Velo'v: Finally, a test-drive, during yet another grève (strike)

Several months ago, in an earlier blog, I wrote about the Velo'v system in Lyon, which is a rent-a-cycle system that has stations all throughout central Lyon. Most likely it was conceived to allow people to move within the city and allow them to go to places which buses and the metro do not cover. In the center of the city, it is said that every 200 meters one can find a dispenser with bicycles lined up nearby. What is amazing is that everything is controlled by a central computer, which determines which bikes have been borrowed and which have been returned.

You swipe a card (see photo, the blue card) in front of a reader, which reads its magnetic coil inside (similar to the anti-theft coils that you find inside of CDs in record stores). After inputting a PIN code you make a choice of bicycles among the ones offered, and within one minute, disengage the bicycle from its berth alongside the dispenser. I've learned to check which bikes are in good condition before borrowing them, as I've already gotten stuck with two bikes with flat tires. (These bikes, I returned after waiting two minutes for the central computer to register them as "borrowed.")

The card itself costs 1 EUR for one week, but each time you borrow a bike you have 1/2 of an hour free. So if you borrow a bike and then return it at a station, say, one km away, you probably do not have to pay a rental charge.

The system is not perfect: sometimes bikes do not register as having been returned or sometimes the bikes that are listed as rentable, turn out to have flat tires or broken bike chains. One bike I used has handles which were misaligned, or missing handle covers. And there is a problem of bottlenecks at larger stations, where people sometimes want to return bicycles but find there are no more berths to return them to.

Today, especially, making use of these bikes made good sense: with transport strikes reducing the number of buses running, waits for buses on even some of the more popular lines ran into the tens of minutes. By renting a bike and peddling it from one station to the next (a sort of leapfrogging) I was able to bypass the wait and get myself home much more quickly than I would have had I waited for the bus.