Bicycle Sharing (inexpensive, quality, distance, ride)

[plaidmom]

I would love to see something like Paris' Velib
( Vélib' - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) program come to the U.S.

Vote here if you would like to see something like this in your community:

B-cycle | Who Wants It More? (http://www.bcycle.com/who_wants_it_more/ - broken link)

[stone-ground]

Sounds like a great idea!

We'd also have to have bike lanes all over the place, as I understand they do in Europe.

[playasurfer]

It would be a great idea, but growing up in an area where people steal sewer lids to sell as scrap-metal, I must point out it may not be feasible everywhere...

[plaidmom]

Originally Posted by playasurfer

It would be a great idea, but growing up in an area where people steal sewer lids to sell as scrap-metal, I must point out it may not be feasible everywhere...

Yikes!

This is not a "free" bicycle program (lived in an area where the "Yellow Bike" prgram suffered theft and abuse ) but a pay-to-ride. Kind of like car sharing.

So you swipe a card to take a bike. I'm pretty sure if you steal the bike you get billed for it.....

[jtur88]

I recently lived in a town that had a few difficult hills in it. If there had been bicycle-sharing, all the bikes would be at the bottom of the hill, and nobody would want to walk them back up.

[UpperPeninsulaRon]

If biking is your choice for transportation, just buy your own bike. It's an inexpensive capital outlay versus a very complex system to get to a place that has a bike and return it to another place. Seems like a lot of wasted time.

Look at any college. Everyone simply owns their own bike, with bike racks everywhere. Why make things so complicated?

[recycled]

Hi Plaidmom, interesting Wiki article on Velib. Last time I was in Germany I used some bike rental stands in several cities (Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden) that were located near the Deutsche Bahn railway stations. They had good quality city bikes for rent at reasonable daily rates. This was great because these days it is such a hassle and expense to try and haul a bike onto an airplane for a long distance flight. And plenty of locals used these rental bikes too. I liked the freedom of it, because I could use a bike one day or part of a day, return it and after that I did not have to worry about the security of the bike. The Velib idea is a different twist with the self service rental stands scattered all over the city. In a place like Paris with one of the greatest public transit systems on the planet, I guess it's not such a worry if you use a Velib bike say from point A to B, and turn in the bike at a Velib stand at point B. Later on you go to the Velib stand at point B, or even point C and want to get a velib bike to get back to point A. Let's say there aren't any bikes available at point B or C. Oh well, just hop the nearest metro or bus in Paris to get back to point A, no biggie. Here in the US of A, where public reliance on public transit is rare or very rare outside a handful of major metro areas, the lack of public transit as a "backup" to a velib system might be a problem. And I think that theft here in the US would be far worse than in Paris, which lost over 10 percent of the velib bikes in a year.
Of course, I'll just continue to pedal along to and from work everyday on my bike here in Orange County. Today was bike commute day #215 for this year, and commute miles are somewhere above 6000. Don't need a car very often around here, it's normally just when I need to escape the megalopolis.

[Minato ku]

According stat thief are worse in France than in USA. The main problem of Velib is not thief but vandalism and vandalims is a big issue in Paris.
Honestly Velib is overrated, there is only 100,000 journeys per day compared at 5 million daily trip for the metro.