The Paris Velib' bike sharing system is in trouble. Despite being the largest such system in any city, Velib' is suffering problems of theft and vandalism. Will Velib' survive to be Paris' "civilizing force" as Mayor Bertrand Delanoë hoped it would be?
There are a lot of ways to calculate the benefit of bike-sharing programs. For Paris' Velib bike-sharing program one could look at the number of Parisians using it, improvements to traffic congestion, improvements to the air quality, health benefits of the users, and so on. Adam Stein of TerraPass, a carbon offsetting company, crunched some numbers based on these stats from a NYC article on the Paris Velib program and came up with an estimate of the amount of greenhouse gases avoided.
Trying out Bixi bike --- Photos courtesy of Yvonne Bambrick
Bixi the Montreal bikesharing system which will be launching Spring 2009, will be coming to Toronto to convince us all that Montreal knows what they are doing. Can Toronto imitate Montreal which is imitating Paris? I'm sure we can swallow our pride and do it. We did it with Nuit Blanche after all!
Montreal has rolled out their prototypes for their bikesharing program, Bixi, to launch next spring.
The Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation (TCAT), The Clean Air Partnership & The Community Bicycle Network are proud to present:
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