Continuing the seasonal theme of holidays and cycling, BusinessWeek/Spiegel Online alerted me to a quite nouvelle French initiative with their headline:
From the middle of July visitors and residents of Paris will find it easy to get hold of public bike rentals called Vélib explained as 'pedal power to the people' or, as seen elsewhere, 'liberate a vélo'.
It's part of Paris's green transportation plan and you need a chip card (available online, from post offices or certain Metro stations) to rent the bikes from public stations. To start there'll be 750 self-service stations equipped with over 10,000 rentable bikes to start with and the plan is to double this by the end of the year.
Lots more information in the Paris bicycles article - looks like this is going to be an interesting summer.
