The process began as early as 2009, amid Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s expansion of bike lanes, as city officials wondered if a bike-share system might also suit the streets. The administration compiled a report studying programs from five cities — Barcelona, Montreal, Paris, Toulouse and Washington — weighing how characteristics of each might translate in New York.

Paris seemed immediately like the best comparison, given its size, tourism and widely used mass transit network. The population density of New York’s busiest hubs, like Manhattan and western Brooklyn, was virtually identical to Paris’s, officials noted.

But despite the popularity of the program, which includes 24,000 bikes — quadruple the size of New York’s initial system — Paris also supplied crucial lessons in what not to do.

In the early days of the rental system, known as Vélib’, an estimated 80 percent of the program’s original bikes were stolen or damaged, often landing on the black markets of Eastern Europe and North Africa. The city later reinforced the bikes’ chains and baskets and added better theft protection, but vandalism “is still a problem,” said Albert Asséraf, vice president of strategy, research and marketing at JCDecaux, which oversees the program in Paris.

With this in mind, New York’s bikes will be locked into stations at the steering port, rather than on the side of the bike frame — the configuration that has allowed Parisian thieves to “use the bike as a lever” to crack it out of the lock, Mr. Orcutt said.