Posts Tagged ‘france’

Pithy Advice for the Person Who Ends Up Running San Francisco’s Bike Share Program

Friday, February 5th, 2010

Remember back in the day, back when Clear Channel “promised” that they would provide a Velib-style bicycle sharing program for San Francisco? Let’s dig up a press release crowing all about that from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). Ah yes, from the “Transit Shelter Advertising and Maintenance Agreement” with Clear Channel Outdoor, Inc.:

“The agreement also requires Clear Channel to provide a Bicycle-Sharing Program, at the SFMTA’s request, details of which will be negotiated in an amendment to the Agreement.”

Details! Oh noes. Well Clear Channel looked at the details of running a bike share program and decided that they didn’t want to do it. Of course, they were not “required” to do Jack despite what the SFMTA thought. Isn’t that funny? 

Now let’s imagine that you’re in charge of San Francisco’s bike-share program. What should you do? Let’s start with the good stuff and then worry about the details, the gritty nitty.

But first, let’s check in with Jessica Alba in Paris on a Velib. She’s in your corner:

 

All right, let’s go:

1. Junkets, junkets, junkets!

Try to get in as many “fact-finding missions” as possible early on. You’re the CEO, right? So, first thing you do is jet off to France, or D.C. or Montreal, bidness-class. Start a blog to post vacation photos of you on a Velib and complain about how you have to spend so much time away from your kids. Enjoy yourself, it’s going to go downhill from here.

2. Make the program as small as possible.

This is key. The bigger the program, the more headaches you’ll have. If you listen to people who tell you that you need to have a “critical mass” to be sustainable, you’ll have 5000 bikes on the streets – that means 5000 things to fret over every day. The Feds might give you millions to get started, but they’re not going to give you millions every year. As far as you’re concerned, a bike share program is a bike share program.

3. Think of a catchy name for your program.

I don’t know, BikeConnect (if Alex Tourk would license the name)? How about City BikeShare, CalBike, BikeCal, SFBike, BikeSF, FoggyBike, or Frisco a Go Go? I’m at a loss…

And now, decisions to be made:

1. Which bikes to use?

In the Parisian program, the heavy bikes come from Hungary and they cost $1000 per. This is both good and bad, because you want to have the bikes well-built in order to survive the rigors of heavy use, but you don’t want to lose too much money every time one dissappears. I think it’d be impossible to charge $1000 to a San Francscan when the bike s/he just checked out got lifted by a thief, so you’re going to lose big bucks on theft. On the other hand, if you go the cheap route and use inexpensive mountain-type bikes, they’ll get stripped for parts with a quickness. You want bike thieves to think these are custom-made with no reuseable parts. Bixi bikes are cheaper (I hope) – perhaps they’d be a good starting point?

2. How much to charge users who don’t return bikes?

The Parisian government now subsidizes share program operator JC Decaux’s losses to the tune of millions of dollars per year. This is despite the fact that this company makes a mint from the 1600 advertising spaces given to them to pay for the program. If you are “too nice” to customers and only charge $50 for a bike they don’t return, then the customers won’t really care if their rental goes missing. On the other hand, if you try to charge the full replacement value, your customers won’t stand for it.

3. What about vandalism?

What about it – the little monsters are going to mess you up. They’re going to make it their business to make you want to go out of business. How will you react to the taggers who will paint over whatever they can? Now, program operators don’t have to deal with this issue in La Rochelle or Lyon, but in Paris, that’s a different story. Well guess what? We’re going to be just like Paris, having bikes with broken keels and lost keels. Deal with it. How about getting the City to cover all vandalism costs? That would help.

4. What about helmets?

You know, France has different attitudes about certain things. For example, they’ve got 58 nuclear panner plants and they’re building more, and they have a huge nuclear waste dump in Champagne, of all places. So, when you talk to the French about helmets for non-Tour-de-France-bike-riders, they don’t like it. Could San Francisco somehow rent out a smelly used helmet along with the bike? Doubtful. Could customers carry their own helmets? Sure, some of them would, but carrying around a helmet goes against the very nature of the whole program, which is designed to appeal to the general non-bike-riding public. In France, they tolerate deaths due to share program customers not having helmets. Will San Francisco?

