned number, my secret PIN (only once now) and my last name, which Velib thinks is "Robin". I'm not sure why they think this, since they got my husband's name right.

RIght away I try to use my Navigo to get a Velib, but it doesn't work. Velib kiosk reports that it is not associated with any account. Has all our work been in vain? I go back and log into my Velib account and find that there is no Navigo card number associated with my account, even though giving my Navigo card number was an important step I had completed back in November. So I enter one in the field for Navigo card number.

Now it works!! And it is really much easier than dealing with the kiosk. Now I think nothing of swiping my card and hopping on a Velib to ride just a few blocks. My travel time is cut in half getting to the train station. I check my account a few days later and am amused to see a long list of trips, every one of them under the 30 minute free limit.

But wait! After 4 months of effort and an almost innumerable number of steps, my husband is not so lucky. Even though we applied in parallel, attended to each step in parallel, made all the same mistakes and missteps in parallel, when he enters his Navigo card into his Velib account he is told that “the staff will take it under consideration.”

Now, if we can just figure out this one last thing...

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Where will bike-sharing work?

OK, Paris was and is terrific. Car traffic was manageable; bike lanes abound; everything is close to everything; and each block of the city is a nice one to be out riding on. So where else will it work?

Places that have safe places to ride. Paris has spent the last 4 years working out dedicated bike routes throughout the city.

Places that don’t have too many hills. I know that San Francisco is looking into bike sharing for their city. After my no-bike experience at the top of a not very big hill, I just can’t imagine the size of the bribe it is going to take to encourage people to return bikes to the top of SF hills – or what percentage of bikes will have to be trucked around and how many times a day.

Places where there is great transit. At least as Velib works now, you can’t absolutely positively count on a bike being available. If you can’t count on it, then it is out for commuting, out for important errands, and becomes a kind of nice novelty. That will dramatically diminish its use.

Places where we aren’t weather wimps. I couldn’t say places with nice weather, because I know those Danes use their bikes in every possible climate. I guess it will depend on the culture of those who live in the city whether or not they will ride when it is dark, cold, drizzly, hot, muggy.

Places that commit to a large number of bike locations. It really mattered that the bike stations were everywhere. At first I was irritated that Velib didn’t have printed maps available to show where the stations were, and that it was too dangerous to wing it. But I was wrong. I could depend on finding a station with just a little bit of circling. I didn’t need a map or big green V’s marring the beautiful Paris streetscapes shouting “here.”

Places that are beautiful – certainly a plus. The pleasure of being out and seeing the sites was a big encouragement. Velib quickly became my top and preferred mode of transportation: virtually free, fast, convenient, safe-ish (I would have liked my helmet), beautiful. As a single (sans enfant) person, why travel any other way?

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Details of the Velib deal and operations

(as of March 21, 2008, 8 months after launch) Details on stations, communications,bikes, utilization, contract. Here is Velib link, note you can change language in top right corner.


Stations: Each Velib station is positioned along a section of sidewalk, or a carve-out from curbside parking. Typically, these are not on the prime thoroughfares, but on the smaller streets that abut them. There is a 6 foot high kiosk and 10 or 20 knee-high locking stations cemented into the ground. You reserve the bike at the kiosk, choosing a specific bike (the parking stations are numbered), and then push the button on the station of your chosen vehicle and it releases.

Communications: The kiosks communicate using GPRS to the server. The bikes themselves have no electronics. One half of the stations get connectivity through one cell phone company; and the other half through another, with the idea being that if one cell provider goes down, at least half the bikes will still be accessible. In their third day of operations they had a 2-hour outage. Since then, all has been well.

Bikes: Have sturdy-ish front basket, three speeds, front and back fenders, chain guard, front and back lights powered by generator, lock, very hard seat, up-right riding stance.

Utilization: 60-90,000 trips daily in winter; 150-170,000 trips daily in the summer. This is about 7-12 trips per day. 97% are less than ½ hour (cleverly accommodating almost all trips you would do in the city). Almost 200,000 people have signed up for annual memberships, reaching their estimated goal for first year four months early.

They have to move about 18% of the bikes using a small truck with a flatbed trailer attached. This corresponds roughly to the commute into Paris in the morning and the reverse commute back out. You can understand this movement of bikes here.

The advertising deal with Paris (I didn’t read the contract; this is information from Albert xx, the person at JC Decaux who is in charge of this project). The city of Paris aggregated all its street advertising (primarily bus shelters and some flat stand-alones) into one single bundle, as well as eliminating 20% of the existing advertising (no doubt the least visible spots). Companies were asked to bid on the contract. In addition to the amount the city would normally get for selling its advertising space, the city required that the bidders sweeten the deal the building and operations of bike-sharing for the city of Paris. The contract is for 10 years.

