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The BBC is reporting that the private company operating the Paris bike-sharing program says the costs of theft and vandalism make it too expensive to sustain:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7881079.stm
I wonder what this might mean for bike-sharing programs in the States.
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I read another article similar to this one.
From what I can tell of the two articles, the program is actually quite a success, but that problems have arisen that need to be addressed. It seems that all of the problems were expected, but that some of them are more severe than expected.
42M users? 10,000 km per bicycle per year? Those sound like great numbers to me.
I wonder how these stats (provided in the article, by Velib) compare to private bicycles in any major city:
20,000 bicycles
1,250 stations
Cost 400 euros each to replace
7,800 "disappeared"
11,600 vandalised
1,500 daily repairs
Staff recover 20 abandoned bikes a day
Each bike travels 10,000 km a year
42 million users since launch
I don't ride my bike 10,000 km each year.
This blog, by a bike-sharing consulting firm, has a lot of research on bike sharing systems:
http://bike-sharing.blogspot.com/
Are the problems of the Velib system a serious threat to the existence of the program?
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How do we know who to believe? The BBC story seems so pessimistic beyond the actual concerns. Vandalism? Who would have thought? ;)
Here are some more stories:
http://bikeportland.org/2009/02/12/veli … officials/
http://www.streetsblog.org/2009/02/12/r … aggerated/
I like this comment from Steve Durrant:
The BBC report (and derivatives) will live on in many minds as the authoritative death knell for puiblic bike programs, and will unfortunately slow down some cities and creative new approaches.
We (Alta) are helping several cities consider and design public bike programs. There are barriers, including bike attrition, but they are surmountable.
Rob pointed out that it's 42M uses, not users. I realized the difference, but just repeated the quote. (Stats like that often pump up car usage numbers too. E.g., 20K cars trips recorded on a given street but only 1K bike trips, yet a person might drive a car 100 mi in day while a person rides a bike 15 mi in a day. A 20-to-1 ratio becomes a 3-to-1 ratio of motorists-to-bicyclists.)
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