19 posts tagged “paris”
It's been of the most shocking revelation of my recent visit to France. The French are riding bikes; a lot and in modern and innovative ways. It seems that the Parisian initiative, "The velib'" got a lot of press from around the world. [1] so I was really eager to try this new system (launched during the summer 2007), and If I were expecting change, I was expecting to notice it only in Paris. Well, I indeed saw a lot of positive change but I also noticed it in other towns. I can't wait to see Paris and other major towns in a few years, I hope the future built is for less pollution, less noise, less stress, more "green". velib' and similar system are surely one good step in that direction.
velib' would change my transportation experience in Paris...
In Paris I almost exclusively used public transportations. It's relatively fast, not THAT expensive (though it is, if you don't work) and convenient. But It's depressing.
I only used velib' once for a short trip (So I realize that's not a great deal of experience, comments are welcome in this conversation)
The ride was 25 minutes (I got lost) so less than 30 minutes and thus free. It was raining a bit and it was dark, but nonetheless it was fantastic to be at the surface. Paris is a beautiful city but it's hard to enjoy it from underground. I went on l'"ile de la cite", Saint Michel, Saint-Germain... It was just lovely, I can't imagine how cool it must be in summer. Also I felt pretty safe during the whole ride. You have to be careful at intersections though (cars cross the bike paths there).
How it works?
The New York Times put that well:
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. (The system also takes a 150-euro deposit authorization to ensure the bike's safe return.) The machine prints out a card with your code number and you enter a personal password. You tap in this code and password to unlock a bike and ride off.
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. The first half-hour is free, after that the cost is 1 euro, or about $1.45, for the second half-hour, 2 euros for the third half-hour and 4 euros for each half hour after that.
Kudos to the city and partners, the sheer implementation of the idea is brilliant
The immediate consequence of this success is that you cannot miss velib' users there are literally everywhere.
- Bike stations are ubiquitous
- The Bike lanes and contraflows are numerous and well designed. There are 371 kilometers of cycle paths in the city. I guess you can probably plan your trip to almost exclusively use the safest path.
- Bike and 2-wheels parking are numerous too (though it's not really related to velib') It looks like the city built a lot of parking space for 2-wheels which is great. For sure there is no park-meters to hijack as in San Francisco, so the city had to build something else :)
- The fares appear to be fair, though I haven't practiced enough to really tell
velib' quirks (most of them are minor)
I heard that american tourists were running into issues when trying the system because of the silly credit cards there were using (no chip). So at first I tried with my french credit card (with a nice little chip, thanks Mr. Moreno). Well it didn't work, don't ask me why. I changed station just to be sure, and it was the same issue. Oddly when I tried my dumb american credit card it just worked!
I should probably not complain about this one, but by using my american credit card I wasn't charged for my velib' at all! Maybe because the amount was low (1 euro for the day pass, then I used it for free because not for too long). So it's not perfect... (well for me it's surely is :)
Update: "They" probably read me, since this morning I've been billed $1.52!
In a very short period of time (a few days) I saw quite a few bugs (the whole station turned red for a few minutes) (reportedly[fr] it's because the stations are running windows and not Linux, are trolls riding bikes ? :)
More annoying, it looks like it's quite often that stations are full. It's probably more the case during the night and the week-end? I know that the staff is reshuffling bikes around stations, maybe they don't do it 24/24. From my understanding the problem is that users are taking bikes to the same locations (to go out). so the stations are filling, and if a station is full you can't return the bike. Apparently, you are credited 15 free minutes to go to another one. I know that my friend Julie cancelled a gym class because she couldn't find a spot to park.
The velib' are bulky (22kg) but that's fine, as a regular bike commutes what I find more annoying is the lack of higher gear (1, 2 and 3 only), I found myself only using the third one and wishing for twice as many (or at least one allowing me to go FAST).
The last drawback I see, is that velib' doesn't encourage people to wear helmets. Face it, it's dangerous! :/
Elsewhere
It seemed to me that bikes were everywhere during my trip to France, maybe it's a consequence of me becoming a cyclist in San Francisco (I hadn't ridden a bike for years before settling in SF), maybe people were biking that much before but I wasn't aware of it?
Paris surely got a lot of press (see a few references below [1]), but it's not the only city in France where you can bike. Soissons (north-east from Paris) doesn't have a bike sharing program but kudos to the old lady (70-80 years old) I spotted biking in town, at night, by -6C).
When I visited Rennes, I learned about the "velo a la carte" which I believe is the world first system of the like using computers.
Then in Aix-En-Provence, I spotted v'hello
In Marseille it's called "Le velo"
And I now that Lyon has "velov'" for a long time.
Looking for the wikipedia entry for the list of projects it looks like the increase in new projects is accelerating.
[1] blog & press references:
This english video by NYC folks presents the system just after the launch and before improvements. You see bikes, stations and users. Fun fact out of 1400+ stations in Paris the video is made from the very own station I tried (a few meters from my friend Julie's apartment)
- NYT article
- SF-Gate article, same system in preparation in the city by the bay?
