Getting a one- or seven-day subscription by Nemorino
People who use the Velib' bikes more than five weeks a year are better off getting a yearly subscription for 29 Euros, which 198,913 people have done in the first year of operation. These are mostly people who live in Paris or the nearby suburbs, and they have the option of adding the Velib' function to their Navigo cards, so they can use the same card for renting bikes that they use for riding trains, buses or trams.The rest of us can take out one- or seven-day subscriptions at the computer terminal which is found at most Velib' stations. You need a bank card or a credit card for this, preferably a European card with a chip in it. There have been problems with chipless American cards, but I have just downloaded the General Terms and Conditions from the Velib' website, and it says in Article 5.2 (3) that they accept AMEX and JCB cards.
It takes a few minutes to go through the procedure in which you agree, among other things, that they can take up to 150 Euros from your account if you fail to return a bike.
The young Portuguese ladies in this photo are taking out one-day subscriptions at Velib' station 10011 (or 10-11, the eleventh station in the tenth arrondissement) on rue du Château d'eau near Place de la République. I was happy to show them how to find the English-language menus and to answer the one question they had about the procedure. When it asked for a secret four-digit PIN number, they didn't realize that they were supposed to choose this number themselves, any four digits that they could easily remember.
According to the official statistics there were 277,193 seven-day subscribers and 3,683,714 one-day subscribers during the first year of Velib' operation, from July 2007 to July 2008.
Second photo: There are two sides to each computer terminal, and to subscribe to need to use this side that has a slit for your credit card and another slit where your Velib' ticket comes out when you have successfully completed the subscription procedure. Caution: it spits out your ticket very vigorously, so hold your hand by the slit to catch it, or look for your ticket on the ground nearby.
http://www.velib.paris.fr/
