reposted from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2139594,00.html
A new free bike scheme in Paris is a big success. But how long will it take Britain to follow suit?
Agnès Poirier
Thursday August 2, 2007
The Guardian
Le Tour is dead, long live le vélo! The French vélorution began the day after Bastille day, or day one of the vélib - short for vélo-liberté. With it, millions of Parisians have been able to forget the shame of the Tour de France and make the road theirs, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
You can't miss them: the vélib are everywhere - brand-new bikes with grey 25kg frames and a basket on the front. The people riding them look like criminals on the run: elated, eyes shining, sweat pearling on their brows, unable to quite believe their luck. Freedom, freedom! They ride alone or with friends, against traffic, over pavements, frightening poodles and old ladies.
So far, none have been nicked. Each bicycle has been used an astonishing 30 times a day, on average. Only three have been graffitied, in a dodgy corner of quartier Goutte d'Or. The bike station on top of Montmartre, meanwhile, was constantly empty, while the bikes at the bottom of the hill gathered dust in the sun, unused. So three people were hired to ferry the bikes from the bottom to the top of the hill, from dawn to dusk, enabling tourists to descend in gleeful, guilt-free rapture.
One bike was found 30 miles away, in a rough estate, another near Monet's house in Giverny. The first was probably ridden by an athletic delinquent escaping the police; the second, by an American tourist lost in the Normandy countryside.
In less than three weeks the vélib scheme has crowned Paris the capital of freedom cycling. The experiment has been tried elsewhere, of course, but never so successfully and never on this scale. The Dutch attempted it in 1964. At the time of free love, free cycling seemed a logical development. Almost all of the bikes were quickly stolen or burnt and the utopian idea died, probably in a mist of marijuana, as quickly as it had appeared. In 1998, in Rennes, the capital of Brittany, a variant on that experiment was launched for the first time. JC Decaux, the French outdoor advertising company, was competing for the right to control all of Rennes' public advertising space. At the last minute a rival pocketed the contract, after it offered to finance a programme of "vélos gratuits" for the city. JC Decaux learned its lesson, and so did its main competitor, the American company Clear Channel.
Since then a war for the domination of the vélo world has raged, as each company tries to outdo the other in city halls around the world, offering bicycles to the people in return for the right to manage their cities' outdoor advertising. Clear Channel has managed to woo Oslo, Barcelona and Berlin, but JC Decaux is wearing the yellow jersey in the race. After a breakthrough in Lyon two years ago, the company has gone on to provide free cycling services to Seville, Cordoba, Giron, Brussels and Vienna, soon to be joined by Marseilles, Mulhouse and Besançon.
What the philosopher Roland Barthes described as the true epic dimension of cycling can now be experienced by millions of ordinary citizens living in the same city. Setting a different pace of living, these riders create a new harmony, smoothing the rough edges of modernity, taming the flow of the polluting cars around them. So the question is: when will Britain's cities follow?
Interviewed on the radio recently, London mayor Ken Livingstone explained that he couldn't ride a bicycle because his parents had been too poor to buy him one. With vélo-liberté, l'ami Ken and millions of Londoners can leave their homes and estates and make the capital theirs once more. Ken and Boris Johnson could even race one another to City Hall, while David Cameron follows with his driver right behind him and insists on a dope test at the finish.
· Agnès Poirier's book Touché, a French Woman's Take on the English, is out in paperback
