Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Cycling in Paris

Well, this is terribly exciting. Miss Felicity has invited me to guest blog. I think she was over me sending her lots of random links and going: "you should blog about this!" So, here I go. First guest post!

Ah, the most beautiful gay Paree! I was lucky enough to spend a weekend in Paris last August, hanging out with my cousin, and taking in the sites.
To be fair, this is as close to the tower that I got. WAY too many tourists.

Paris is where I fell in love with beautiful old school bicycles. The numbers of amazing Parisian woman riding bicycles around the city in heels and sundresses made me just so green with envy, and was the driving force behind picking up an Electra when I got home.

Not everyone is Paris gets to ride the old, beautiful bicycles, but Paris, being such an amazing city, have an alternative.
The bicycle that this lovely Parisian boy is riding (photo courtesy of The Sartorialist) you can find all over the city, sitting in their little bike racks. There are approx 15 bikes per rack and the idea behind it is that you pop in your travel card, pick up a bike, ride it to your next location, and drop it at another rack near said location. As people have to use their travel card (the same cards they use for the Metro which holds all information about the card holder including residence) in order to use the bicycles, they can be traced back if they happen to steal the bike, or damage it.

I quite like this idea, and think that Wellington could do something similar for the central city. Have a number of bike racks around Wellington - waterfront, Courtenay Place, Cuba, Lambton (both ends) so that people can quickly get from one end of town to the other without contributing to their carbon footprint. With the joy that is the Snapper card (once they sort themselves out and we're able to register them) I can't see why this couldn't work. Well, I can. For some reason Parisians have respect for other people and their property - I imagine in Wellington they would all get stolen/trashed/dumped in the harbour.

It's free to dream...

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