Contrary to my earlier praise of Velib, the French public bike-sharing system, I’m now anti-Velib. These bikes cost $3,500 each, there are 20,600 of them around the city, and 80% of these have been stolen or damaged. JCDecaux, an outdoor-advertising corporation, has been a major financier and organizer of the project: “The company invested about $140 million to set up the system and provides a yearly fee of about $5.5 million to Paris, which also gets rental fees for the bikes. In return, the company’s 10-year contract allows it to put up 1,628 billboards that it can rent.” They run 11 repair shops, with 400 employees, who must repair some 1,500 bikes per day. It’s no wonder that “anarchic” kids are vandalizing and stealing the bikes. These bikes are mostly located in the center area of the city, not in the segregated banlieus outside the city. The bikes might seem cheap to city-dwellers ($43/year), but for suburban kids who don’t come into the city much, they’re pretty expensive for a single ride, and you only get them for half-an-hour before having to pay extra. To suburban kids, these bikes are a symbol of the utopia for the urban bourgeoisie created by exploiting their working class, immigrant parents. While the bikes are seen as an enhancement of mobility by the bourgeoisie, suburban kids see that mobility as spatially inconvenient and too expensive for themselves. Also, the heavy policing of the Velib stations, increased in response to the vandalism, connects them with another symbol of the kids’ oppression: ‘le flic’ - the cops. I see their vandalism of the bikes as a direct continuation of their expressions of rage during the riots in 2005 - with 8,973 vehicles burned in 20 days.
This state-corporate run public bike system seems to benefit only the urban bourgeoisie, rich tourists, and JCDecaux through the millions its making off of the advertising space it got through the deal (further turning Paris into a city of commercial spectacle). Thus, I am fully in support of the kids carrying out their ‘anarchic’ desires to fuck up these bikes and the system that controls them. Yet, I am still a huge advocate of a public bike system. In opposition to this corporate-socialist version, I advocate a self-organizing, community-run, anarchist version: bike co-ops all over the city (especially in the banlieus), subsidized through taxes, cheap bikes that people can buy (for say $100-250) and keep and maintain themselves, free bike maintenance lessons, free use of the bike co-ops’ tools and space, and community organizing in and around the bike co-ops. First, take the fucking advertising corporation out of the picture — why do people need their use and maintenance of a bicycle to be mediate by an advertising corporation? That makes no sense. Second, buy cheap bikes - not these $3,500 things that are only so expensive because of their high-tech security and payment gadgetry. Third, allow people to own their own bikes - so they can use it anytime and wherever they want and can develop a sense of care for the bike, they treat it as part of themselves and their community, rather than as a part of a state-corporate complex that exploits them and regulates their movement. ‘Anarchic’? - yes please!
