Velib Paris Wins Guardian Ethical Travel Award

215,000 Parisians have voted Velib a winner by renewing annual subscriptions. UK Guardian readers have awarded the system their Ethical Travel Award.

Vélib’ is a public bicycle rental programme in Paris. It was launched with 10,000 bicycles and 750 automated rental stations each with 15 or more bikes/spaces.

This number has since grown to 20,000 bicycles and 1,450 stations, about 1 station every 300 m throughout the city centre, making Vélib’ the largest system of its kind in the world.

Each Vélib station is equipped with an automatic rental terminal and spots for dozens of bicycles. Maps showing the station locations are available at all kiosks.

The robust gray bicycles were produced by the French bicycle company Mercier in Hungary. They weigh about 22.5 kg and feature three speeds, always-on LED lighting powered by a fronthub dynamo, a lock, and a front basket.

The rental terminals display the locations and numbers of available bicycles and free spots of the neighboring Velib stations. If a user arrives with a rented bicycle at a station without free spots, the terminal grants another 15 minutes of free rental time. Twenty vehicles are used at night to redistribute bicycles to high-demand stations.

In order to use the system, users need to take out a subscription, which allows the subscriber an unlimited number of rentals. Subscriptions can be purchased by the day, week or year, at a price of, respectively, 1, 5, or 29 euros.

With a subscription, bike rental is free for the first half hour of every individual trip; an unlimited number of such free trips can be made per day. A trip that lasts longer than 30 minutes incurs a charge of one to four euros for each subsequent 30-minute period. The increasing price scale is intended to keep the bikes in circulation.

Either a credit card, a Maestro debit card with PIN is required to sign up for the programme and to rent bikes.

The system is financed by the JCDecaux advertising corporation, in return for Paris signing over the income from a substantial portion of on-street billboard advertising. JCDecaux won the contract over a rival bid from Clear Channel

The company paid start-up costs of about $115 million and employs the equivalent of about 285 people full time to operate the system and repair the bikes for 10 years.

The city receives all revenue from the program as well as a fee of about $4.3 million a year. In return, JCDecaux receives exclusive control over 1,628 city-owned billboards; the city receives about half of that billboard space at no charge for public-interest advertising

At least 3,000 bicycles have been stolen in the first year of operation, many more than had been initially estimated.

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