Vélib是由法文中腳踏車（vélo）和自由（liberté）兩個字合成，是一個單車租賃系統，由巴黎市政府和廣告公司JCDecaux合作，也是當今世上最大規模的城市公共自行車計畫。


The rental stations are also easy to use, contributing to the success of the year-old program.

根據紐約時報2008.7.13的報導(A New Fashion Catches On in Paris: Cheap Bicycle Rentals)，巴黎已經擁有20,600輛可供出租的單車，和1,450個自助租賃點，約每隔300碼（273m）就有一個租賃點。因為租用的前三十分鐘免費，以提高周轉率，Vélib在啟用的第一年，創下兩億七千五百萬租用車次。第一年Vélib被竊的車數高達3000輛，里昂的經驗值是10%,顯然巴黎的失竊率較高。（稍後許多被竊的車在羅馬尼亞和摩洛哥被尋獲。）

JCDecaux成立了CycloCity公司來負責整個系統案單車的維修服務。JCDecaux將會在10年內支出高達一億一千五百萬美金的費用及相當於285位全職員工來經營和維護整個系統，若有任何營餘，則全歸巴黎市政府。此外，還要每年支付巴黎市政府四百三十萬美元。而巴黎市政府的對價則是：JCDecaux獨家取得巴黎市政府在城市裡所有的1,628塊廣告看板的使用權，但這些廣告看板，約有一半要提供市府做公益廣告之用。

看看怎麼使用Vélib吧！Vélib的營運和7－11一像呢！



租賃點／出租站



Vélib 單車的介紹  樣子看起來笨重，還真的是很重，25公斤呢！一部成本是USD1,300.-相當於NTD 42,900.不單單笨重，也很貴重。



安全守則：沒有強制要求帶安全帽，但仍要遵守交通規則。



價目表：


Paris Embraces Plan to Become City of Bikes

By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 24, 2007; Page A10

PARIS, March 23 -- Paris is for lovers -- lovers of food and art and wine, lovers of the romantic sort and, starting this summer, lovers of bicycles.

On July 15, the day after Bastille Day, Parisians will wake up to discover thousands of low-cost rental bikes at hundreds of high-tech bicycle stations scattered throughout the city, an ambitious program to cut traffic, reduce pollution, improve parking and enhance the city's image as a greener, quieter, more relaxed place.

By the end of the year, organizers and city officials say, there should be 20,600 bikes at 1,450 stations -- or about one station every 250 yards across the entire city. Based on experience elsewhere -- particularly in Lyon, France's third-largest city, which launched a similar system two years ago -- regular users of the bikes will ride them almost for free.

"It has completely transformed the landscape of Lyon -- everywhere you see people on the bikes," said Jean-Louis Touraine, the city's deputy mayor. The program was meant "not just to modify the equilibrium between the modes of transportation and reduce air pollution, but also to modify the image of the city and to have a city where humans occupy a larger space."

The Socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, has the same aim, said his aide, Jean-Luc Dumesnil: "We think it could change Paris's image -- make it quieter, less polluted, with a nicer atmosphere, a better way of life."

But there is a practical side, too, Dumesnil said. A recent study analyzed different trips in the city "with a car, bike, taxi and walking, and the bikes were always the fastest."

The Lyon rental bikes, with their distinctive silver frame, red rear-wheel guard, handlebar basket and bell, can also be among the cheapest ways to travel, because the first half-hour is free, and most trips are shorter than that.

"It's faster than the bus or metro, it's good exercise, and it's almost free," said Vianney Paquet, 19, who is studying law in Lyon. Paquet said that he uses the rental bikes four or five times a day and pays 10 euros (about $13) a year, half for an annual membership fee and half for rental credit that he never actually spends because his rides typically last just a few minutes.

Anthonin Darbon, director of Cyclocity, which operates Lyon's program and won the contract to start up and run the one in Paris, said 95 percent of the roughly 20,000 daily bike rentals in Lyon are free because of their length.

Cyclocity is a subsidiary of outdoor advertising behemoth JCDecaux, which runs much smaller bike businesses in Brussels, Vienna and the Spanish cities of Cordoba and Girona. London, Dublin, Sydney and Melbourne reportedly are considering similar rental programs.


The Cyclocity concept evolved from utopian "bike-sharing" ideas that were tried in Europe in the 1960s and '70s, usually modeled on Amsterdam's famous "white bicycle" plan, in which idealistic hippies repaired scores of bicycles, painted them white, and left them on the streets for anyone to use for free. But in the end, the bikes were stolen and became too beat-up to ride. A number of U.S. cities, including Portland, Ore., have also experimented with community-use bicycle programs.

JCDecaux experimented with designs and developed a sturdier, less vandal-prone bike, along with a rental system to discourage theft: Each rider must leave a credit card or refundable deposit of about $195, along with personal information. In Lyon, about 10 percent of the bikes are stolen each year, but many are later recovered, Darbon said.

And to encourage people to return bikes quickly, rental rates rise the longer the bikes are out. In Paris, for instance, renting a bike will be free for the first 30 minutes, $1.30 for the next 30 minutes, $2.60 for the third half-hour, and $5.20 for the fourth half-hour of use and every 30 minutes after that. That makes the cost of a two-hour rental about $9.10.

Membership fees in Paris will be steeper than in Lyon, from $1.30 for one day to about $38 for a year.

The Paris deal will bring the world's biggest bicycle fleet to the City of Light in a complex, 10-year public-private partnership.

