The Dublinbikes scheme begins tomorrow, offering a fast, cheap way to get around. EMMA CULLINANtries out the French capital's version, which shows you another side of the city
I CYCLE THE WRONG way down Rue du Faubourg St Denis, in Paris, having cruised happily past a no-entry sign that also bore the magic words Sauf Vélos, or Except Bicycles.
Since Paris increased its bike population two years ago with the Vélib’ hire scheme, the city has given cyclists access to more car-barred areas and provided off-road bicycle paths. It gives an idea of how Dublin’s version of the system, which begins tomorrow, might change the city.
Paris’s scheme, which has had 42 million users so far, still has frightening gaps. At the Place de la Républic roundabout, for example, our family of four sails through a green light only to find that the traffic lights aren’t co-ordinated, and by the time we are halfway around four lanes of traffic get their green light and re-enact the start of Le Mans as they race at and around us.
Avoiding oncoming traffic and heading down past the St Denis sex shops, however, you are reminded that bicycles offer you access to parts of cities that you would not normally see on public transport or on foot. And although the Métro is fabulous, with stops all over the place, they swelter in August. A sunny breeze above ground becomes dusty, dense hot air in underground carriages, and even short journeys can involve changes with long walks through tunnels.
Also, you don’t get to see the city when you travel beneath its streets. That’s why we decided to hire Vélib’ bicycles. We put our credit-card details into a streetside machine – at which point we were warned that €150 would be deducted from our card should we do something nasty to one of the bikes – and signed up for 24 hours for €1. (A year-long subscription costs €29.)
Once you’re a subscriber, each time you take a bike the first half-hour is free, the second costs €1, the third costs €2 and any others cost €4 each.
As we are spending a week up on the hill at Montmartre, we are soon confronted with the reality of the joke in which someone asks for directions and is told: “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you.” The four of us want to set off from the nearby Vélib’ station on Place des Abbesses, but we can’t, as the stand doesn’t have enough bikes.
A Parisian told me about this problem soon after the scheme began. People are happy to speed down a hill on one of the bicycles but aren’t too keen to cycle them back up. Climbing a hill is especially hard on a Vélib’, which has only three gears and is heavy, particularly at the front, where the thick stem and handlebars – which should make the bicycles unattractive to thieves – mean you’ll need healthy biceps to lift the bike on to the pavement, especially if you’ve put something in the basket. Paris has solved the problem of bicycles in the wrong places by using trucks to move them around the city.
Once you eventually track down a bicycle at a station farther away, and head for a popular tourist destination, you find the opposite problem: the Vélib’ stands by the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay, for example, are nearly always full, leaving you nowhere to offload your bike.
As with most Vélib’ eventualities, there is a system to obey and play. First, you look at the map at the bike stand and find the next station, which is rarely far away. Then you punch in your Pin and tell the machine that you are stuck with a Vélib’ – at which point it gives you 15 minutes’ grace to hunt for a drop-off point.
Sometimes a stand has just one free space, so you learn to juggle – handy when four of you are about to start totting up a €16 bill every half-hour. One of you puts your bike back, then waits the minute or so before being allowed to take a new one. The next person puts his or her bicycle back in the newly vacated spot, and so on.
You do find yourself mentally living in half-hour slots, but in Paris a 30-minute cycle will get you most places, and the joy of dropping bicycles off at Vélib’ stations is that you never have to worry about your bicycle being stolen.
The Vélib’ scheme is brilliant for tourists, as it lets you avoid pounding the city on foot, taking care of all those short journeys that are no problem on their own but wear you out over a day.
One morning, for example, we glide down from Montmartre to the vintage shops around the Marais, in the city centre. Then we head across the river to the Bon Marché food hall, for picnic stuff, and into a local park. Later we walk on to St Sulpice Church (and find out, from signs there, about factual errors in The Da Vinci Code), then cycle to the Shakespeare and Company bookshop, near Notre Dame Cathedral, and find a stand across a small park from it. Next is a cycle to the Musée d’Orsay for its late-night opening, to avoid the daytime queues. From here we walk past the Louvre to a Japanese restaurant on Rue St Honoré (but wish we’d gone by bike), then, powered by noodles, cycle back up to Montmartre.
Vélib’ seats are easy to adjust, but you often end up with oil-covered hands, so you learn to choose bicycles that are going to fit you. Parisians also politely teach you informal Vélib’ conventions, such as that leaving a seat facing backwards means the bike is useless, even if a shining green light on the bike stand tells you otherwise (bikes with red lights can’t be hired). We end up with bicycles with missing pedals, only one gear and flat tyres – all easy enough to swap. (About 1,500 of the bikes are repaired each day; another 20 that have been abandoned are recovered.)
Once, when my daughter tries to exchange a cycle with a flat tyre, the machine says she still has the bike she has just given back and can take a new one only if we put in a credit card again – meaning that the rest of my life would cost €4 every half-hour, for a bicycle in Paris. In such cases you get to speak interesting French with a person in the machine.
My language skills are also stretched when, as I am entering my Pin in Montmartre, someone else takes the last available cycle. I ask a maintenance man who is there at the time if he can give me a red-light bike. “Non,” comes the reply. “Mais elle a pris le dernier vélo,” I say. (“But she has taken the last bike” – not a sentence hitherto found in phrase books.) His coeur softens, and he releases me into the traffic. And so we head back into the city, down Boulevard de Magenta, whose pavement cycle lane means that the occasional confused older man, suddenly forced to share this part of the public realm with a bicycle, mutters with malaise as you blur across his field of vision.
To get from the Louvre to Notre Dame we take to the terrifying road along the Seine – much like Dublin’s own Liffey highway – with uncaring sharing going on between two- and six-wheeled vehicles in bus lanes. That helps teach us to stick, if we can, to the quiet rues – most city traffic keeps to the main thoroughfares, leaving Vélib’ riders to discover the offbeat, charming side of Paris at their own pace. Ours is a week of picnics in small public gardens with local lovers and neighbourhood cats.
Go there
Aer Lingus (aerlingus.com) flies to Paris Charles de Gaulle from Dublin, Cork and Belfast. Ryanair (ryanair.com) flies to Paris Beauvais from Dublin and Shannon. Air France (airfrance.ie) flies to Charles de Gaulle from Dublin and Shannon. EasyJet (easyjet.com) flies to Charles de Gaulle from Belfast.