5. What about hills?

Now let’s say your customer wants to go from a bike station at the top of Nob Hill down to Embarcadero Station – that’s a straight shot down California, it would take about five minutes, easy peasy. But who’s going to pay for the right to pedal a heavy bike back up to the top of Nob Hill? Should you give people who turn bikes in at the Nob Hill station more time? Certainly. Should you go ahead and just make that a free ride? Should you give these hardy souls a credit for future trips? Should you just pay jobless people to ride bikes uphill? Should you load up a truck and have an employee redistributing bikes all day long? Should you just not have a Nob Hill station? Don’t know.

There are no easy solutions for you. You’ll be made sport of in the pages of SFist and SFGate, San Francisco’s online newspaper. It’ll be endless. The Velib program works in Paris because of all that sweet, sweet street advertising money from all those signs. You won’t have access to that kind of dough, not in San Francisco.

Oh well, that’s why you’ll get paid the big bucks. 

Good luck, Chuck.

After the jump, all the places you should junket to, before the cash runs out. 

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Our Captain Sullenberger is Getting Dissed from France – Was Sully’s French Plane the Real Hero?

Monday, November 16th, 2009

I don’t know, it seems like writer William Langewiesche, currently residing in France, wants to have it both ways with his new book, Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson. He wants to rip on Sully, thusly:

“His performance was a work of extraordinary concentration, which the public misread as coolness under fire. Some soldiers will recognize the distinction.”

“Like it or not, [French pilot Bernard Ziegler] reached out across the years and cradled them all the way to the water.”

But then when Langewiesche gets a little blowback, he folds up like a deck chair, talking about how he’s surprised by Sully’s reaction, and how he’s neither pro- nor anti- fly-by-wire, and how he thinks cockpit automation is merely ”a part of the story,” anyway, of Flight 1549. Well, duh, it’s a part of the story. 

But that’s Langewiesche’s “Truth About the Miracle on the Hudson” – that’s it, that’s all there is?

Haven’t read Fly by Wire myself. Probably would rather read it more than Sully’s less-techy book (mostly about the his Search for What Really Matters), which I haven’t read either. Oh well.

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Obviously, there are pros and cons to Die by Wire. If William Langewiesche is now going around saying that, as he is, then there’s not much of a dispute anymore, we’ll take solace in the certainly that the bruised egos of French Airbus execs (who want Sully to thank Gaia for Airbus every chance he gets) will heal over time.

I don’t know, pretty cheesy (fromagey?) Monsieur William Langewiesche.

Pretty cheesy.

Home Country of Assault Victim Rests Easy After San Francisco Attack

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

I’ll tell you, the reason why the home county of the exchange student who was recently sexually asaulted in San Franciscois resting easy these days is that the media of said home country isn’t aware of the attack. And why’s that? Apparently, it’s the policy of San Francisco to not give out that kind of information. Per the SF Appeal:

“Police are not releasing information about the country the alleged victim is from in order to protect her identity, Tomioka said.”

I’m wondering how small a country has to be such that saying its name discloses the identity of any particular tourist in San Francisco.

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Like if there’s a famous exchange program in Monaco (population 30k) and they send ten students a year to the States? That would seem to fit the bill, fair enough.

But what if the exchange student is from one of the following Big Ten tourist-producing countries (countries avec concomitant robust, aggresive media, of course)?

Germany

United Kingdom

France

China

Italy

Japan

Canada

Russia

South Korea

Mexico

If the student is from one of these countries, I’d be hard-pressed to see how saying the name of the country would identify any particular person from that country. Maybe there’s a written policy, or maybe there’s an unwritten rule, the way the MSM won’t report routine cases of Golden Gate Bridge jumpings?

