Problems with bicycle sharing in Paris

AP photo.

There is so much vandalism--far more than the experience in other French cities--that the contract provider of the service says that they can't continue to do the program with the kind of financial arrangements currently in place.

Thanks to a reader, we know about the BBC story "Thefts puncture Paris bike scheme," while on the worldcitybike e-list we got a series of translated articles from various Parisian publications. The BBC piece reports that:

Over half the original fleet of 15,000 specially made bicycles have disappeared, presumed stolen. They have been used 42 million times since their introduction but vandalism and theft are taking their toll.

According to "Success Velib Tempered by Costs of Breakdowns" from Bike Europe:

In its first year Vélib had 198,913 annual subscribers, 277,193 seven days subscribers and a stunning 3,683,714 one day subscribers. All together they rented the bikes 26 million times and made an average trip of 18 minutes.

There are a couple of "take aways" from this. One is that the program is successful--imagine, 42 million new bicycle trips in about 18 months! Two is that the amount of vandalism is incredible, and I am curious about what it communicates about the level of connectedness and civic engagement on the part of a goodly group of Parisians.

Yesterday, I was reading Cultural Planning Handbook: An Essential Australian Guide (1995) [as Christopher says, I read obscure publications so that readers of the blog don't have to] and there is a very interesting concept discussed, that of a community's "altruistic surplus" and the idea of community livability positives and negatives, but referred to as "livability resources" and "livability corrosives."

Altruistic surplus has to do with time spent in voluntary community service, donations, and percentage of population that is engaged in local civic activities of various sorts. It can also be thought of as a willingness to compromise or accept tradeoffs for greater community benefit at the expense of personal comfort or benefit.

I have to track down the original paper "A philosophical framework for urban planning: the concept of altruistic surplus" by C. Cunningham.

It doesn't take many people consuming the public space and environment negatively to make it bad for all. And the idea of maintaining order by maintaining public spaces as expressed through the "Broken Windows" theory (Kelling and Wilson, see the book Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order And Reducing Crime In Our Communities) is increasingly supported through research, despite claims to the contrary, and despite inadequate attempts to institute such policing strategies by many police departments (i.e., arresting people for not wearing seatbelts in a car is just as mis-focused as keeping all police officers in cars, and only responding to 911 and 311 calls, rather than establishing presence by being out and about).

The Cultural Planning Handbook has an appendix listing livability resources and corrosives. Surprisingly, the list of corrosives is short, and while it includes crime rates and fear, it doesn't include more specific "negative consumption" of the public space indicators such as litter, graffiti, and vandalism of street furniture and other public assets.

Flickr photo by gamebouille.