The Vélib’ Version 2.0: A Bikeshare Success Story
The Vélib’ is the largest public bikesharing system in the western world. Based in Paris, France it was originally launched in 2007, with the system (operated by JCDecuax) encompassing around 14,500 bikes and 1,200 stations located in the City of Paris and its surrounding arrondissements.
”Car dominated streets of Paris are now a thing of the past…”
During this time, cities from all over Europe and America, including London and New York took note of the Vélib’ operation, which had an average daily ridership of over 85,000 rides at its peak in 2011, and began to launch their own systems (Santander Cycles and Citibike New York respectively).
In 2018, after the first large-scale public tender for the replacement of an existing public bikesharing service with Smovengo awarded the operation of the ‘second-generation’ of the Vélib’.
The ‘second-generation’ Vélib’ was rebranded to the Vélib’ Métropole which offered a fleet of 21,000 bikes with 1400 stations that services the city of Paris and 64 surrounding cities, of which, a third of the fleet (7000 bikes) are electric.
Although the initial launch was plagued with issues, many outside of Smovengo’s control, combined with the worst transport strikes in France’s history, the Smovengo operated Vélib’ has passed multiples tests that previous operators had not experienced to today (during a world health pandemic) achieving over 185,000 rides per day, a 70% increase on the previous systems peak ridership.
It is safe to say that Smovengo, one of BICO’s partners and advocates, have truly succeeded. Having dealt with a difficult start, to now having peaked at almost 200,000 rides in a single day, far exceeding the statistics of their predecessor.
On average there has 14% increase of rides against previous statitics , with a 20% increase on peak days, proving that Marie Hildago’s vision for a car-free Paris is possible with the continued support from Smovengo.
The figures also show, to cities across the world, of which many of them have also seen, that bikeshare is a crisis-resilient reliable and sustainable mode of transport that deserves the increased credit, funding and infrastructure that other public transportation services already receive.
For operators, it outlines the significant impact, that robust, resilient and adaptable AI-driven software systems can have on their operations, even in times of uncertainty.
For us, at BICO AI, we are proud to have been a key partner of Smovengo from the beginning, and to facilitate such ground-breaking ridership figures via our AI rebalancing platform is something we and Smovengo take huge pride in. We cannot wait for the 200,000 ride barrier to be broken and to continueto help to provide Parisians with bike and space availability, when and where required with Smovengo.
BICO AI provides an AI Operations Platform that assesses various environmental, resource, performance and usage data to optimise available resources (teams, bikes, batteries etc.) to ensure asset availability (location, usable, charged) across the entire network when and where it is required.
Smovengo is a consortium of four international mobility experts: Smoove, Indigo, Mobivia, Moventia. Perfectly complementary, these four players have formulated the best offer within the framework of the call for tenders of the mixed syndicate Autolib ‘and Vélib’ Métropole relating to the self-service bicycle market of Vélib metropolitan.