JCDecaux will provide all of the bikes (at a cost of about $1,300 apiece) and build the pickup/drop-off stations. Each will have 15 to 40 high-tech racks connected to a centralized computer that can monitor each bike's condition and location. Customers can buy a prepaid card or use a credit card at a computerized console to release a bike.

The company will pay start-up costs of about $115 million and employ the equivalent of about 285 people full time to operate the system and repair the bikes for 10 years. All revenue from the program will go to the city, and the company will also pay Paris a fee of about $4.3 million a year.

In exchange, Paris is giving the company exclusive control over 1,628 city-owned billboards, including the revenue from them, for the same period. About half the billboard space will be given back to the city at no cost for public-interest advertising.

Based on statistics from Lyon, company officials estimate that each bicycle in Paris will be used on average 12 times a day, for a total of about 250,000 trips a day, or 91 million trips a year.

In Lyon, according to deputy mayor Touraine, the city's 3,000 rental bikes have logged about 10 million miles since the program started in May 2005, saving an estimated 3,000 tons of carbon dioxide from being spewed into the air. Overall, vehicle traffic in the city is down 4 percent, he said, and bicycle use has tripled, not just on account of Cyclocity, but also because the program has prompted a boom in private bicycle use and sales.

The main complaint voiced by riders is that at certain times in certain places -- such as mornings at local universities -- all the racks can be occupied, making it impossible to return a bike. "I'm going to start using my own bike, because sometimes there are not enough spaces in the rack" at school, said art student Cecile Noiser, 19.

Company and city officials said that because the system sends in electronic data about which bikes are where, they are exploring ways to redistribute bikes using trucks to better match customers' needs. Touraine said the glitches are minor compared with the benefits.

Researcher Corinne Gavard contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/23/AR2007032301753.html

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單車之都！巴黎挑戰新頭銜

〔編譯魏國金／綜合報導〕繼榮膺美食、美酒、藝術、羅曼史之都後，巴黎將在今年夏天套上另一光環︰單車之都。在七月十五日法國國慶翌日，巴黎人將發現分布在巴黎各處的數百座高科技單車站內，有數千輛出租單車向人們招手。這項計畫旨在減少污染，並使巴黎成為更環保、寧靜與休閒之處。

塞車夢魘 單車搞定

巴黎官員說，到年底，巴黎應會有一千四百五十座單車站、兩萬零六百輛單車，每隔約兩百五十公尺就有一座單車站。而且依照法國第三大城里昂兩年前開辦類似計畫的經驗來看，大部分民眾將免費用車。

巴黎市長德拉諾埃的助理迪梅尼爾指出︰「我們認為這可改變巴黎的形象，讓巴黎更安靜、空氣較好、生活更舒適。」此外，一項針對巴黎交通運輸的分析也發現，比較利用汽車、單車、計程車與走路通行巴黎，單車的速度最快。

在里昂，租用單車是最便宜的暢行方式，因為租用最初半小時免費，而大部分行程皆短於半小時。在里昂研讀法律的十九歲學生帕奎特說，他平均每天使用四、五次單車，一年支付的租車費僅十歐元（台幣四百四十元），因為行程多半只需騎車幾分鐘。經營里昂相關計畫的Cyclocity主管達朋指出，里昂日租單車平均兩萬筆，九成五屬免費。

華盛頓郵報報導，Cyclocity衍生自一九六○、七○年代曾在歐洲試行的「單車共享」概念，以阿姆斯特丹的「白色單車」計畫為藍本。當時阿姆斯特丹一些嬉皮修復了二十幾台單車，塗上白色，然後放在街頭供人免費使用。不過，這些單車不是被偷，就是被破壞到無法再上路。

Cyclocity的母公司則研發出一種較經久耐用的單車，同時施行防盜的租用制度︰租用者必須留下一張信用卡或一百九十五美元保證金，以及個人資料。達朋說，在里昂，每年約有一成的單車被偷，後來許多被找回。

為了鼓勵人們趕快歸還單車，租金採累進費率，以巴黎為例，租車最初半小時為免費，第二個半小時為一．三美元、第三個為二．六美元、第四個為五．二美元，若租用兩小時，租金達九．一美元。

在長達十年的官民合作合約下，巴黎將出現全球最龐大的「單車車隊」，JCDexaux提供所有單車，並興建取車、還車站，每站有十五至四十個連上中央電腦的單車架，以監控單車的狀況與位置。

http://www.libertytimes.com.tw/2007/new/mar/25/today-int3.htm

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Vive la velorution

A new free bike scheme in Paris is a big success. But how long will it take Britain to follow suit?

Agnès Poirier
The Guardian, Thursday 2 August 2007

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.

To become one of them you simply dash to the nearest electronic bike station, dock in, and the bike is yours. There are already 700 stations in Paris. By the end of the year there will be an astronomical 1,451 (compared to 298 tube stations) - that's one at every street corner, offering a total of 20,000 bikes, all available to the public for free. Free for the first 30 minutes, that is. After that costs begin at €1, rising to €29 for one year's access. Should you fall in love with one particular heavenly machine and fail to return it to a docking station, you'll be fined €150, half the price of a new bike.

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

Agnespoirier.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/aug/02/comment.france

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The stories were taken from The Washington Times, Guardian, Liberty Times (Taiwan,自由時報) and official website of Vélib.  The photos were taken from the New York Times.  The authors of these articles and publishers are not involved with the production of blog.