As Paris marks this week the first anniversary of the appearance of public bicycles on its streets, other cities are watching ever more closely a hugely successful experiment in self-service public transport.

Since Bertrand Delanoe, the city’s Mayor, took the gamble of putting 16,000 vélibs, short for vélo liberté, or bike freedom, at the disposal of Parisians, the stately grey machines have been taken out for a spin a total of 27 million times. To the pleasure of the left-wing council and the frustration of drivers, cycle traffic has jumped by 70 per cent as Parisians take advantage of the almost-free service.

But as Boris Johnson, an regular cyclist, ponders a similar scheme for London, he may well consider the downside. Paris’s vélibs are used for 120,000 trips a day, each one averaging 22 minutes. However, the pedal boom has been attended by a jump in cycle deaths and injuries. Three vélib riders have been crushed under the wheels of heavy vehicles and about 70 have been injured since January this year. After a 35-year-old violinist was killed by a municipal bus in a bus lane in May, her father called on the Mayor to suspend the vélib scheme.

The authorities are blaming the cyclists as well as the city’s notoriously aggressive drivers, although the overall accident rate has declined by 20 per cent. Many accidents involve inexperienced riders or careless tourists.

Police are handing out football-style yellow cards this week to cyclists, drivers and pedestrians who commit minor but potentially dangerous offences. Last year 7,000 fines were issued to cyclists, double the previous year. Yet few riders of the vélibs bother to wear helmets or high-visibility attire and more than half do not stop at red lights.

The bikes, which are free for the first 30 minutes and are available from 1,200 high-tech docking zones, have proven more vulnerable than expected to thefts and vandalism and less robust than they were supposed to be.

JCDecaux, the firm which operates the bicycles in return for concessions in display advertising, acknowledges that it found the scheme tougher than it had expected. About 3,000 of the €400 (£320) bikes have been vandalised or stolen, it said. Hundreds have vanished, and Parisians are sighting them in Romania, Casablanca and more exotic spots in Africa. Last month Le Parisien published a picture of a boy showing off his vélib in a Romanian village. Rumours fly that port customs officers are discovering containers loaded with vélibs. Albert Asseraf, the strategy director at Decaux, said that London should consider a few rules for the scheme: “Install a dense network with docking stations every 350 metres; keep the hire cost minimal; base it on credit [payment] cards, and make sure the maintenance system is up to scratch.” A spokesman for Mr Johnson said yesterday that the Mayor “has already had very productive discussions with Transport for London regarding plans to create a bicycle hire scheme in London, along the lines of the hugely popular vélib scheme in Paris.”

Vélo city

- Paris’s vélib scheme is by far the biggest in the world. The total number of bikes will reach 20,000 by the end of the year.

- 1,500 bikes are repaired every day, most at the docking stations.

- The fee system is designed to encourage short hires. A day ticket costs €1 (80p), a weekly one €5, an annual one €29. The first half-hour is free, with an additional cost of €1 per half hour.

- The city of Paris has made about €30 million profit in the first year but JCDecaux, the firm that supplies the bikes, is reported to have spent millions over budget because of greater than expected wear and tear, theft and vandalism.

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