Paris to kick-off EV car sharing program!
Posted by Holly Reich on Aug 3, 2010
The wildly popular Velib, Paris’ rental system for bicycles, is expanding. But, I’m not talking about two-wheelers. The city plans to launch the world’s largest electric car access scheme in September of next year.
The program, Autolib ( auto liberty), has the goal of cutting down on car ownership, traffic and pollution.
With the Veil system, people can access banks of bicycles in their neighborhood, leave a deposit, register at a computer terminal — and ride away. The bikes can be left at posts throughout the city.
Autolib will work in a similar way, except the cars will be stored in parking garages as well as on the street. The benefit? The price will be significantly less than the estimated $7,000 a year it costs to keep a private car in Paris.
Paris is not a stranger to sustainability. Since 2001, traffic in the city has dropped nearly 25 percent because of improved public transport and limitations on automobiles.
“The success of the program is going to depend on a number of different factors,” says Bill Moore, publisher of EV World, an online magazine about electric vehicles.
Moore notes that by offering a fleet of all electric cars, the city of Paris is making a major move that could provide a model for the rest of the world — as long as the plan avoids the obvious pitfalls.
The downside
His concern is that Autolib could suffer the kind of theft and vandalism that plagued Velib. Nearly 8,000 of the original 20,000 bikes in the program were stolen or ended up hung from lampposts or thrown into the river Seine.
City officials say the electric vehicles will be much harder to damage or steal than the Velib bikes. Then again, burning cars in France is a common sport. Every weekend, hundreds of automobiles are burned by unhappy youths in cities across the country.
The upshot
Autolib could kick off a worldwide model for time-sharing electric cars.
Officials say there will be about 1,000 battery-recharging stations around the city, with a fleet of 3,000 electric cars planned for the start of the program.
source: NPR
