Status-Q

Michael and I were in Paris in July, just a few days after the launch of the Velib’ scheme (Vélo Liberation) – which provided bicycles for public rental at hundreds of ‘stations’ around the capital. We didn’t get a chance to try one, though I’ve used a similar facility in Copenhagen before. The Paris scheme works partly because it was funded and managed by JCDecaux in exchange for control of large amounts of advertising space, and partly because users need to provide a credit card-based €150 deposit to be able to hire one.

Anyway, apparently it’s been a huge success, with 10,000 bikes deployed and people using them for 100,000 journeys per day.

Ken Livingston, are you listening?

There’s more about the scheme here and here, and many other successful operations are running in other cities around Europe.

Ten years ago in Cambridge, of course, we had the Green Bike Scheme, which has passed into local legend – almost into mythology, because even if you lived in the city at the time you might have missed it. 300 unclaimed bicycles from the police pound were painted green and deposited at special stands around the town with the idea that people would just pick them up at one place and drop them off at another. Well, they got the first half right. All of them were stolen within the first day or two. I lived in the centre of Cambridge at the time and never even saw a Green Bike, let alone rode one. The special stands were quietly removed a little while later.

Perhaps, though, in some way, we played our part in the success of such schemes in other parts of the continent, by illustrating how not to do it…

It’s always a bit embarrassing to discover that a friend has been involved in a really good initiative and you didn’t know about it until months later. I was even invited to the launch, but was away at the time.

So I’ve just discovered (sorry, Vicky!) the Shape Walks guides to Cambridge, created by Stride Design and Shape East, and in particular the audio guides, which you can download into your iPod or phone and then stroll (or stride) around the town with a very nicely-produced commentary on your surroundings – especially if you’re interested in architecture.

If you’re feeling a bit less energetic, you can click on their online map and hear the tour commentary through your browser while sitting at home in an armchair.

I went looking to see if Stride had done this for any other towns and found just one more – amazingly, for me, it’s for Ware, in Hertfordshire, where I grew up, and which I now discover I knew very little about despite living there for 15 years.

These are very good; every town council or tourist information office should commission one.

As a slight variation on this theme, a couple of winters ago I found another good way to explore a new place…

John has a lovely post on his blog about Karen Spärck Jones, who died on Wednesday.

She was a good friend. We had a couple of arguments – no, not arguments, debates – which we both enjoyed greatly. She was right more often than I was; sometimes I knew this from the start but it was fun playing devil’s advocate with her.

Some loved her, some admired her, some found her infuriating. But whatever your viewpoint, the world is a duller place for her passing. And that’s not a bad epitaph for anybody.

Somebody going by the pseudonym of ‘Neorelix’ has started a nice blog of Cambridge-related photos.
Thanks to Heidi Tempest for the link.

When I was playing with in-car systems at the AT&T Labs, we always wanted to do maps which were coloured according to the time it took you to get to a certain location, or distorted to show time rather than distance. We never got around to it, sadly. Fortunately, Chris Lightfoot and Tom Steinberg did.

They have all sorts of nice variations on the theme, too. The fact that much of it is based around Cambridge makes it particularly interesting for me.

Imagine a collaborative project where everybody is feeding their road speed into a central database and you can get this sort of data in real time, centred on your location, wherever you are. That would be a fun project for somebody…

And has anybody done this for the airlines, I wonder?

Thanks to John for the link.

Any readers in the Cambridge area will appreciate this useful page put together by Samuel Lipoff.

Thanks, Samuel – your efforts much appreciated!