Simon's Blog (the personal one)

Will Vélib work in London?

  Velib 
  Originally uploaded by austinevan

Thanks for The Bike Show podcast of 25/2/08 for highlighting this Paris scheme to me. The Paris Vélib Service (Vélib is short for “Velo Liberte” or “Bike Freedom”) is a pick up and drop off bike scheme. Launched in July 2007 it will shortly grow to 20,600 bicycles available in 1,451 stations. It is the largest bicycle rental project in the world.

There's a whole blog dedicated to it here. This blog, written by Evan Bench, is the source of this picture. Click on the picture to view an annotated version of the photo highlighting the key characteristics of the system. There are lots more photos of the scheme in this Flickr Slideshow. This slideshow also includes pictures of the Oybike (London) and Lyon schemes mentioned in the podcast.

Will it work in London or other UK towns and cities?

Here are the plans for London courtesy of bikeforall.net.

There is no such thing as free parking

I've just listened to a really interesting podcast from Jon Winston's Bikescape (Episode 47, 20/10/07). It includes an interview, about 19 mins in, with Dave Snyder, Transportation Policy Director San Francisco Planning and Research and on the Board of 'Liveable City' in San Francisco. They talk about what happens when parking is unrestrained in a city. Note 'Transit' means 'Public Transport, cycling etc'.

In San Francisco a one bedroom flat costs $2,000 a month but you can park your car (if you have one) for free in many places. This is referred to as a 'market distorting subsidy'. The space occupied by cars could be occupied by accommodation and this would bring the price of accommodation down. Dave makes the point that if you do want to subsidise car use in this way then that's fine but you should not pretend it's not a subsidy. And you must recognise that if you spend public money doing this there will be less for other things like drug treatment centres etc.

Consider the supermarket in this country. Supermarkets are required by planning law to provide parking for their customers and this is generally free. But it's not really. The high value space the cars occupy isn't free. It costs money to provide and the opportunity cost is big. This cost is recouped by the prices charged for the stuff in the supermarket. OK so far. But we all pay the same prices for goods in the supermarket even if we walked there or cycled. So, when we go to the supermarket in the car we are being subsidised to do so. As a car user we are not paying the true cost of our action.

In the jargon, the true cost of using a car is 'externalised'. It is not being paid for in total by the car user. The car users are being subsidised by the non car users who use the same supermarket and pay the same supermarket prices.

On this basis, would you pay for parking at your local supermarket on the basis that what they sold would be slightly cheaper?