That is all.

Bixi, the Bike Taxi, in Golden Gate Park – Testing Out the Canadian Bike Rental System

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

The Bixi short-term bike-share roadshow blew into town today, however briefly, to show us how they do it up in Montreal.

But first things first – a quick report on what our visiting bike-sharing visitors were surprised by in GGP:

1. The summertime cold and wind;

2. The homeless dude with a guitar case who flipped out, attacked a jogger, and had to get taken down by a bunch of Park Rangers and SFPD officers;

3. Noisy raptors circling low overhead; and

4. San Francisco’s famous bicycle built for four. It almost stole the show. See?

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Program Director Andy Thornley with SF Weekly’s Matt Smith et ux, ”quad” liberi, all together on a charming, fully-functioning bicycle. Click to expand:

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So Bixi is just like the Parisian Velib program except the Bixi bikes aren’t as heavy, which is a good thing. But the Bixis are still heavy though. And if you happen to be six foot one and a ton of fun, you’ll find that the frame is strong enough but that the seatpost doesn’t go up high enough. Otherwise the whole program is as you would expect.   

The mise-en-scene today:

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In France, they incentivize people to drop the bikes off at the tops of hills. If a program like this ever gets off the ground in San Francisco, what would it take to deal with stations at the tops of our mini-mountains?

Bienvenue à Montréal!

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It’s enormous work keeping a program like this going. The little monsters of France have effectively managed to steal, vandalize, and otherwise mangle the entire original fleet – at a replacement cost of thousands of dollars each, that’s a tough row to hoe.  

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If you want to make a system like this work in San Francisco, you’d need  a subsidy from the government, the way that MUNI and BART and Golden Gate ferries get subsidies.

And where will people get the helmets they’ll need? Whoops. (In gay Paris, they take a c’est la vie approach to matters like this.)

All in all, I’d rather have a regular bike and a U-lock than a Bixi program membership. But if you can’t find a cab or you just missed your bus, you might like having the option of a short-term bike rental.

We’ll see.

 
City CarShare Cohosts Bike Sharing Demonstration.

Exploring New Trends in Green Mobility

WHAT:   A one-day opportunity for the public to ride bikes from a bike share system. Bike sharing allows people to pick up a bike from one station, travel to their destination and return the bike to any other station in a network. City CarShare will be conducting a survey among participants to get their feedback on the concept, the equipment and their level of support for bike sharing in San Francisco.
 
WHEN:   Sunday, August 2, 10 am- 3:30 pm
 
WHERE:   Golden Gate Park, (just inside the car-free Sunday road closure on JFK Drive at Conservatory Drive East)
 
WHY:   To allow the public to test-ride the bikes and learn more about this eco-friendly mode of urban transportation. Through this demonstration project, the sponsors hope to encourage awareness and increased civic conversation about Bike Sharing for San Francisco as having the potential to build a greener city while encouraging healthy living.
 
SPONSORS:   City CarShare, SF Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), BIXI (of Montreal)
 
COST   Free

San Francisco Celebrates Bastille Day Tonight – Ce Soir Ce Soir Ce Soir!

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

Are you all set for Bastille Day in San Francisco? If not, check out 7×7 Magazine for some hasty planification de dernière minute. And see Joe Eskenazi’s take right here.

Or you can keep it simple and just wander over to the “French Quarter” (of one-percent of) San Francisco around Bush Street betwixt Union Square and the Financial District, on tiny streets like Belden Place (home of Plouf, Cafe Bastille, B-44, and le Best-O-Burger), Mark Lane (home of the Bank of Ireland, aka the Irish Bank), and Claude Lane (home of Cafe Claude).

This is what Belden looked like on July 14th last year. Click to expand:

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And this is the Mission from this year. Can you see les drapeaux tricolores? Peter Acworth’s Kink.com famously makes pornography at the old San Francisco National Guard Armory and Arsenal, but they’re never too busy to let a holiday go by without hoisting some huge flags for the occasion:

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Here are some more deets:

This party is back on Belden Place, considered a great out of many of San Francisco’s best street parties, this year will be one of the best for sure. Why? Well, the music, of course!!

