Stepping outside of your comfort zone when visiting a new city is one of the easiest things to do accidentally and extraordinarily difficult to do deliberately.
Take, for instance, getting about. That inevitable, friendly, multi-lingual, multi-level big red bus that will stop and let you off wherever takes your fancy and then stop again to pick you up when you’re cold and hungry is irresistibly reliable and familiar. And I recommend it. It’s not economical for the city bus tours to take their passengers to the suburbs or industrial zones so a hop-on-hop-off tour is an efficiently condensed course in the highlights of the dead centre of your new city and it’s the first thing you should do to lay down a rough, subconscious map.
And then you’re ready to get on a bike. Velib in Paris (and Barclays Cycle Hire in London, Villo! in Brussels, Velo Bleu in Nice and doubtless some equally clever or sponsored name for the same scheme in whatever city you’re visiting) has been trending up since it was introduced in 2007 and with good reason. This is exactly the sort of committee-inspired, municipally-funded, bureaucratic nightmare that should fall flat on its stupid face the moment it’s launched but Velib is none of these things — it’s a free-market, privately-funded, advertising-driven, customer-focused service that’s conveniently placed 1800 bicycle rental kiosks each with dozens of bikes all over Paris (and similar numbers in London and Brussels and Vienna and so on).
Like most of the best ideas it’s boringly simple. Your rental period starts when you pick up your bike at one rental stand and ends when you drop it off at another, anywhere else that you find one. The success of the scheme doubtless rests on the fact that you will always find one and in the vanishingly rare instance that you don’t you get an extra fifteen minutes of rental for free and a list of the nearest available slots. The popularity of Velib is such that you’re far, far more likely to be disappointed when looking for a bike in the first place then you will be trying to find an empty dock to which to return it.
In Paris you can associate a subscription of up to a year with a credit card or, more conveniently, your Navigo (metro pass). As a tourist, though, you’ll want to take one of the one or seven day subscriptions, pay online with your credit card and rent and replace your bike with a PIN.
The first time I rode a Velib in Paris I took it directly to the next nearest station, put it back and judged myself quite satisfied with this first effort. Don’t be like that. The second time I took it from Gare du Nord to the sixth, which is about 10 km and it was a dawdle. I would suggest though that you make a point of knowing at least roughly where you’re going so that you’re not looking at street names and landmarks or Google Maps when you really, really need to be paying attention to the cars around you. Paris is in fact fairly bike friendly but it’s still a very busy city with correspondingly busy roads and a metropolitan Smart Car in Paris will kill you just as dead as a New York Cadillac.
So be careful and be bold and you’ll have the navigation edge over every other form of transportation in Paris, London, Vienna, Brussels and all the other cities that are introducing the future of urban transport.