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Paris City Hall takes over rollout of disastrous Velib bike-hire system

Paris city hall is taking over the installation of new stations for the Velib bike-hire system, following weeks of disastrous efforts by its new operator that have the city's cyclists seeing red.

Published: 2 March 2018 09:29 CET

Paris City Hall takes over rollout of disastrous Velib bike-hire system

AFP

Socialist Mayor Anne Hidalgo announced last October a splashy overhaul of the popular programme, giving the contract to the French-Spanish upstart Smovengo.

A total 1,460 stations are supposed to be up and running by the end of March, but the grey bikes remain virtually absent from the city streets, enraging many Parisians who usually rely on the hire bikes for their daily commute.

Only a few hundred stations have been set up so far, and fewer still are actually in operation.

“We are taking the situation in hand, with much closer oversight by the city,” Hidalgo's transport deputy Christophe Najdovski said Thursday.

“We have the teams, the technicians, the engineers who know how to lead this type of operation,” he added, saying they would focus first on hooking up existing stations to the electrical grid — many have been running on batteries, making them prone to failure.

Smovengo has blamed the delays on electrical problems and a legal dispute with JCDecaux, but the city has twice fined it one million euros ($1.2 million) for failing to keep up with the planned station rollouts for January and February.

Velib will also refund its roughly 300,000 subscribers for the month of January as a “gesture of compensation” for the delays.

By late January, only 113 of the bike system's docking stations were working — well short of the 600 that had been promised by the New Year, with 1,400 supposed to be working by the end of March.

The disruption began before Christmas and the delays have enraged cyclists.

READ ALSO: 'It's a nightmare' – Cyclists furious over bike hire chaos in Paris

'It's a nightmare': Cyclists furious over bike hire chaos in Paris

Cyclists' group Paris en Selle (Paris In The Saddle) called the situation “a nightmare”, saying cyclists should be given three months' free use as compensation.

More than a thousand have signed a petition urging compensation, while angry cyclists have been taking to Twitter in droves.

“Nice app which doesn't work,” complained Alexandra Davis, an illustrator and graphic designer. “I've basically been paying for three months for a service I can't use.”

Road rage in Berlin as cyclists clog streets in pandemic

Cyclists near the landmark Brandenburger Gate in central Berlin on December 7, 2020. Odd ANDERSEN / AFP

“Move!” one of them yells after illegally mounting the pavement and charging at a defenceless pedestrian.

Bernd Lechner, a 40-year-old insurance clerk, manages to dodge the speeding bike just in time, but he's had enough of the “increasingly aggressive” attitude of cyclists in the German capital.

“It's getting worse and worse. I'm starting to become more scared of bicycles than of cars,” he said.

Berlin has long been known as a bike-friendly city, but a sharp rise in the number of cyclists during the coronavirus pandemic has been causing tensions on the road.

The number of Berliners cycling to work or to go shopping has increased by some 25 percent since the start of the pandemic, according to city authorities.

All good news for fitness, air quality and public health, since it reduces the number of people using public transport during the fight against Covid-19.

But at the same time, police have registered a sharp rise in the number of offences committed by cyclists and a surge in complaints about them from pedestrians, according to Berlin police chief Barbara Slowik.

Compulsory registration?

In an interview with the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper in October, Slowik even proposed compulsory registration for cyclists to make it easier for the authorities to identify those who break the rules.

“More than 50 percent of all traffic accidents involving cyclists are caused by the cyclists themselves,” she said.

And some are paying with their lives: 17 cyclists have been killed in traffic accidents in Berlin this year, 11 more than in 2019.

But the idea of compulsory registration is unlikely to become reality because of the “immense bureaucracy” it would entail, Ragnhild Soerensen of Changing Cities, an NGO that lobbies for sustainable transport, told AFP.

Berlin has about 3 million bicycles, compared with only 1.1 million registered cars, she points out.

But the police chief's comments have ignited a fierce debate on the behaviour of cyclists in the city.

“We are being pushed around, insulted. Many people think they are better people just because they ride a bike… This anarchy has to stop,” the Tagesspiegel newspaper wrote recently.

Cyclists on the street leading up to Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on a quiet day of lockdown, April 1, 2020. Odd ANDERSEN / AFP

'Denigrating cyclists'

According to Soerensen, critics are simply “trying to denigrate cyclists in order to distract attention from the delays in drafting a new transport strategy” to increase the use of public transport.

Just three percent of public space in the city is reserved for cyclists, but they make up 18 percent of traffic, says Anika Meenken of the Verkehrsclub Deutschland (VCD) transport association.

“Aggressiveness occurs when space is too tight, which naturally leads to more stress,” she said.

By way of contrast, cars make up some 33 percent of traffic in the city but take up 58 percent of the space.

But Oliver Woitzik, head of transport for the Berlin police, argues that “we can't just build roads, cycle paths and pavements everywhere.”

“What would help a lot would be for people to stop putting their own ego first, and also to know when to give up their rightful place” if there is danger involved, he said — a skill that is sometimes lacking among those on both four wheels and two.

In any case, cyclists who break the rules are more likely to be fined in future as Berlin is expanding its use of officers on bikes around the city, he told AFP.

Their number, currently around 40, is expected to “climb to 100 in the spring” and then continue to grow over the next few years.

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