Dad: Paris has a public transit bike program that we were hoping to try out. Google "Paris Velib" for details. The bikes lock onto special racks located throughout the city, especially near Metro stations. To use the bikes you can purchase a magnetic stripe card for limited term use, you can get a smart card for the yearly rate, or you can link the deposit for the bike to your Metro/bus card. It appears to be a useful and very popular system, but it wouldn't work for us.
Our only option was to use our credit card or atm card to pay the deposit and get cards for the bikes. As it turns out, the machines only accept bank cards with chips in them which are not used in North America. We also ran into one station semi-permanently displaying the Windows start-up screen.
Most conspicuously, you don't see high-end bikes or even low-end road bikes in Paris. The style is upright with traditional French very shallow frame geometry. We didn't find a bike shop here. It would be interesting to find out how they keep all these old bikes going. I suspect they must have fabulous piles of old three-speed parts in dark basements.
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