Bicycles built for vous - SUSAN SACHS

ARIS — The City of Light is going green on two wheels.

Parisians awoke yesterday to find more than 10,000 sturdy bicycles available for their use at 750 locations around the city. It cost next to nothing to take one for a spin. A swipe of a credit card for the deposit, and a 22-kilogram, pearly-grey bike, complete with basket and chain lock, was ready to ride.

"The weather's great, the streets are practically empty and we're going on a picnic," said Adrien Roux, a social worker who had just pulled out two bicycles for himself and his girlfriend from a stand near the Gare de Lyon train station.

Yes, they would have planned a day in the park anyway. "But we wanted to give bicycling a try," said Mr. Roux.
The new self-service bike-rental program is called Vélibre, a play on "vélo" and "libre," meaning free bicycle or, in a more lyrical translation, bicycle freedom.

It is the brainchild of the socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, who has made the automobile his personal bête noire since his election in 2001.

Much to the fury of car owners, he has already dramatically reconfigured the city's traffic patterns, eliminated most of the free parking, widened bus lanes and created pedestrian walkways in the place of car lanes. Paris has also doubled its bike lanes, to 370 kilometres, in the past five years.

At the same time, however, the bus and subway system is nearing saturation. Some 1.4 million cars and trucks crowd into city streets each day, a reduction from the peak traffic figures of the 1990s, but still too much for Mr. Delanoë.

With Vélibre, his idea is to flood the city with subsidized rentals in hopes of reducing air pollution and weaning the capital's residents from their cars for short trips to work and play. Studies have shown that most car trips are relatively short, with Parisians spending about half an hour getting from home to work. The fee schedule for Vélibre takes that into account.

The first 30 minutes on a city bike is free. But to encourage turnover, the price escalates the longer a user keeps a bike. The second half-hour costs one euro (about $1.45), the next half-hour is another two euros and from then on each 30 minutes costs four euros.

"Reducing air pollution has to be put at the centre of our development plans," said Mr. Delanoë when he officially launched the program yesterday. "We are simply offering here a little more air, a little more innovation and, as you can see in the name, a little more freedom."

The novelty of the Paris project may be in the sheer volume of bicycles available.

By early next year, when the new Vélibre program reaches full strength, no Parisian should have to walk more than 300 metres to find one of the planned 1,400 bike-rental stations. The city anticipates a total of 20,600 community bikes by January, 2008.

The bikes are to be supplied, monitored and maintained by the advertising company JCDecaux, which gets free rights to advertise on 1,600 city billboards in exchange for operating the program.

Similar, but more modest, projects in other cities have foundered.

Amsterdam, which made several hundred free bikes available, abandoned its program a few years ago. Copenhagen has an ongoing program, but offers just 1,300 free bicycles.

Toronto's BikeShare project, run by a non-profit group and funded by the city, closed last year after five years of operation. At its peak, it offered 150 yellow bicycles from 18 pickup and drop-off points, but the program suffered from a high incidence of vandalism and theft.

Paris is betting stiff penalties will reduce the potential for bikes to disappear. Users will be required to leave a security deposit of 150 euros (close to $220) when they take out one of the city bicycles. They forfeit the entire amount if the bike is not returned. If the bike is stolen, and a police report is filed, the renter's forfeit would still be a hefty 35 euros.

For all its good intentions, however, Vélibre has its critics.

Cycling groups have called for dedicated bike lanes, saying that bike riders will be at risk because they share lanes with motorcycles, buses and, in some cases taxis. Others have complained that Paris traffic will only worsen with the addition of thousands of bicycles.

"This mayor is a disaster," said Christine Lagarde, a Paris housewife driving her two children to the movies yesterday. "We call him 'Monsieur Traffic Jam' because everything he is doing makes the traffic worse in Paris."