Modes of Transportation

The next category on Jeopardy tonight is Modes of Transportation!  We've been pretty impressed by all the creative ways the Europeans have come up with to get from point A to point B.  Going clockwise, you will see the innovative modes of travel starting with 1) the Segway, 2) a canopy bicycle rickshaw, 3) a six person bicycle that all help to peddle but only one person steers, 4) a "moving ad" bicycle and 5) my personal favorite, the city rent-a-bike!  This last one is an amazingly brilliant setup they have been experimenting with in Berlin, Paris and now London.  Around Paris there are about 600 stations and over 20,000 bicycles available for use.  How it works is you set up an account online and then simply go to a bike station, punch in your credit card number and it releases the bike from it's lock.  You are then free to ride it anywhere in the city and it doesn't matter which station you return it to, even if it's all the way on the opposite side of the city.  It is also free for the first 29 minutes and you are only charged something like 30 cents a minute after that time.  Genius!    Apparently, in the past when metro/bus workers have gone on strike, it stranded people, so they decided to give the communal bike experiment a whirl.  The next time a strike happened our professor said they recorded over 100,000 people a day using the bikes to get around the city!  They also say it will help with things like obesity, which is hilarious because I don't think we've seen more than 10 fat people here...we think they were from the states. ;)  I am totally motivated to buy a bike when we get home and ride it all over town, but we'll see how into that I actually am when we return to 110 degree weather. Ugh!