French Rental Bikes Ride the World

PARIS, France – The “Vélorution” was launched on July 15th last summer and is conquering the world. The concept of implementing a wide spread bike rental system in exchange for long term and exclusive advertising rights has proven to be a successful combination.

This deal seems to be very beneficial for the advertising company JCDecaux  as the concept is being introduced all major big cities worldwide, like Chicago, Moscow, Geneva and Sydney. And again all eyes are on Paris as the world capital of rental bikes. Within just three month the Velib has become a common sight on the boulevards. Soon there will be 20.000 of them, mainly made by Accell Group in their Hungarian facility.

The entire system is operated by JCDecaux. Some figures: since July more than 6 million rides have been made, more than 80 percent of all rides were less than 30 minutes and free for the biker, every bike is being rented on average 10 times a day, around 100,000 people, mainly Parisians have already taken annual subscriptions.

The cost of this system is enormous. JCDecaux has hired 350 employees for the rental scheme, 50 of whom are occupied exclusively with riding the bikes from one station to another to keep up with demand. JCDecaux has even its boat sailing up and down the River Seine, collecting bicycles in need of maintenance. The overall annual cost comes to around € 2,500 per bicycle. JCDecaux expects to realize a € 600 million of advertisement on the 1,628 urban billboards over the course of the 10-year contract.

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