Eighteen months ago Paris announced that they were going to be initiating a bike-sharing program that would see 15,000 specially designed bikes made available on the streets of the city for people to use freely. Since that time the bikes have been used 42 million times, but almost all of the original vandal proof bikes have had to be replaced.

It appears that a lot of the people using the bikes like to abuse or destroy them as some of the bikes have been found hanging from lampposts, dumped in the Seine River, smashed and burned. Apparently there are even videos online of people treating them as BMX bikes as they ride them down stairs.

The thing that makes me just shake my head is that the proponents of programs like this didn’t think this kind of thing would happen in the first place. Sure they might have like to believe that only a small portion of the bikes would be treated in this manner but I hate to break it to them – people can be assholes … especially with stuff that they have no investment in. So when I read something like what Kimberley D. Mok wrote on Treehugger – “come on people, let’s be a little more responsible here” – can’t believe people are really that naive.

As nice as it might be to believe that people are generally good the reality is that there is a large portion of our society; across all age spectrums, who love nothing better than being malicious and causing as much damage as they can. To ignore this common social attitude when designing programs like the bike-sharing one in Paris is just stupid.

[picture courtesy of Sybil Star on Flickr]