Starting Points: Bicycle

Oct 31, 2009

French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality - NYTimes.com

By STEVEN ERLANGER and MAÏA DE LA BAUME

PARIS — Just as Le Corbusier’s white cruciform towers once excited visions of the industrial-age city of the future, so Vélib’, Paris’s bicycle rental system, inspired a new urban ethos for the era of climate change.

Residents here can rent a sturdy bicycle from hundreds of public stations and pedal to their destinations, an inexpensive, healthy and low-carbon alternative to hopping in a car or bus.

But this latest French utopia has met a prosaic reality: Many of the specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each, are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many others are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides, their wheels bent and tires stripped.

With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche.

“The symbol of a fixed-up, eco-friendly city has become a new source for criminality,” Le Monde mourned in an editorial over the summer. “The Vélib’ was aimed at civilizing city travel. It has increased incivilities.”

The heavy, sandy-bronze Vélib’ bicycles are seen as an accoutrement of the “bobos,” or “bourgeois-bohèmes,” the trendy urban middle class, and they stir resentment and covetousness. They are often being vandalized in a socially divided Paris by resentful, angry or anarchic youth, the police and sociologists say.

Bruno Marzloff, a sociologist who specializes in transportation, said, “One must relate this to other incivilities, and especially the burning of cars,” referring to gangs of immigrant youths burning cars during riots in the suburbs in 2005.

He said he believed there was social revolt behind Vélib’ vandalism, especially for suburban residents, many of them poor immigrants who feel excluded from the glamorous side of Paris.

“It is an outcry, a form of rebellion; this violence is not gratuitous,” Mr. Marzloff said. “There is an element of negligence that means, ‘We don’t have the right to mobility like other people, to get to Paris it’s a huge pain, we don’t have cars, and when we do, it’s too expensive and too far.’ ”

Used mainly for commuting in the urban core of the city, the Vélib’ program is by many measures a success. After swiping a credit card for a deposit at an electronic docking station, a rider pays one euro per day, or 29 euros (about $43) for an annual pass, for unlimited access to the bikes for 30-minute periods that can be extended for a small fee.

Daily use averages 50,000 to 150,000 trips, depending on the season, and the bicycles have proved to be a hit with tourists, who help power the economy.

But the extra-solid construction and electronic docks mean the bikes, made in Hungary, are expensive, and not everyone shares the spirit of joint public property promoted by Paris’s Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë.

“We miscalculated the damage and the theft,” said Albert Asséraf, director of strategy, research and marketing at JCDecaux, the outdoor-advertising company that is a major financer and organizer of the project. “But we had no reference point in the world for this kind of initiative.”

At least 8,000 bikes have been stolen and 8,000 damaged so badly that they had to be replaced — nearly 80 percent of the initial stock, Mr. Asséraf said.

JCDecaux must repair some 1,500 bicycles a day. The company maintains 10 repair shops and a workshop on a boat that moves up and down the Seine.

JCDecaux reinforced the bicycles’ chains and baskets and added better theft protection, strengthening the mechanisms that attach them to the electronic parking docks, since an incompletely secured bike is much easier to steal. But the damage and theft continued.

“We made the bike stronger, ran ad campaigns against vandalism and tried to better inform people on the Web,” Mr. Asséraf said. But “the real solution is just individual respect.”

In 2008 , the number of infractions related to Vélib’ vandalism rose 54 percent, according to the Paris police.

“We found many stolen Vélib’s in Paris’s troubled neighborhoods,” said Marie Lajus, a spokeswoman for the police. “It’s not profit-making delinquency, but rather young boys, especially from the suburbs, consider the Vélib’ an object that has no value.”

Sometimes the bikes are also victims of good old adolescent anarchic fun. These attitudes are expressed by the “freeriders,” and a bicycle forum, where a mock poll asks riders whether the Vélib’ can do wheelies, go down stairs and make decent skid marks.

