The New York Times has an article in today's edition about the Vélib bike program in Paris. When we were in Paris, we saw the bikes all over the city. It was clear the program was wildly successful.
From the article:
Twelve weeks after the introduction of the Vélib, 15,000 bikes have been put into service at more than 1,000 stations. In that time Vélibiens (or Vélibeurs or perhaps Vélibistes) have checked out bicycles almost six million times and ridden them an estimated 7.5 million miles.
The Vélib system is simple. You swipe a credit card in a kiosk that is located beside a row of parked bikes and purchase a one-day, one-week or one-year subscription.... When you've reached your destination, you look for the nearest Vélib station, click your bike into an empty dock, watch a light change from yellow to green to acknowledge that you've returned your bike, and you're done.
One bit of good news: some American credit cards now work at the kiosks. Ours did not because they did not have a small embedded computer chip, a puce, embedded in the plastic to trigger the kiosk's release mechanism.
1 comment:
As noted in the article, AmEx cards will work. After PBP, we tried all the cards in our wallets before discovering the Amex trick. Riding the bikes around Paris was pretty neat.
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