I see this as something of a clever bribe: You want our prime city’s prime eyeballs? We want our cut of the revenues plus Velib. There is a long story about how the bid (and rebid) unfolded, with the result that Paris got a promise for 20,000 bikes. Decaux’s previous bike efforts, in 8(?) other cities only totaled 12,000 altogether. So Paris got a deal on a totally different order of magnitude, which corresponds to the value of Parisien eyeballs relative to those in other cities. This makes me realize that there are very few cities in the world that are likely to be able to extract as large a “bonus” as Paris did.

Decaux says it spent 90 million euros in 2007 on Pairs: to build Velib and swap out the flat-panel stand-alone advertising for new ones that rotate three different ads. One friend, Eric Britton, tells me that when DeCaux reinstalled the new panels, it rotated some of them that were parallal to the curb, to become a right angles with the curb, obstructing the sidewalk. Decaux claims it was only able to pull off this deal by installing the rotating sign boards which bring in three times the revenue because they support three times the advertising.

Remarkably, from contract award to Velib launch, only 4 months passed. As many as 700 people were at work on the project last year. They are down to 400 staff people now. While there are plenty of things you can imagine that would improve the system, I have to give them enormous credit for pulling off a system that is 85% right is just four months. Over time they will hopefully tweak and improve the system. In fact, starting this week, they will be offering a 15-minute “credit” for people that return bikes to 40 stations they have identified as chronically under-biked. And surprise, surprise, many of these stations are at the top of the hills.

Oh, Decaux has experienced way more vandalism and theft than it had in any of its other cities. No doubt (hopefully) they will figure out to minimize this problem.

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Success of Paris bike-sharing

Or Robin eats humble pie.

For years and years, people have asked me if Zipcar were going to expand into bike sharing, or did I want to get involved with a bike sharing start up. Each and everytime I thought, why? What’s the point? Anyone who wants one can pick up a used bike for as little as $30. And the market for tourists is handled by bike rental.

Then, Paris launched Velib (roughly translated as Bike Free) last July, put 16,000 bikes throughout the city in groups of 10 and 20. It has been a roaring success.

Last week I was in Paris and used it every day, several times a day. I took the Metro only four times. Velib is great! Here’s why:

• You can get a bike in front of your house and go to a park.
• Lock the bike into a nearby Velib parking space way faster than it is to find a good spot for your own bike and lock it up.
• Wander through the park and come out the other side. Grab another bike, and keep going.
• Stop at the grocery store that doesn’t have Velib parking. Use the lock that is attached to the bike to lock it up while you shop (ugh, a real pain compared to the push-in locking at the Velib stations).
• Take the subway to a friend’s house for dinner and decide to ride a bike home because it is faster. It has front and rear lights powered by your feet.
• Ride a bike into work. End the day with a meeting away from the office. Take another bike home.
• Push it into the nearby Velib spot, buy some take-out, and go up 7 flights to your apartment. Don’t worry about rain, storage, maintenance, or parking.

Cost: 1 euro for 1 day; 5 euros for 7 days, 29 years for a year. That’s it if you keep your trips around town to under 30 minutes. And my trips always were.

I LOVED IT.

Down sides:

Bike Upkeep: There was an inexcusable (from my operational point of view) number of dead broken bikes on the racks that had clearly been sitting there – tires ripped out; broken baskets and fenders, or smashed by hoodlums. Wise people check front and back tires, brakes, lift up the rear wheel and give it one pedal, and look for chain guards (I ripped my pants the second trip because it didn’t occur to me that every bike wouldn’t be intact). If the bikes don’t stay in good working condition, Velib will no longer be mobility contender.

Bike Availability Unpredictable: On Sunday I rode to the top of a hill to visit Pere Lachaise cemetery. As predicted, when I got to the top of the hill and the closest Velib station, my bike proved to be the only one there. After I’d had my fill of famous dead people’s graves, I went to get a Velib for the return home. Of course, my bike was gone and that station was empty. The kiosk has a print map of the Velib station you are at, and shows you all the adjacent stations. Over the next 30 minutes (and snow flurries were coming down) I walked to four more stations. At each one I found: 2 dead bikes, 5 dead bikes, 5 dead bikes, 2 dead bikes. When I got home, I went to a website not maintained by Velib -- parisavelo.net that has hacked their data. It shows you a map of Paris with:

green balloons (both bikes and parkings spaces available),
red balloons (racks completely filled with bikes, no space to park), and
black balloons (no workable bikes).

Gosh, wish Velib had that live data available at their kiosks!

My lesson from that day, and from the other days, is that with practice you will learn the pulse of bike and parking availability for your common routes, and adjust your use of Velib accordingly. If I’d been smarter, the obvious thing to do on finding no bikes at the top of the hill was to walk to the closest downhill station. I stupidly stayed on the top of the hill (7 black balloons mapped there on a cold Sunday afternoon). This means that I might or might not be able to rely on Velib for commuting to work. In general, I think Velib will work best in cities that have great mobility redundancy: the Velib’s weren’t at the top of the hill so I hopped on the Metro, no problem).

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