Bike Sharing Growing Pains
Paris’ plans to grow the highly successful Vélib’ bike sharing service into surrounding urban areas has been put on hold by the courts. The service, which has plans to double in size this year to 20,600 bikes, is operated by the advertising company JCDecaux. JCDecaux’s competitor, Clear Channel France, has sued JCDecaux and the city of Paris, claiming that the surrounding areas are new markets that were not covered in the original bidding process, and thus a new bidding process must be held. The courts have agreed, and have cancelled the Paris city council’s decision to extend the bike-sharing service. The city council is appealing the court’s decision.
The expansion of the Paris bike-sharing service is part of Mayor Bernard Delanoë’s ambitious plans to change the face of transportation in the region. 2008 is an election year and, if he is re-elected, Delanoë has promised to add 200 kilometres of new bike paths, to double the number of bike parking spots to 46,000, and to create a car sharing network of 2,000 electric cars. He also promises a plan to improve the safety of pedestrians and the quality of their experience by widening sidewalks, designating new pedestrian streets, and improving separation from bikes.
Bike sharing programs with thousands of bikes are a new and quickly-evolving phenomenon, and the Paris legal case is an example of the growing pains that cities are experiencing as they develop their models. With successful programs such as Vélib’ in Paris and Bicing in Barcelona worth millions of dollars each year, and with many North American cities investigating launching similar services, competitors to the giant advertising companies, such as Cemusa and Intrago, are rolling out their own technologies. This introduces the problem of whether adjacent municipalities will end up with different service providers, making bike sharing less attractive to riders who might want to commute across municipal boundaries.
Another problem has been learning how to distribute the bikes so that there are bikes available when they are needed and spaces available when they are dropped off. Fleets of trucks are used to move the bikes as required, and it has become a science to predict where the bikes will go, influenced by the weather, time of day, holidays, and geography.
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