- Le capitaine sauve par velib' [fr]
- video from streetsblog
- a pool dedicated to velib'
- official press section
- bike hugger
- http://www.parisdailyphoto.com/2007/09/velib-to-go-international.html
- One good article from washcycle great blog
- ... and a second one
more hi-quality public transportations + more green + less car lanes = happy people (well those that realize that car is not an absolute necessity).
On the other hand some need to drive in Paris for they daily job (transporters ...), I guess it's not funny for them to be stuck in traffic jams.
One additional thing Paris miss is giant parking lots outside Paris. Ideally they would be free - or the parking fee would allot you some public transportation free time.
For the last two years, Yelp had been of invaluable, er. help, when it came to find information about local services and business during my visits to San Francisco.
I was dreaming of having something similar in Paris just for restaurants (heavily using google maps and Metro station network), but I left Paris :D
In France, justeacote launched not so long ago to do something similar, let's see how it goes a bit later.
Anyhow, Yelp just got it right. Kudos.
Access to the internet is sporadic at best, so here is an update about our move from Paris to San Francisco.
It's been difficult, tiring, we ran into a few unexpected issues, but all is well so far !
The furnitures and stuff are somewhere on the roads, waiting to reach final storage destination. We're bouncing between family and hotels before the final take off on sunday.
This video demonstrates potential privacy issues with Nike+ device. It's interesting. If you're a geek you'll love it no matter what, considering the amount of hardware hacks and cool software shown in the video...
I've placed an order for a Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS/Heartbeat monitor device. Let's get tracked by satellites - yeah!
In the meantime I woke up this morning at 5 am because of the jetlagged... not enough sleep ! I'm waiting to for a bit of daylight before doing my first work out in Paris -- tracked by my Nike+ RFID spy sensor :D
Leaving France is giving me headaches for many reasons. First of all because I need to keep bank accounts in France. And I don't really know what will be my future needs once in San-Francisco.
Will I need to transfer money, how much does it cost ? (easy answer : it's outrageously expensive !). Also banks are trying to sell me "Expat" packages to help me in the process (300€/year), the key feature being the "recommendation letter" to help me find a local (San-Francisco) bank -- and reduced fees for international wire transfer.
On the other hand I've been documenting myself about how the american bank system works. It's so different. It's amazing. In addition to friends and colleagues advices, the best resource I've found is a website.
BankRate is purely a gold mine. It really helps me to find my way in this new system (a lot of new terms to learn).
So right now, my gross feeling is that American banks won't give a shit about the recommendation letter that french bank would write ! They won't trust me until I'll have a credit history. I'll probably need to start with a secured credit card. I'll also convert my Euro Amex to a dollar Amex.
The Gotan project released their second studio album called Lunatico, which is the first album I heard from them.
It's a bewitching mix of tango and electronica.
"Lunatico", named after tango hero Carlos Gardel's champion racehorse of the 1930s, was recorded in Buenos Aires and Paris, with a host of local session musicians, vocalists such as Caceres, Jimi Santos, Koxmoz and in deed Cristina Vilallonga, and collaborations with Argentinian pianist Gustavo Beytelmann and Tucson based Calexico.
This is the end of a long, painful process, but eventually Caroline and I have been granted L1/L2 VISA for the US.
There's still a lot to do, but one of the biggest milestone has been reached. YAY. Now I'll have a busy week-end with insurances, banks and find a company to move few stuff from Paris to San-Francisco...
This week-end, manu, my brother in law came in Paris to initiate me to its religion (aka sport) : the Basque Pelote. Sometimes we play Squash together, so he often told me about his favorite sport (he's a retired champ' since he now lives in Britanny - far from Paris and the Basque country) which looks quite interesting (I love Squash; the Pelote share a lot with Squash, and adds a lot of little interesting tricks).
This week-end was the week-end and it was awesome to have him here in Paris. We played squash for 3 hours in the morning and then we had the "Trinquet" one of the playground for almost 2 hours in the evening. It's a 4 players game, so we just didn't really played a match... It was just a few balls to give me the right feelings. The downside is that it's a lot of pain feelings too! Indeed, the Pala is a 500g (1.1 pounds) piece of wood, without a modern handle (think: comfortable grip). So I ended with my right hand torn in pieces at 7 different places.
Oh yeah, I'm a bit proud of those injuries, it's kind of the "warrior" initiatic silly thing... You have to go thru this anyhow before the skin of your hand is strong enough... then you can play :)
Anyway we had a great time! It remembers me the time where I was used to play bare hand with a tennis ball and a wall at school (11-14 years old).
My Vox development server is dying :
miro kernel: CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled
Message from syslogd@miro at Wed Jul 19 12:41:59 2006 ...
miro kernel: CPU1: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled
Message from syslogd@miro at Wed Jul 19 12:41:59 2006 ...
miro kernel: CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttledMessage from syslogd@miro at Wed Jul 19 12:41:59 2006 ...
miro kernel: CPU1: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled
It's 36°C in Paris...
