“BURN FAT NOT OIL – RIDE A BIKE!” 
These were the words written on my favourite sticker given to me with my very first bike when I was a little girl. Thinking back it is a particularly good and relevant slogan because it subtly and succinctly links cycling with the subjects of health and environmental awareness – two areas which are of increasing importance in the world today. The bike transport trend is taking off across Europe and as many of you know, faberNovel is part of the race!! 
faberNovel’s project for transport company Transdev called ‘AlloCyclo’ is now ‘up and running’ (or riding) in France. On the 15th of December during the Christmas markets, the AlloCyclo-Reflex project (“AlloCyclo” refers to the national system and “Reflex” to the local one) was launched in the city Chalon-sur-Saone to the south east of Paris. It was launched near the city hall with representatives from Transdev present as well as politicians and locals. AlloCyclo-Reflex initially launched 50 bikes and by the end of March this number will be increased to 200.
For those of you that don’t know, AlloCyclo-Reflex is similar but different from JC Decaux’s Velib service in Paris. This is how it works: The bike rental technique employed by AlloCyclo-Reflex is akin to the one used by German Transport Company Deutsche Bahn called Call-A-Bike. It is a system which can be operated simply by using a mobile phone. Initially you call a number or go to a website in order to register. After that, you can call any time you wish to use a bike and you will receive an opening code - simply key it into the display on the bike to release the lock. faberNovel adapted this German transport technology so that it was more flexible and efficient and more suitable for French city networks. There are bike stations throughout the city as with the Velib system but these are much more flexible and can have any number of bikes at a time. In addition, faberNovel has developed a web application for the service and an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology. IVR allows a computer to detect voice and touch-tones keypresses and then combine this with information based upon the phone number which is stored in a database. The technology then processes all this information and is able to provide a relevant answer to the request.
Just to give you a bit of background about this city. Chalon-sur-Saone is situated in the Côte-du-Rhone region of France and is a big countryside city of about 120 000 inhabitants. A bit of trivia is that the city’s aim is to be a ‘city of photography’. There are various large photography houses situated there and every year the city hosts a large 
photographic festival. As a result the transport network decided to designate names which are associated with photography, for example “Zoom” for the bus network, “Declic” for a mobile project and of course “Reflex” for the AlloCyclo project!!
The AlloCyclo-Reflex system has been operating successfully in Chalon-sur-Saone for the past month and usage is expected to increase once the warmer weather begins to set in…