Come early to get a seat, some wine, your favorite food, and listen to some of SF’s finest dj’s.  Audionista will be playing first, probably the best time slot of the day, so make sure you get there by 4pm.

Also featuring Trevor Simpson of Worldtown-energy 92.7fm
Pheeko Dubfunk of Swank SF
Jared F and Nima G of Connected Grooves”

And there’s ever more stuff below too.

Happy Bastille Day!

Bal Populaire du Comite Officiel Directions
Saturday, July 11th, starting at 6 pm at the Basque Cultural Center.
Cost: $60 per person, gourmet dinner: choice of filet mignon or half-chicken – wine included.
A program of Franco-American music and dance, and a raffle (grand prize: a trip for two to Paris Courtesy of the Official Committee. (Read More)

The Santa Barbara French Festival Directions
Join the fun at the 22nd Annual Santa Barbara FRENCH FESTIVAL
(Bastille Day Weekend, July 11 & 12, 11am-7pm, FREE admission).
Great food. from crepes to Cajun. Over 40 great acts on 3 stages: cancan, folkdance, Poodle Parade, Femmes Fatales Drag Review, Moroccan bellydance, Napoleon, Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf, Hot Jazz a la Django Reinhart, African drumming, Tahitian dance, accordeons galore, and much more. Huge Eiffel Tower. Free drawing. Lots for the kids.
It’s where AMERICA celebrates FRANCE! (Read More)

Bastille Day is back on Belden! Directions
Come enjoy a fun and vibrant Bastille Day celebration, July 14th(4 to 10pm) in Belden Place, San Francisco.
DJs, drinks, open restaurants, all the ingredients to have fun!
Restaurants: Sam’s grill – Cafe Bastille – Cafe Tiramisu – Plouf – B44 – Belden Taverna – Trademark – Brindisi
Official Belden Bastille Day After-Party, Scuba, at Harlot – 46 Minna between 1st and 2nd streets, SF(10pm to 2am)

Napastille Day Directions
Join us for a very special Bastille day on July 14th (10am to 9pm) in the wine country for an all day celebration of our French community!!! Come celebrate 220 years of revolution and 220 years of French presence in the wine country..!
The whole market will have a French flair for a very special Bastille day!
All vendors will have French specials: French everything: French songs, French surprises, French Dancing. (Read More)

Bastille Day Soiree Directions
On July 14th (8pm to 2am), French Tuesday organize Bastille Day Soiree. For this extra special occasion, the revolution will take place in Ruby Skye. an upscale entertainment venue especially decorated for Bastille Day!
At this event you will find: complimentary stationed horsd’oeuvres graciously offered by San Francisco top French restaurants along with French Wine tasting, live Band and Special performances, music by DJ Frenchy le Freak & Pheeko Dubfunk.
The suggested dress code is Blue/White/Red. Tickets prices will be $10 for the first 100, $15 afterwards, $20 for the last tier and $25-30 at the door (upon availability). (Read More)

Bastille Day at Sofitel Directions
Join the Sofitel at the bay bar on Tuesday July 14th (8pm to 12am) for the ultimate “Bastille Day” celebration with DJ Cris and a special dinner at Bay223.
For more information & reservations: Call: 650 -508 -7126. (Read More)

Bastille Day at The Bubble Lounge Directions
Celebrate Bastille Day with French Champagne Tuesday July 14th, lively music and a fun atmosphere at The Bubble Lounge starting at 4 pm.
Enjoy discounted prices off Taittinger Champagne as well as select Champagne cocktails and food items from 4 – 8 pm. (Read More)

The Vélibs are Coming, The Vélibs are Coming to San Francisco!

