HOW TO RENT A BIKE (VELIB) IN PARIS - We'll walk you through step-by-step!

Today we get to talk about one of my favorite subjects, and that is cycling in Paris. Not Tour de France cycling, tourist cycling, or commuter cycling as we call it. So this is the Paris Velop system, it is the public bike share system. You'll notice you see a whole bunch of green, but there are some blues sprinkled in here as well. Blue signifies electric, so you get that nice little power assist if you're trying to climb up to Montmartre and see Sacré-Cœur. They have these stationed all throughout the city. There's an app that you can get on the phone called Vélib, which is vélo and libre, so bike free in French, combined. And with the app, it will show you where all the stations are, how many manual bikes, how many electric bikes, and how many parking spots are available, because obviously you need a place to park the bike once you're done with your ride. There are a few things to know, though, before checking out a Vélib. When you're walking up to it, these things are notorious for being broken, having things wrong with them. Before you even start to check out a bike, you have to do what I call the three-step assessment. I think it's three. Maybe it's four. We'll find out in a second. Let's try it out. First thing, as you're walking up to it, you want to take a look at the chain. It's usually pretty guarded by this, but you can see if the chain is dangling or not. I can see that this one is good and it's working. The second thing is, this is the universal symbol for bike broken. Someone was riding this bike before. There was something that was not working with it. It could have been the brakes, the chain, the tire, anything. If that's the case, when you park it, you turn the seat around and lock it back in, and people know, don't check that one out later. Technically, this one is not broken. It's the one I rode here, and I know it works. I did that so it would still be here while we were filming. All you do is lift this, and then you can adjust the seat. Sometimes, they're stuck and you have to really wiggle them and then pull it up as high, and then lock it on down. The first step was to check for the chain. Second step, squeeze the brakes. Make sure the brakes work. A lot of times, the cables have been cut and there's nothing working there. Second step is lift up the back of the bike like this, and then push the pedal. You'll be able to feel if the gears are locked up or if there's something wrong with it. If all that checks out, then you push the green button. The green check. Once you press the green check, you should have a screen like this. It means it's ready to accept your code, your card. This is an electric bike because it's blue. See the battery is full power, so this one is good to go. If we were to look at a manual one just over here, it's the same exact principle. When it says this, a lot of times, it means it was not locked up properly. No, it just switched to that. There's something mechanical wrong with this. You cannot check this one out. You would just go to the next one, and the next one, and sometimes. I've gone through five bikes before I found one that works, so while it's a great system in theory, in practice, it can be a love-hate relationship. So, oh, fuck. Just as we were about to talk about the bird shit, I think I just dodged a bomb, quite literally. Our Parisian friends, they are the rats with wings in Paris. Are you not happy about that? This is potentially the worst station to rent a Velib from. Everyone talks about the dog shit in Paris, but this station is all about the pigeon poop. We chose it because there's always a lot of bikes, so for the symmetry of the video, we figured this one would work, and you can see that my bike is nice and clean because it came from a different station, so here you go. All right, so now we're going to go ahead and show you how to get one. Each stand should have a digital kiosk like this. You have your language selection right there, so we're going to choose English. If you want information on how to do it, here's all of that there, but hire a Velib. You have two options. There's the découvert and the séjour, so discover and journey. First one is five euro per person. It gives you a pass valid for 24 hours, allows you to take up to five Velib at one time, or a pass for seven days that allows you to take five Velib at one time, so if we were to do this one, it's valid for 24 hours versus the other one that was seven days, so here you see the green to notate the manual bike versus the blue for electric. First 30 minutes are free, so you paid your five euro for the day. You can go 30 minutes for free. You can get almost anywhere in Paris, whether it's by metro or by bike, in 30 minutes, so what a lot of people do is station hop. They'll ride. The little electronic display we showed you on the bike actually has a timer that's counting down the entire time or counting up as it were, so as you see, you're getting close to 30 minutes. You can find the station, dock it, and then recheck it out, and your 30 minutes restarts. Between 30 and 60 minutes will be one euro for the manual, and then for the electric, your first 30 minutes is one euro, 30 to 60 minutes is two euro. To compare, a metro ticket is about a euro ninety right now, and if you buy a ticket on the bus, it's two euro, so it's almost the same amount, but you can kind of go where you want at your own pace and see a lot more. Obviously, plus 60 minutes, one euro, two euro, 30 minutes, okay? So from there, you hit subscribe. This offer lets you hire several bikes with the same ticket, so if you're traveling with your significant other, with family, this is a great, easy way to do it. We just need one, so we do not have a promotion code, so we will