For visitors, biking in Paris is not for the faint of heart. Riding down the edge of a narrow side road or a busy boulevard with cars zooming by (sometimes only a couple feet away from hitting you) is no easy feat. But it sure is fun. Biking is one of the primary ways of getting around in this vibrant city. Special bike lanes have been made on most streets and there is a picturesque bike/pedestrian walkway along the Seine. If biking interests you as it interested us, you can go on bike tours, rent bikes at a shop, or get a Velib.
What is Vélib Métropole?
Velib is a public bike sharing program with bike stations located all around the Paris area and in 64 neighboring cities. The bikes are lined up in docking stations with a kiosk in different places around Paris.The stations are normally not more than a few blocks apart. With an account where you have to pay a small daily or weekly fee, you can check out the bikes and ride all around as long as you return it to another station. Being dysfunctional and time consuming, the locals don’t use Vélib Métropole as much as they used the much better bike system that it replaced, but the City Of Paris has demanded that Velib’s problems be fixed by September 2018.
How it works:
In order to ride a Velib bike, you must have an account. To get an account you can either go to the kiosk that is in most bike station areas and normally won’t work, or you can go to their website at https://www.velib-metropole.fr/en_GB (we highly recommended the second option). When subscribing for your account, make sure you understand that you have to choose how many bikes you are going to use and that each bike costs $5 a day or $15 a week. You also have to pay for the time spent riding, but if you stay on the bike for under 30 minutes you don’t have to pay anything (this condition only applies for regular bikes not electric). After you obtain your account, it will give you two codes which you should write down and bring with you when you get bike/s in order to check them out. You can also get the app, which has a map of all the stations and how many bikes they have in them.
Mark tries an entire row of bikes. Most screens allowed checking out, but none unlocked from the dock once checked out.
Problems:
There are definitely problems with Velib. The bikes’ touchscreens often won’t work and sometimes, you come to a station and none of the bikes will come out of their docks. Some of the bikes we saw had been vandalized but most were easy to put back in riding shape. If you are trying to not pay anything, make sure that you leave enough time to find a station before 30 minutes is up because some you come to might be full. Be careful, because you might come to a station and park your bike in the docks and find that you can’t get any others out, but you should be able to check out the one that you just checked in with a new timer set.
In conclusion, the Velib did have faults (some times more than others) and they ended up being very time consuming, but all in all, they were very helpful for getting around and were actually quite comfortable and worked well. We saw a lot more of the city than we would from traveling on metros everywhere. It was definitely a learning experience for us and we would recommend (when you’re ever in Paris) to at least try them if you’re adventurous or you really like riding bikes.
For more info go to
https://www.velib-metropole.fr/en_GB