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

Globetrotting San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced today in France that a Vélib’-style bike share program is coming to San Francisco. The plan is like ZipCar for bicycles - you could find a bike locked up in one of five areas around town, swipe your card, ride it to another bike lot, and then go about your bidness.

The French program has had its ups and downs. The little monsters of France (where “destroying property is a national pastime“) have found no end to what they can do to these built-to-last 50(!) pound bikes. In Paris, thousands of them have been lost and destroyed.

A satisfied Vélib’ customer in gay Paree. Cliquetez ici:

(¡Zoot alors! Their trash cans look just like ours!) via autsinevan

Who knows how this pilot program will work out here in San Francisco. Certainly, it will necessarily be different than what they have in Paris or Lyon. (The seven-mile trip between the CCSF Main Campus to the flat part of the Presidio – hoo boy, that’s a journey much longer than the typical Parisian jaunt, for example)

As they say in France, le bon Dieu est dans le detail.

 

  MAYOR GAVIN NEWSOM ANNOUNCES SAN FRANCISCO BIKE SHARING PILOT PROGRAM
PARIS, FRANCE – Mayor Gavin Newsom today used his visit to the successful
bike sharing network in Paris to announce that San Francisco will implement
a bike sharing pilot program in 2009. San Francisco’s bike sharing program
is intended to build on the recognition of San Francisco as a gold-level
bicycle friendly community by the League of American Bicyclists-the largest
United States city to receive such an honor.
“Bike sharing will help connect thousands of residents and commuters to
their workplaces and shopping destinations by providing bikes that they can
easily borrow,” said Mayor Newsom. “This bike sharing pilot project will
allow us to test and perfect the bikes and technology that will be used in
our citywide network.”
The pilot program will include 50 bikes located at five stations on
non-city property (as required by a Court injunction until environmental
review of the City’s Bicycle Plan is complete). Each station will have
either nine or 12 bikes and will provide approximately 50 percent more
bicycle parking slots to help ensure proper distribution between available
bikes and open, available drop-off spots. The stations will be in the
Financial District, Mission Bay, the Presidio, Civic Center and the City
College campus.
Bike sharing customers will sign-up through an online registration system
linked to the website of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency
(SFMTA), which manages the City’s Bicycle Program.  Registration will
require a valid credit card to charge an annual user fee, hourly fees, and
to provide security for lost bikes (which will be the responsibility of the
user). A subscription will provide members access to all rental stations
and the use of a bike for a limited period of time per day.
“We are committed to the vision of increasing bicycling in San Francisco
through innovative programs like bike sharing,” said SFMTA Executive
Director/CEO Nathaniel P. Ford, Sr.
According to the 2007 Census update, 2.7 percent of San Franciscans commute
via bicycle compared to an average of 0.5 percent in the United States and
0.9 percent in California.  The SFMTA’s 2007-2008 Bicycle Count found a 25
percent increase in bicycling over the previous year, and a 2008 survey
showed that fully 6 percent of all trips in San Francisco are made by
bicycle.
The start-up costs for the pilot program are estimated to be between
$400,000 and $500,000, while the annual operating costs are projected to be
$450,000.  As provided for in the SFMTA’s Transit Shelter Advertising
Contract with Clear Channel, these costs are for Clear Channel to staff the
pilot program and have responsibility for installation and maintenance.
Today in Paris, Mayor Newsom received a briefing on the history,
organization and success of the “Velib” or bicycle share program in Paris,
and toured the repair, design and showroom facilities along with the
research and development facility. The “Velib” program was introduced by
Mayor Bertrand Delanoe as a way to reduce traffic and environmental
degradation in Paris by having a shared bicycle program encompass the
entire city. Today Paris has over 20,000 bicycles as part of the “Velib”
program and it has proven to be very popular and successful.

Mayor Gavin Newsom Demands a Downtown Terminal for CA High Speed Rail

Monday, January 26th, 2009

You know what San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom wants? He wants the new California High Speed Rail System to make tracks all the way up to the new Transbay Terminal near Mission Street instead of having the rails end around the CalTrain Station on King Street. Says our Mayor, who is right now this moment learning all about high speed rail on the scene in Paris, France:

 We’re not going to build a $2 billion bus station under my watch.”

