Project EVIE Blog

Yesterday morning I did the most unhealthy, healthiest thing I’ve ever done. I cycled through a big city.

I had a meeting to see an apartment across town and decided that, instead of taking the metro, I’d try out Paris’ (in)famous Vélib system (basically a rent-a-bike plan, for a full explanation of the Vélib system, see below).

Getting on my bike, I felt quite chuffed with myself. I felt good about getting a bit of exercise, good about using zero-emissions transportation. These good feelings quickly evaporated though, as I hit the road, and was engulfed in exhaust fumes.

Yes, there’s nothing quite like breathing in petrochemicals for breakfast. Cycling alongside cars, standing behind tailpipes at stoplights, weaving in and out of traffic – I got my full fill of hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide. And boy, could I feel it. Now it would’ve been great if, while messing up my sinuses and harming my lungs, all these toxins at least got me a little buzzed, but they didn’t – they just gave me a headache, and a horribly scuzzy feeling, like I was breast-fed by the New Jersey Turnpike. I went home and feel asleep.

So there you go, I was trying to be healthy, I was trying to be eco-conscious, but all I ended up getting for it was being poisoned, and having a fitful of rage for gasoline-powered cars. Damn it’s hard to be green.

I’d like to challenge anyone who’s against electric cars, any of those folks who think an attack on gasoline cars is an attack on their manhood – Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or any of those right-wing bimbos who’re seeking eternal revenge for being born with only one nut. I’d like to challenge them to a water-boarding like test – give them a bike, a helmet, and put them in the middle of a congested city, and see how long they last before they start coughing, holding their breath, feeling woozy, and thinking that there might just be a better solution to getting around than burning oil.

Don't know what you got till it's gone

*****

Intended to reduce Paris’ congestion and pollution, the Vélib system – a compound of the French words vélo for bike, and liberté for freedom – is a network of bikes dotted all around the city that, for about $1.50, you can rent, ride around, and then drop off at any of the designated bike racks. And since there’s a bike rack about every two blocks (every 300 meters to be exact), you’ll seldom need worry about finding one.

Purple swarm of Vélib locations

However like most grand, French, government-run schemes, the Vélib system opened in 2007 to a great deal of fanfare and Gallic self-congratulation, proceeded to work perfectly for about two weeks, and since then has encountered a number of fundamental problems that the French government has been unwilling, underfunded, or simply incompetent in responding to.

On the most basic level, a failure to predict and correct for commuting patterns has caused an unequal distribution of bikes around the city, meaning that at certain times of the day riders either can’t find a free bike to use, or can’t find a free slot to return their bike to. Not exactly biking freedom!

What a rack

And in what may be a rare case of French optimism, but is more likely an example of the French’s inexhaustible propensity to willfully overlook their own character faults, a great many more bikes than *estimated* have been stolen, vandalized, or in other ways made inoperable. In the roughly 2 years since Vélib’s inception, 16,000 bikes have had to be replaced due to intentional misuse, with some being reportedly “hung from lamp posts, dumped in the River Seine, torched and broken into pieces.” Also partly to blame is a trend known as ‘Vélib Extreme’, whereby the cruiser-style bikes are taken and repeatedly used in heavy-duty BMX courses until they fall into broken bits. Another 8,000 have been outright stolen, with some bikes turning up in places as far afield as Eastern Europe and North Africa. Yes, it indeed seems that when they started up the Vélib system, the French somehow forget they’re a nation whose main national pastimes include rioting, burning cars, and all other kinds of civil unrest and disrespect of law.

Yet, perhaps all this bike vandalism and theft can be explained away as a French response to the fact that JCDecaux, the company the city of Paris commissioned to run the Vélib system, is an English company – i.e. the French destroy and steal all these bikes merely to get back at the English, and don’t realize that it’s in fact their tax dollars being spent replacing them. Sounds unmistakably like rational French thinking.