[sustran] Happy birthday Vélib 2009 - Almost there

Eric Britton eric.britton at ecoplan.org
Wed Jul 15 16:55:49 JST 2009


Later today a final version of this will be posted to World Streets. If in
the meantime you have comments or suggestions, that would, as always be most
welcome.
 
 
Happy birthday Vélib 2009
 
Well here you are dear child, already two years old and for such a young
thing you have certainly been very active over these first 730 days.
 
More than 50 million rides, going on three hundred thousand annual pass
holders, and finally the full complement of 20,000 bikes on the streets. And
as if that were not enough, here you are already venturing out into thirty
surrounding towns and suburbs to give each of them Vélib's of their own. You
turned out to be too good a present for Paris to keep you for itself.  
 
You, and the Paris and JCDecaux teams that make you work day after day, have
been busy continually fine-tuning your bikes, maintenance procedures,
station locations, software, like redistribution and everything else that it
takes to make you an appreciated partner of Paris's first-rate,
internationally competitive, affordable new mobility system.  
 
Few of us really understood at the beginning how important you were going to
be, and I bet that even you did not fully appreciate the extent that you
would become part of a major transformation process.
 
Vélib and us
 
And those of us who hop on your bikes every day – our editor for example
estimates that he has made more than 2000 trips, most of which worked out
very well – are in a pretty good position to appreciate your contribution.
It is not that you are perfect, oh no!  but certainly good enough that for
many of us you have become a part of our daily mobility solution, an almost
always agreeable part of our day to day lives.  You don't have to be
absolutely perfect, almost perfect will do just fine.
 
A trained Vélib user (it was you that trained us dear Vélib) has a whole
series of backup strategies just in case we do not find a working bicycle at
the first station or a parking slot when making a mad dash for a transit
connection -- and for still somehow getting  wherever it is we need to go
when we need to get there.  We love you most of all, but if the rain is too
hard, the snow is falling, or we cannot find that bike, we have a
workaround.  That is part of our partnership deal with you.
 
And now let us have a look at your 2009 birthday gift.
 
This is an important day and we have been giving this a fair amount of
thought over the last weeks, and when you give a gift you really want it to
be useful, and used.  And of course the best gifts are the ones that can be
shared.
 
We would very much like to come up with a present this year that would help
you to deal with the problems associated with your nice bicycles which are
too often being vandalized or stolen.  As the world knows, those are big
numbers and really do need attention and ingenious ways of dealing with
them.  But that is sufficiently challenging  that we have to back off this
time and can only promise to give it thought we would share ideas from many
parts with this as they come in.
 
So our gift this year is one that we hope you will like. We want to help you
with what is probably your Number 2 operational problem, smoothing the
distribution of bikes over the system.  Here is what we propose.
 
A sketch plan for using small financial incentives for getting and improve
distribution of bikes throughout the system.  
 
We are well aware that smoothing the redistribution process  is not one that
is unique to Paris and that is a fundamental structural problem that needs
to be dealt with just about everywhere  in a strategic manner.  So here is
our gift proposal. By the numbers:
 
1.	We propose you introduce an overlay software system to provide small
financial incentives for anyone who parks a bicycle in a station which is
empty (or almost empty).  Which will also apply to anyone who picks up a
bicycle from a station which is full (or almost full).
 
2.	In other words, make us the users and the beneficiaries part of the
solution. 


 
3.	This process can work of course only where there is a basic
logistics/financial system which will support it.  But in your case Vélib we
think you have in place just about everything you need to make this one
work. (And many of your brothers and sisters in other cities should be able
to do this as well.)
 
4.	The idea is to automatically credit a specific sum to registered
users who provide these valuable services. There are several key details
which need to be figured out before going ahead, which include the
following:
 
5.	What exactly should be the sum awarded to participants? One Euro,
two, three? Well that will depend on balancing (a) what works as an
incentive on the one hand, and (b) the costs you presently have to bear for
manual distribution. 
 
6.	What exactly should be the "station threshold', i.e., should the
award be made only to those who add a first bike to an empty station, or
should it be also made for second and third bikes being brought in?  And
ditto for freeing places in a full stand?  This the operator will be
well-positioned to figure out, and in any event by nature of the flexibility
of the underlying logistics  system, this can be played with and fine-tuned
in the early stages of the project.
 
7.	Behind all this, it is useful to have precise information on the
cost of physically moving a bike at present.  Our own best guess, not only
for Paris but for the more than a dozen other systems that we have visited
and observed, is that this has to run on the order of four Euros per bike,
plus or minus 2.  But this of course the city and the operator will know.
 
8.	Such payments will of course be made only to people holding annual
passes, However it may also be worth considering whether a special
arrangement might be set up in which users register for the program and the
financial incentives that go along with it.
 
9.	An advantage of this approach, which we might call "dynamic
redistribution" as opposed to physically lugging the bikes around, is that
it is a continuous process, with all the advantages that this entails
 
10.	One final advantage  that comes to mind is that something like this
increases the feeling of public ownership of the system, which in itself is
one of the tools you need to fight against the problems of bicycle theft and
abuse.  It will not deal with all aspects of that challenge, but it is one
of the many small steps that can be taken to drive down those numbers to
something which is financially and socially tolerable.
 
So there you have it your Vélib, World Streets present to you on this
important day.  And hey!  as we were saying, this is the kind of gift that
you can both use yourself and share with the world. So do it, and our
friends in Barcelona, Montreal, Seville, Rome and the more than one hundred
cities in the world that have already installed their own public bicycle
system.  And the thousand or so cities that are looking to you dear Vélib
for ideas, encouragement and your example.
 
You have been a very good girl. Thank you.
 
Happy birthday Vélib!
 
 
 
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