Word: bike
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America’s Walking City is primed to become America’s Biking City. In an exciting announcement on Tuesday, top Boston officials unveiled plans for a citywide bike-sharing program similar to Paris’s famous Vélib’. The plan eventually calls for 6,000 communal bikes to be stationed at 600 public racks around Boston; anyone with a bike card can swipe in to unlock a bike, ride it as long as he or she chooses, and return it to any rack in the city...
...Welcome to the cruel downside of Vélib' - the enormously popular bike-rental scheme offering Parisians a cheap, environmentally friendly form of urban transportation. Since its introduction in July 2007, Paris' Vélib' program has facilitated 42 million rentals by 177,000 people with annual subscriptions to the system and countless others who have rented bikes on a one-off basis. The program allows riders to use credit cards or subscriptions to hop onto one of the program's 20,600 bikes from 1,451 stations around Paris and its nearby suburbs. And the ride is free...
...riders, who think riding someone else's property whenever the mood takes them means they can ignore the rules of the road and act like jerks," says Nathalie Dubois, a 45-year-old medical worker who has been riding her own bike in Paris for over a decade. "Nine times out of 10, when you see someone breaking road laws or just being obnoxious on a bike, they...
...Indeed, it doesn't take a very long stroll around Paris before an observer will see cyclists like the older Rue de Rivoli bomber running red lights or racing through busy crosswalks in violation of codes. An astonishing number of bike riders also seem to think directional restrictions on one-way streets apply to cars alone. And pedestrians in Paris simply haven't lived until a cyclist tartly demands that they cede passage on sidewalks that bicycles have no right to be on in the first place...
...Accusations and countercharges over whether the Vélib' program has imperiled safety will probably continue for some time, especially since the criticism of Vélib' riders is partially based on the in-crowd snobbery of private-bike owners. Still, even Vélib' adepts admit they've earned some of their bad reputation...