Upon hearing that the El Paso City Council was considering a bicycle-sharing program, I became nostalgic for my hometown, Paris, which has such a program, called Vélib' for "free bike," since 2007.
It also reminded me of what happened to my friend Alice. That story involves a shared bike, a flawed plan and a very long night.

But first, let me say that bike-sharing programs are great. Vélib' literally changed the face of Paris. I personally never had the guts to ride one but hundreds of thousands of braver men and women negotiate the treacherous Paris traffic on shared bikes every day, making the sturdy gray Vélib's as prominent as yellow cabs in New York.


The Paris program, a public-private partnership, started with 20,000 bikes parked in 1,500 stations, one roughly every 300 meters. Users swipe their credit card at the station and get the first 30 minutes of their ride free (the fee then gets progressively steeper to discourage riders from hogging the bikes). Bikes can be returned to a slot at any other Vélib' station. Each bike is used a reported average of 10 times a day.

Now let's get on with the story.

My friend Alice was going to meet some friends at La Butte aux Cailles, a trendy little area jampacked with restaurants and bars in the 13th arrondissement. The only headache was that she would have to slip away from the festivities, Cinderella-style, to catch the last subway at 1 a.m.

Not wanting to cut the evening short, she came up with a plan. She'd just grab a Vélib'. There would be no traffic at that time of night, and she calculated that she could pedal home in 15 minutes, well within the 30 minutes of free riding time. That was the plan, anyway. The eve ning started well enough -- old friends reminiscing over good wine. When the time came to say "au revoir," Alice headed toward the nearest Vélib' station.

This being a popular, high-traffic area, a lot of the bicycles were gone, but there were still a couple left and Alice picked one up. It didn't take too long to get home and Alice congratulated herself on carrying out such a brilliant plan. 

But a surprise awaited her. Since Alice doesn't live in a high-traffic area, the Vélib' station near her apartment was full. There were no free spots to leave her bicycle and stop the timer.

Alice hadn't memorized the location of all nearby stations, so she felt that her safest bet to find a spot was to retrace her steps, so to speak. She turned her bike around and started pedaling back. The next station on her way was also full. And the one after and the one after, until Alice, now well over the 30-minute limit, arrived back at the Butte aux Cailles, her starting point.

She returned her Vélib' precisely where she had rented it. Utterly dejected, she paid the machine for this forced tour of southeast Paris. With no other option, she walked all the way home.

Nowadays, this type of "Groundhog Day" scenario is less likely to occur. Trucks are hired to load up bikes and redistribute them among the stations throughout the day. Without this feature, the station at the top of the Sacré-Coeur basilica, which is perched at the top of a steep hill, would always be empty; people use the Vélib's to go down, but few have the stamina to pedal up.

Louie Gilot, a former reporter for the El Paso Times, has a blog about living green on the border, www.lagreenga.com.