A loverly idea that will never work it will take a lot more than cheap bikes to get people out of cars.

Paul-
I agree that it’s not likely to reduce automobile traffic but it should increase the options (and quality of life) for transit riders and pedestrians who would like to make a quick ride rather than wait on a bus. And that’s good enough for me…

Applyfor-MortgagesOnline.com-
You’re right- nice photograph.

An interesting twist: It seems that Paris is not paying for this program. The advertising/urban furniture company JC Decaux paid for the 14,100 bicycles (soon to be expanded to 20,600) AND 400 staff to manage the program, in exchange for 1,428 advertising spaces that they can rent out for 10 years.

Has anyone looked a little closer at this free lunch? Is this really such a boon to anyone who already bikes or walks in the city?

What do these “1,428 advertising spaces” look like? Where do these 14,100 bicycles park? Do they use sidewalk space?

Here in New York we can’t park our bikes in our workspaces, our sidewalks are overflowing with people and we are inundated with annoying advertising. Would a Paris style fleet of share bikes help any of these problems?

It seems likely they will want to put as many of these as they can in the most crowded part of the city to get the most advertising exposure. If they do, the bikes better go in existing parking spaces and not take an inch of sidewalk or park.

Central Paris is a lot less dense than central New York City.

There is nothing wrong with bike rental kiosks. But if City Hall is willing to take away on-street parking for other uses, let’s take the hot dog carts, book vendors, magazine stands and everything else crowding sidewalks and making life living hell for pedestrians and stick them there.

Like AGS above, I’m not sure about the New York vs Paris density statment, nor whether density in itself necessarily has a negative effect on the insertion of bicycle facilities. Is important to distinguish density from urban form.

It really depends on what kind of density you are talking about, and at what scale you calculate it. If we just take population and divide by area, we get:

Paris, all arrondissements: 24,775/km²
Paris, 11th arrondissement: 41,053/km²
New York, all boroughs: 10,292/km²
New York, Manhattan: 25,849/km²

(From Wikipedia -probably not the most reliable source in the world, but it looks like the authors got their numbers from the census so they should be accurate.)

So Paris and Manhattan seem to be about the same density, with certain spots being more or less dense depending on the form and use (lots of offices in lower manhattan means many buildings but less residents).

But should we really be counting the number of residents or the amount of floor space per unit of ground available The latter is called COS in French or FAR (floor-area ratio) in English, and is used in urban planning.

http://www.carfree.com/far.html

In paris it is between 3.25 and 3.75, and it looks like in Manhattan averages about 5. In this sense Manhattan is more dense because there are concentrations of tall buildings. There is also the question of perceived or lived density versus calculated (actual) density. In France this is a difficult issue in the banlieue, where the orthodox-modernist towers in a park scheme leads to fairly low density neighborhoods that people generally perceive as stiflingly dense and overly-urban simply because of the form and arrangement of the buildings.

And in the end all of this is only loosely related to how much public space is available physically and politically on the street to park bikes. With crowded sidewalks, the obvious solution would be to put the bike stations in parking spaces. In Lyon they have avoided this, which some find contradicts the message that bicyclists have as much a place on the street as cars. In Paris the

As for the advertising space, JC Decaux is a provider of ‘urban furniture’ and I believe that the spaces are on the furniture, which means essentially bus stop shelters. However, people in Lyon say that since Decaux set up its bikes, the city is getting increasingly lax about having more and more advertising in the center.

It is almost certain that this will not lead to massive shift in transport modes in Paris, and thus will not ‘save gas’. The population is essentially divided into motorists and non-motorists, and changing transporation policies tends to shift around the percentages between transit, walking, biking, etc without really taking anyone away from the car. Despite the impression that the city is full of cars, 30% of trips in Paris are made by transit and 45% on foot – cars are already only 20%, which goes up to 40% if we count the banlieue. The metro and trains are all electric, so these people were already not using gas, though the electricity is 70-80% nuclear – more radioactive waste, less greenhouse gasses. That said, getting more people onto bicycles is precisely what is needed to improve the safety and comfort for this mode, and thus its ability to grow in the future: motorists learn to share the road with cylists only once they have reached a certain ‘critical mass’.

In any case, these bikes will only be in ‘central Paris’ and this idea can probably only work in the center, i.e. where the real estate is expensive and the jobs are all service-sector. So many people interpret the incresed presence of bicycles in the city as just another quality of life improvement for a small segment of the society, another way for the affluent to distinguish themselves from the poor. The first time I heard it put this way it surprised me and shocked my sensibilites a bit, but it is valid criticism.