You know about that charming European idea of putting bikes out on the street for anybody to use, reducing the amount of automobile traffic and encouraging the citizens to get some exercise as they go about their business? Free city bikes in some places, I've heard (Amsterdam?), bikes for hire linked to your Metro subscription in Paris. The contract between the city of Paris and J-C Decaux, the company that builds bus shelters and public toilets, must have assumed that the Velib' program would incur some losses due to theft and vandalism, but today's Le Monde reports eight thousand bikes stolen from the system and sixteen thousand vandalized. That sounds like a lot to me.

Maybe there were eight thousand people who needed a bike and couldn't afford to pay for one: petty crime is, like other economic activities, subject to a rational calculus. But destruction? Le Monde figures that these bikes are serving as symbolic scapegoats. “Velib', the bobo fetish,” they call it. Maybe those ranks of cheery exercise machines, so unobjectionable to me, appear as an aggressive expression of low-carbon-footprint moralism to other people. Think of the resentments stirred up by the mention of Brie, Volvos or arugala in America. I bet the symbolism of the bicycle, and the reasons for its apparently irrational destruction, would repay investigation.