It is commonplace now to see the bikes at docking stations in Paris with flat tires, punctured wheels or missing baskets. Some Vélib’s have been found hanging from lampposts, dumped in the Seine, used on the streets of Bucharest or resting in shipping containers on their way to North Africa. Some are simply appropriated and repainted.

Finding a decent one is now something of an urban treasure hunt. Géraldine Bernard, 31, of Paris rides a Vélib’ to work every day but admits having difficulties lately finding functioning bikes.

“It’s a very clever initiative to improve people’s lives, but it’s not a complete success,” she said.

“For a regular user like me, it generates a lot of frustration,” she said. “It’s a reflection of the violence of our society and it’s outrageous: the Vélib’ is a public good but there is no civic feeling related to it.”

Still, with more than 63 million rentals since the program was begun in mid-2007, the Vélib’ is an established part of Parisian life, and the program has been extended to provide 4,000 Vélib’s in 29 towns on the city’s edges.

So despite the increasing costs, Paris and JCDecaux are pressing on. The company invested about $140 million to set up the system and provides a yearly fee of about $5.5 million to Paris, which also gets rental fees for the bikes. In return, the company’s 10-year contract allows it to put up 1,628 billboards that it can rent.

Although JCDecaux will not discuss money figures, the expected date for profitability has been set back. But the City of Paris has agreed to pay JCDecaux about $600 for each stolen or irreparably damaged bike if the number exceeds 4 percent of the fleet, which it clearly does.

In an unsuccessful effort to stop vandalism, Paris began an advertising campaign this summer. Posters showed a cartoon Vélib’ being roughed up by a thug. The caption read: “It’s easy to beat up a Vélib’, it can’t defend itself. Vélib’ belongs to you, protect it!”

Aug 26, 2009

How Social Media Help People Find Stolen Bikes

By ANJALI ATHAVALEY

When Heather McKibbon's bike was stolen in May, she didn't just get angry. She decided to get it back.

The 29-year-old project manager at a Toronto consulting firm alerted people to the theft through the social-networking site Facebook. Just hours later, a friend replied with a link to a bike for sale that looked like her own $1,300 Cannondale touring bike on eBay's Kijiji, an online classified-ads site. Ms. McKibbon recognized her bike and, posing as an interested buyer, arranged to meet the seller at a local subway station. She brought the police along as well, resulting in a small-scale sting operation.

Police arrested the man and returned the Cannondale to Ms. McKibbon, who claimed it with photos of herself on the bike, as well as its serial number. "It was a little overwhelming to realize that nobody in Toronto gets their stolen bike back, and here I was about to get my stolen bike back," she says.

Ms. McKibbon is one of a growing number of bike-theft victims who are using bike blogs and social-media sites such as Twitter to take matters into their own hands. These grassroots efforts come as bike theft rises in cities and college campuses around the U.S.

San Diego saw a 45% increase in reported bike thefts in the first half of this year from a year earlier. The police station covering the central part of downtown Los Angeles has seen a 72% increase in stolen-bike reports so far this year, the city's police department says. Austin and Philadelphia have seen increases for the past two years. The incidence of theft is likely even higher, cycling advocates say, because many victims don't bother reporting bike thefts.

The reasons for the theft boom are complex, including population growth in some locales, but generally, more people are biking these days—and they are riding pricier bicycles. Also, the economic downturn is contributing to the increase.

"Harder times mean more thefts," says Bryan Hance, founder of StolenBicycleRegistry.com, where people can list their stolen bikes free. Last month, the site received 335 listings, about twice as many as a year ago. "Bikes are a lot more expensive than they were five or 10 years ago," he adds. "The fact that they are worth more makes them more of a target."

Jonathan Maus, publisher of BikePortland.org, an Oregon blog that relaunched its stolen-bikes listings in June, notes that "a lot of the growth in biking is coming from new people. They may not understand how important it is to use a real lock."

Some cities are taking action in an effort to be more bike-friendly. In Austin, city officials are planning to curb theft through a new bicycle registry and an education campaign on how to correctly lock a bike. Last month, Boston launched StolenBikesBoston.com, where people can register their bikes and send out theft alerts on Twitter and Facebook.

