Yet more on Velibs

The official velib website lets you search a google maps app for stations and click on them to see how many bikes or places they have. Useful, but not as useful as this hack which colours all the stations red, blue green etc. on the map so you can quickly see where the nearest one with a lot of bikes (or a lot of space to park a bike) is.

At lunchtime today my colleagues were discussing Velibs. One of the PhD students has his thesis defence on Thursday, and has to find a way of geting his examiners from the gare du nord to the university, so telling them all to hire velibs was suggested.. this silly conversation then progressed to an excellent idea to solve the problem of some racks running out of velibs while others are full: credit back 50 cents of your abonnement every time you take a bike from a > 90% full rack to a >90% empty rack! People with nothing better to do could zip between racks and clock up a healthy payback - Travailler plus pour gagner plus!