go payment pre-authorization, so it's saying for one valid, it's going to put a 300 euro hold on my card, if I'm getting between two and five euro valid, it's going to hold 600 euro as a damaged deposit on there. So I acknowledge that I've read all of this, yes, that's great, we're going to accept, you then enter your contact information, confirm, your PIN unless you lock your two, the PIN you won't forget. We will choose one, two, oh, no, one's there, one, two, no, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, voila. Please follow the payment pre-authorization instructions on the terminal to complete your purchase. Okay, 300 euro, insert your card, wow, I feel like I'm buying a bike. So rather than using a debit card, obviously I went ahead and used a credit card that's got a larger balance, so that way I don't have any bank issues while I'm traveling. Okay, so I am going to do a screenshot of this with my phone, so that way I always have this code, also printed a ticket down here as my access code, plus all the instructions in English on how to use the bike. Okay, so there's also the app that you're going to want to download, this is something you can do at home before you travel to France, so Vélib, square with the yellow circle, app officiel, I already have it downloaded, so once you open it, now you will need your cellular or Wi-Fi, so that way you have location services and it knows where you are, and then as you zoom out, you can tap on the green, that tells me there are 29 manual bikes, the blue, there are 5, and 21 parking spots. If I zoom out a little more, I see all the dots, if I zoom in closer, then it will start to appear how many bikes are available at each station. So this gives you an idea, this circle in the center is Paris, so that's all the stations they have just within the city center. So if we wanted to ride from here to the Eiffel Tower, I see I can dock it there and walk across, I can dock it there, there, there, and I zoomed in, there's 3 bikes, 2 bikes, so that's how the app works, just hit that and it brings you back to your current location. Alright, so we have our code now, we're going to go ahead and see how this works. We hit the green check, we will start putting in the code, 1, 1, 5, 5, 3, 1, 3, 7, enter, now it's the pin because it's got the key code, 1, 2, 3, 4, green, checkmark, et voila, go! So now you should just pull it straight back out, and then for the electric Velib, there's a fourth check that you should do before going off, and that is to make sure that the motor works. So if you look on the keypad here, you see these bars, there are 2 not filled, so it's on power setting 1, if you press the 2, the pluses indicate where you should press, that's 2 bars of power, you press 3, that's max power right there, ok? So the test that you want to do is as soon as you get on it, press 3, and start to take off, once you press 3, you're at full power, just start, and it really only takes 1 or 2 pedal pushes, and you'll feel the motor kick in or not. If you feel that it's extremely hard to push, then the motor's not working, you should just pack it up and try to check out a new one, you'll feel it kind of get up and go, and that means it's working. One other thing that we didn't talk about is all the bikes, whether they're manual or electric, do have 3 gears, and they're just easily controlled right here by a little twister. So, 3 is the hardest, 2 medium, 1 is the easiest. So when you get to Montmartre and you're trying to go up the hill, you're likely going to want 1, or you're going to want an electric, or just put the bikes up and get an Uber. Finally, another thing that these have are a pouch for the cell phone. One way to tell that I've, or one way I've learned to tell if it's going to be a good bike or not is if this is already set here. What this tells me, there's a good chance a guy that works for Uber Eats used this, and those guys only use bikes that work really well, and they also know how to rig this up to where it's in this position. Normally, this is not here like this. Normally, it would just be loose like this. So let's say you just went to the market and have a bunch of groceries, put your bag in here, you can then use the elastic, whoops, will come over the front and lock under right there, and act as a way to secure your groceries, right? Otherwise, it's really secure. You can take it, run this through, drop your phone pouch in there, set your maps and your destination, and you have navigation on the bike. Now, we're riding on the famous Rue de Rivoli. Excuse the bumps, but that is the road that we're on. So this is actually part of the Tour de France route. So once a year, this route is filled with the top, fastest cyclists in the world who are averaging 35, 40 miles an hour, and they do this loop eight times. So for me, this road is a very special place in my heart. For most people visiting Paris, they'll be more interested in the many fashion shops they have along here, as well as the famed hot chocolate place, Angelina. So that's where we'll be stopping in a little while. So while you're out and about, if you decide you want to make a pit stop and do a little bit of shopping, it's entirely possible to do that without going back to a docking station. The process is the same for the electric or the manual bikes. Once you're stopped, press the green check box, and it will say pause. At this point, you would enter in your code, or your PIN in this case, which as you remember was 1234. Check. We'll show this, and eventually, there it goes. A bolt has engaged to prevent the steering wheel from moving, and no one else can take the bike. So when it's time for you to leave again, it's the same exact process. Press your check mark. Enter in your code again. Check mark one more time. Et voila.