Monday, July 16, 2007

Paris goes green

The city of Paris is deploying a vast network of bicycles that everyone will be able to rent.
It's called Velib', which is an amalgam of the French words for bicycle and freedom: “vélo” and “liberté”.
The first 30 minutes are free. The next 30 minutes are 1€ and the next 1 hour is 2€ so the prices are quite affordable. And there is more potential for a free ride and that's the goal of this project: riding short distance.
You pick the bike wherever you want and you give it back wherever you want too. The bikes are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
They are building so many bike stations that you have to be near one of them.
This project has already been set up in other cities like Lyon and are in project in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille.
All the stands are equipped with a system that allows you to rent a bike, consult a user’s manual and a map.
Hopefully most of the Parisians will use this new system because in the capital it's getting worse and worse to circulate. Paris might become one day like Amsterdam, where people "live" with their bikes.
More info? Here too.

No comments: