Velib was launched in 2007 and it has been quite famous since then. About 20,000 bikes available in 1400 stations for 300,000 users. It changed the way to navigate the city, especially for young people, during day and… night, when the subway is closed.
As any network, Velib had to reach a certain size and density to become useful for anyone. Installing 1400 stations and managing 20,000 bicycles is not an easy task. The user workflow also needs to be smooth, and you need to adapt your system against certain threats.
100% of the bicycles are stolen every year. Yes, that’s right: on average, each of the 20,000 Velibs is stolen at least once. In certain neighborhoods, this rate goes up to 200%. 91% of the bicycles reappear in some way or another, but 27% of these are so broken that they must be destroyed.
The general consensus is that these impressive figures are “natural” and that there is not much to do about it. The youngsters who do this are bored with life and they don’t feel they are hurting anyone. The mere idea of a local community owning something in common does not seem attainable for anyone. This destruction rate is presented as a contemporary law of nature that we can not change. On average, it is estimated that each Velib costs about 4000 euros per year.
Usually, the operator would adapt his apparatus by either disabling the attacked stations if they are outside of Paris, or by deploying some special anti-theft protections that keep people from pulling out and breaking the bicycles.
With this information in hand, we tend to smile when the new operator explains that contrary to old Velib, it will scale up to the “Paris Metropole”. In the real world, many areas will have to be left out, either because the local towns refuse to pay, or because the stations will be destroyed (often, it’s a combination of these two reasons of course).
The losses will be amplified as the new operator plans to deploy a set of expensive electric bicycles. An idea that the Paris mayor loves for the sake of PR coolness: the city is mostly flat. If a basic bicycle costs 4000 euros per year, I let you imagine what this price will be with a fancy one…
This leads us to the complexity of the new project: originally, the switch to the new operator had been sold as very smooth with no service interruption for the user. Hence, the first step was to literally destroy the original network, as soon as late 2017.
Yes, that’s right: before even testing the new system, the magic of contracts decided that the operational system would be taken down. What could go wrong? After all, the Mayor and the new operator had promised a smooth transitioning.
After having destroyed hundreds of stations, Smoovengo, the new operator, realized that it could not reinstall its own system as easily as planned. They hadn’t thought about electricity cables. Because yes, when you implant electric bicycles, you need electricity.
At the same moment, the Parisians started to wonder how green these new bicycles are: imagine how much dust and noise you produce to destroy 1400 Velib stations. How much energy do you burn? Well, these side effects are limited by the slowness of the work. To this day, after six months of preparation for the switch, only 100 stations are ready to use, in theory.
It corresponds to 6–7% of the original capacity of the network, and we will not mention the multiple bugs reported by the users. If you ever find a bicycle, chances are you will have a problem. But as most of the original Velib employees have been fired, there is no such thing as an actual customer service anymore (Smoovengo refused to keep the old staff until December, after a long conflict, which means most of the employees vanished in despair, before the offer was made).
There’s something funny about all this nonsense, but we can’t escape the human tragedy. We can talk about all these people who lost their daily jobs of course. But the actual matter has even deeper roots. From a user standpoint, it means you can’t count on a stable relationship with your environment: you should not love your everyday tools, because they can be taken away from you in a glimpse. The Velib was just starting to get familiar with the city.
Many believe that the city of Paris took this decision because the Mayor is crazy. In this scenario, Hidalgo would be a coke head surrounded by hysterical advisors. While this can look quite realistic from the exterior, it can’t really explain the whole mess. The deeper problem is the following: how do you upgrade a system? How do you deploy a new technology?
Here’s an analogy: imagine that to improve the connection between Los Angeles and San Francisco, you propose the Hyperloop and to implant it, you start by destroying the old railway as you want to build up on its tracks. While it can seem absurd, it could also make a lot of sense because this way, you can reuse important elements from the past network.
If you don’t erase the old network, you might need to rebuild some infrastructure (bridges, etc.), buy out some land, expropriate people, etc.
Worse: the mere existence of the old network might neutralize the urgency call that you need to make your new thing happen.
If we forget about the administrative and legal constraints for a minute, it could have seemed logical to deploy an incremental transition for the new Velib. Smoovengo would have tested its systems with pilot stations. This would have been the real condition for a so called “smooth transition”. But after six months, chances are that the old operator would have had the occasion to prove its point: “small startup Smoovengo can’t scale!” We don’t have such an option anymore.
So at the core of this absurd situation, you have a radical decision than can make sense from a certain perspective.
Imagine that you want to deploy optical fiber in a certain area. You can do it incrementally by adding an extra layer on the network of phone wires. Or you could pull everything out and replace it with your new cable. With this latter solution you create urgency, and you facilitate the work. It has to be more productive at the end.
The reluctance to engage in such radical changes also causes its own set of absurdities. Couldn’t we have avoided the road inertia this way? Roads are a network that we always took for granted, something too big to change. Tens of millions of humans have died by using them and our only current hope for innovation is more cars (self-driving…).
If some crazy government had decided to destroy its roads for a new network, the Hyperloop might have already been 40 years old in 2018. After all, we went on the moon about 50 years ago… Network inertia makes us slower.
You could argue that as the world goes faster, people have less time so all these improvements are pointless. Good point, but let’s forget about this fun aspect for now: we’re on Medium after all.
100 years ago, Paris had a pneumatic network to deliver letters instantly. Its capacity could have been enlarged to transport packages, but it died. Therefore, we now have these absurd hordes of delivery slaves everywhere.
Of course, upgrading this system would have been a risky bet and a huge mess. Augmenting the capacity of this network would have meant dealing with all the other underground capacities: electricity, phone, sewers and metro. Plus the technical challenge of not shaking your pasta box too much.
Actually, the subway was another risky network bet that the city of Paris made. In the old days, journalists doubted that the Parisians would ever dare to go and bury themselves in the underground. The work itself destroyed some streets for very long periods of time. Traffic was a disaster for several years. However, a few decades later, Paris had become a model in this domain and up to this day, our capital has the highest subway stations density in the world.
So maybe this Velib destruction will make sense after all? But what are these groundbreaking bike innovations that would make worth the current ordeal?
The electric engine seems quite useless and it might amplify the cost of vandalism while causing more accidents. So maybe it’s all about the USB port, available on the new bicycles? Because yes, it makes a lot of sense to charge your phone while riding your Velib!
Well interestingly, the biggest change relies in permanent bike tracking. The user will have to use a smartphone, with an app that will generate nice data. The bicycle itself is also tracked by GPS. Will it keep the youngsters from destroying the stations? I doubt that. But every user will log all his wanderings into the machine. Hence, the biggest innovation is an Uber like control. So it might be worth it, but for who exactly?
The logic that operates here is the same as with terrorism: the acts of a tiny portion of the population allow the government to track all its citizens. However, even if a few Velibs have been spotted in Africa, most of the bikes are stolen for the lulz. After 10 minutes, they are thrown away in the Seine or the canal Saint-Martin, and the GPS is pretty useless. Of course, there will always be a humanist geek in the room to explain that the data generated might avoid some accidents, and that it’s part of an awesome “smart city” plan. But “smart city” is another name for control.
So given this context, what should the city of Paris have done? Mmmh, I wish I had heard about this project before: as Smoovengo is an obscure startup that nobody knew, maybe I could have won the competition for the next Velib?
I would have proposed the following apparatus:
- Bicycle lockers built by my company, to replace the Velib stations: it would take more space than the actual terminals, but we could expand them on ex parking lots, as the car is progressively banned from Paris anyways. Terrorists putting bombs in the lockers are not an issue: lockers still exist in Paris and they are more resistant than many other huge plastic garbage cans.
- 50,000 bicycles available to the people who subscribe to the service (30 euros per year): if each bike costs 150 euros to manufacture (Made in China!), this corresponds to the annual total cost of the old 20,000 Velibs (4000 euros * 20,000).
- An app and a Blockchain: eventually, people could own their bike just like a leasing. Their property is tracked by the system. If you rent a bike that is broken, you signal it on the Blockchain that powers a reputation engine, etc. You could even decentralize the maintenance: the repairer would just log “I repaired this flat tire”. He would have localized the problematic bike via the Blockchain where another user would have flagged it. The next user validates “tire OK, network, pay the guy please”.
And that’s it. I would have cut so much costs that I could take some profits everywhere. The business plan becomes almost secondary.
Imagine that with the original Velib, the city payed up to 400 euros extras, each time a bike was broken or vandalized for more than 5% of its value! With the this budget, my decentralized repairers will earn more than grey suits. The dream job for students and migrants!
In this highly secure system that can monetize anything, the electric bicycle could be introduced as well.
The sad thing is that it’s a trustless network: it means we renounce having a community that would not destroy its own capital. But as we have seen, disenchantment is already here.
This Velib would perfectly fit its two main types of users: (i) the visitor who does not want to own a bike in Paris (tourist or worker) and (ii) the Parisian who does not want the constraints of maintaining a bike and wondering where it is, and how to combine its use with rides on cabs or subways.
And that’s it.
This idea would be an excellent pivot for poor startups such as Gobee, who recently discovered the vandalism cost was not made up, but just hidden.
SOURCES:
Pneus: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_pneumatique
Le changement : http://transports.blog.lemonde.fr/2017/04/12/12-raisons-velib-jcdecaux/
Le vol encore : http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2013/08/12/les-velib-plus-voles-que-jamais_924387