So far, about 240 people follow the alerts on Twitter and 350 on Facebook. Boston police don't track bike-theft numbers, but "we wanted to head off the theft issue because as ridership increases, theft increases," says Nicole Freedman, director of the city's bicycle program.

Cities are also trying to provide safer bike storage. New York's city council passed a law last month requiring commercial landlords to allow the employees of building tenants to bring their bikes into their buildings—potentially making it easier for cyclists to store their bikes at work. Advocates of the law say that fear of theft is the No. 1 reason people don't ride their bikes to work. Some city employers, like Google Inc. and Credit Suisse Group AG, already allow employees to store their bikes at work.

It isn't easy to park a bike in midtown Manhattan, says David Yassky, the city council member who introduced the bill. "A lot of people have put [a bike] in the street, and it has gotten stolen."

Many cyclists prefer to start their own grassroots movements against bike thieves. Senan Gorman, of Farmington, Conn., had his bike stolen a decade ago, but the pain is fresh. "It's still like it was yesterday," he says.

Two weeks ago, the 40-year-old flash developer launched an online community known as Karma Army for victims of sporting-equipment theft, focusing on bikes. Cyclists can send out Karma alerts about their stolen bikes to subscribers via RSS feed. He hopes to get police involved so that they, too, receive the theft alerts. The motto of the site, Mr. Gorman says, is simple: "It's bad karma if you steal someone else's stuff."

Mr. Gorman is also asking cyclists to record video messages telling bike thieves how they feel about having their prized possessions stolen and to upload the videos to YouTube. "Maybe there will be some [thieves] who will watch them," Mr. Gorman says.

The proliferation of sites puts more eyes on the road to identify thieves, says Mr. Maus of BikePortland.org. "We're trying to empower the eyes of the community to get bikes back," he says. The site had 80 listings for stolen bikes in July.

Even Lance Armstrong has tapped social media to cope with a theft. In February, the seven-time Tour de France winner used Twitter, which allows users to share content through short text messages, to tell fans about his stolen bike.

"Whoa!! They just came to my room and said our truck was broken into and someone stole my time trial bike!" he posted. "APB out to the twitterati." After the bike was returned to police in Sacramento, he gave his Twitter followers an update: "Oh!! And they recovered the bike!"

Cyclists who manage to locate their bikes online or on the streets should avoid confronting thieves themselves and should get local law enforcement involved, police say. "We can certainly set up a sting," says Lt. Paul Vernon, head of detectives for the Los Angeles Police Department's central division.

He notes that law-enforcement officials are seeing more "Frankenstein bikes," or those constructed from stolen parts, on the streets. "The trouble for many people is proving that [a recovered bike] is their bike." He recommends that cyclists record the serial numbers of their bikes or even etch their names into them for identification purposes.

Getting a stolen bike back may not mean your troubles are over. When James Selman's bike was stolen from his work studio in Portland in June, he posted an alert on BikePortland.org. A week and half later, Joe Wilson, a 27-year-old electrical engineering student, saw the bike, a Seven Cycles custom single-speed, outside his apartment and matched it to Mr. Selman's listing.

Mr. Wilson, who noted that the thief was wearing regular sneakers, rather than the special shoes that work best with the high-end pedals on the bike, emailed Mr. Selman to tell him that he was stalling the thief while calling the cops. The thief was arrested and the bike returned to its rightful owner.

Though Mr. Selman is grateful that the perpetrator was caught, he got the bike back with $850 worth of damage—an amount below his insurance deductible that he will have to pay out of pocket. His homeowners insurance would have covered the loss of the $5,500 bike. "The way the system works, I would have preferred for it to stay gone," he says.

Ms. McKibbon, who recovered her bike in Toronto, also faced new problems. Last weekend, her bike's rims, gears and other components were stolen on a busy street in Toronto.

But she has a message for bike thieves: Watch your back. "The world isn't as big as it once was," she says. "You never know who's watching."