Well, that says it all.

Click to expand:  

François Lacôte, SVP at French conglomerate (and BART train maker!) Alstom Transport, and our globetrotting First Couple, Gavin Newsom and Jennifer Siebel Newsom, today trainspotting in France. Via the Mayor’s Office of Communications.

And you know who would agree with Gavin? Dave Snyder, Transportation Policy Director at San Francisco Planning + Urban Research (SPUR). He thinks the voter-approved high-speed rail should “reach right into the heart of San Francisco, even if it costs more than… [nibbles right pinky ] one billion dollars.”

However, High Speed Rail Authority Chair Quentin Kopp might look at things a different way.

What will it appear like? Here’s an idea on the YouTube: San Francisco Transbay Transit Center Animation. Complete with intra- and inter-city rail, it’s just like a small version of Toyko Station. They want you to think of it as the Grand Central Station of the West(TM).

Will we get the necessary $300,000,000 ”train box” underneath the TT earlier rather than later? Will CalTrain finally have a chance to get up there to Mission as well? Stay tuned.

More deets after the jump

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ProtectPlace.com = Chlopak Leonard Schechter = French Wine Industry

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

ProtectPlace.com is a little outfit being promoted by Washington D.C.-area PR firm Chlopak Leonard Schechter & Associates, which does work for the confusingly-named Office of Champagne, USA. This unholy alliance is once again trying to manipulate Bay Area consumers through online advertising.

They are now pushing the Declaration to Protect Wine Place and Origin, which promotes concepts thoroughly debunked here and here.

But, there’s more trouble: 

Trouble is, the Office of Champagne USA isn’t the federal government, which permits winemakers to use the word “Champagne” on wine labels as sort of a generic term, but only as long as they note where the wine was actually made. Hence “California Champagne,” or almost as famously, “California Chablis” and “California Burgundy.”

Let’s think back to happier times, before the French hired flacks to manipulate us:

 

You see? French Champagne is made in France and American Champagne is made in America. Some terms have become “semi-generic” in the Home of the Brave and the Land of the Freedom Fries. Should the French wine industry have the only say in how wines made and sold in California should be labelled?

You should certainly be wary of what our European corporate overlords have to say. Don’t listen to the apologists for the troubled French wine industry, which has so much oversupply sometimes they turn wine into industrial alcohol. And does the Champagne region still have a nuclear waste dump? Yes. How’s that for terroir?

So, when the experts tell you to stock up on $100+ bottles of French Champagne, as they did last year, sit back and watch prices fall. And when they tell you to worry:

“People are really worried about the next six months when they should worry about the next 10 to 15 years,” says Charles Curtis, product management development director with Moët Hennessy USA.

You shouldn’t worry.

Bastille Day in San Francisco a Huge Success

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Sort of. Maybe people got their Bastille on over the weekend, instead of last night.

Down on Claude Lane in Union Square, instead of le jazz hot revelers got AC/DC’s Back in Black for at least part of the time anyway.

Clique to enlarge: 

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This what Belden Lane, home of Plouf, Cafe Bastille, B-44, and le Best-O-Burger, looked like later in the evening. Most people were just sitting around noshing.

See you next year?

Local Pornographers Help San Francisco Celebrate Bastille Day

Monday, July 14th, 2008

Well it’s July 14, so it must be time for another Bastille Day in San Francisco. Peter Acworth’s Kink.com famously makes pornography at the old San Francisco National Guard Armory and Arsenal down in the Mission district, but they’re never too busy to let a holiday go by without hoisting some huge flags for the occasion.

 And anyway, efforts like this might serve to tamp down some of the criticism from the neighbours.

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Get over to Belden Alley in the Financial District (“the financh”) sometime today to get in on the fun.

Jours heureux!