Word: libbing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...released figures indicate that around 11,600 of the bicycles have been trashed, slashed, battered, brutalized and even drowned in the Seine since the program began; 7,800 others have been stolen. Just as bad, some cyclists have even begun broadcasting Internet videos of themselves engaged in "Vélib free rides" or "extreme Vélib'," in which wannabe urban daredevils put the solid but graceless bikes through punishing stunts usually reserved for BMX or mountain bikes...
...Unfortunately, that reflects the mind-set of a lot of Vélib' 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're on a Vélib...
...While the proliferation of bicycles in Paris has created a new form of pushy and irresponsible behavior rivaling that of the city's motorists, it may not, in fact, be true that the worst two-wheeled offenders are usually Vélib' renters - despite the statistics that suggest as much. The number of Paris accidents involving cyclists has exploded 37.2% since the scheme was introduced, surging from 506 crashes in 2006 to nearly 700 in 2007 (including three Vélib' rider deaths that year; there were four in 2008). However, that surging accident rate is largely accounted...
...Today, Libé has a new benefactor in the form of Edouard de Rothschild, and a new unstarry-eyed editor, Laurent Joffrin. The paper flirted briefly with break-even in 2007 and it's trying to find a way to go post-ideological, sort of. The Net, conferences, French open-shirted philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy shilling with advertisers - the new Libé will try almost anything. Joffrin even invited Carla Bruni, wife of France's rightist President Nicolas Sarkozy, to serve as celebrity editor for a day, but that was a step too far and Joffrin was forced...