When I was teaching the GCSE Pilot Geography spec a few years ago, one of the units that I taught was about Sustainable Transport. Follow THIS LINK to see all the resources that I posted at the time, still available on the blog I created.
One of the contexts for learning was the VELIB cycle hire scheme in Paris, and the extent to which it might work, and reduce congestion on the roads (in comparison to some of the other ways that had been tried..)
In Paris, the scheme was funded by JC Decaux, an advertising firm, in return for hoardings placed at each of the stations where bikes are stored.
Barclays are also funding a series of "Cycling Superhighways", the first two of which have now opened: from Barking to Tower Gateway, and from Merton to City.
A quote from Albert Asseraf on some of the lessons that London may well learn as the scheme progresses.
"We now give users 15 minutes' free credit if they return a bike to a so-called 'altitude' station. It's little lessons like this that London will need to learn. And London should make sure the stations are well stocked, even during the night. About 15% of all Vélib' journeys occur after the Metro shuts down and people want to get home without paying for expensive taxis. The Vélib' has become part of our lives – Parisians just can't imagine Paris without the Vélib' now."
Also worth remembering the experience of another UK city: Cambridge, where a lot of the bikes were nicked when a scheme was tried a few years ago.
Revisiting the blog, I was reminded of this letter that was published in the Independent at the time:
"Most car journeys are under five miles and a large proportion under two miles. The best solution to our addiction to cars was invented more than 150 years ago: it's called a bicycle. The other part of the solution has been around even longer: walking.Perhaps the heart of the problem is that we've just become lazy. The solutions are not expensive: a reduction of the urban speed limit to 20mph or less, a reduction of town-centre car parking and perhaps a campaign of public ridicule for the idiot who drives two miles down the road in a toy lorry to collect his Independent"
Update: Landscape as brandscape ? Guardian article
Comments