How Velib' works by Nemorino
Here at the annual bicycle fair at the beginning of June a Velib' organizer is explaining how the system works. Each rental station has an electronic vending machine with instructions in eight languages: French, English, Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese.*
Select your language, insert your credit card or European bank card (your card won't work if it doesn't have a chip, by the way, so that eliminates some American cards**) and decide if you want a one-day ticket for one Euro or a seven-day ticket for five Euros. You also agree that they can deduct up to 150 Euros from your account if you damage a bike or fail to return it.
If you live or work in Paris you can also get a yearly ticket, but not from the machine, for 29 Euros, which thousands of Parisians have already done.
With your ticket you can pick up a bike at any station, ride it to wherever you're going and leave it at any other station. The first half hour is "free", meaning included in the price of the ticket, but after that you get charged extra: one more euro for the second half hour, two for the third and four for each half hour thereafter. So if you want to ride around all day like I do you would have to change bikes every half hour -- or just rent a bike from Roue Libre in the traditional way.
Before using a Velib' bicycle, please be sure you understand the pricing system. For a half-hour ride it's a great bargain, but if you were to get a one-day ticket and keep the same bike for six hours, it would cost you 40 Euros, which is more than it would cost to rent a bike for an entire week from Roue Libre.
Second photo: Velib' sign at the bicycle fair.
*Update August 2008: So far only three of these languages have been implemented, as far as I can see, namely French, English and Spanish.
**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.
On her Barcelona page, VT member karenincalifornia has posted a tip on a similar system for spontaneous short-term bicycle rentals called Bicing (yes, that's how they spell it in Catalan), along with a link to Barcelona's Bicing website.
Unlike Paris, Barcelona does not offer a one-day or five-day ticket, just a one-year ticket for 24 Euros. This is because the Barcelona system is explicitly intended only for residents, and not for tourists. That's why the Bicing website is only in two languages: Catalan and Spanish.
Barcelona inaugurated the Bicing system on March 22, 2007 -- not quite four months before Velib' began operating in Paris. But the Paris system is on much larger scale. Whereas Barcelona is quite rightfully proud to have 100 rental stations in operation, Paris already has 750 stations and plans to have 1,451 running by the end of 2007.
Barcelona has 1,500 bikes available; Paris already has over ten thousand on the streets, and they plan to have 20,600 bicycles by the end of 2007.
Both Paris and Barcelona have already chalked up over a million bike rentals each -- but in Barcelona this took over four months, and in Paris it took just two and a half weeks.
http://www.velib.paris.fr/
