If you’ve ever wanted to whistle up a pair of wheels while walking around London, now you can. Friday’s launch of the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme puts 6000 short-hire bikes at 300 docking stations within a few hundred metres of any point in the centre of the city. No matter where you are, you shouldn’t be more than a few minutes’ walk from a hire bike.
The project wisely keeps the bikes on a very short leash, charging a small flat access or membership fee and a progressively more expensive price for the time you’ve got a bike. The first half hour is free, so if you’re just hopping from A to B you can often ride without paying usage charges at all. Access costs £1 a day if you pay daily down to as little as 12p a day if you buy yearly membership. The aim is to keep the bikes coming back to the docking stations to maximise availability for riders and minimise the chances of vandalism and theft.
The bikes don’t come with locks. While some riders see this as an inconvenience — you could always carry your own — the message is don’t lock it, dock it. Given the rate of theft of bikes in central London it’s far safer in the docking station than bolted to a lamppost, no matter how good you think your lock is. If a bike gets stolen while in your charge, you’ll pick up the bill.
Along with the bikes, TfL has released some of the data behind the project, giving independent software developers the chance to build their own smartphone apps and maps. You can use these to locate the nearest docking stations and there’s even realtime data via my own Boris Bikes API so you can see whether a station has bikes available or spaces left for you to dock. It’s great that developers have risen to the challenge and Londoners have a range of great apps across various platforms to choose from. If you want to talk about the scheme there’s also an independent web forum for cycle hire users.
It isn’t all happiness and joy. Barclays’ branding of the scheme is crass and overbearing, not least given that banks and bankers don’t ride high in many Londoners’ affections. But given their £25 million contribution towards the project Barclays were always going to want a prominent role in return their money. If it weren’t for the money talking we might still be walking.
The first day saw a few glitches with overtightened brakes leading to stiff wheels, crashes on the supporting website and problems docking the bikes for a few. TfL responded sensibly by waiving everyone’s usage charges for the day — if your bike’s not docked you’re still being billed, so watch for the green light before you leave it. But overall the experience has been positive, with thousands of journeys being taken without incident and even a healthy contingent of cycle hire bikes on Friday evening’s Critical Mass ride.
Even for non-cyclists, the cycle hire scheme has brought a spinoff benefit for everyone by putting the excellent clear Legible London maps on the monolith at every docking station, allowing walkers to find their way around far more easily than before.
Hopefully the future will bring an expansion of the scheme further out of the centre with more docking stations and bikes over a wider area, but for now the ability to pick up a bike and whizz around a park or from the West End to the City without braving the buses or the Tube is a delightful and joyous privilege.
While many tip Boris Johnson as a future Tory leader and prime minister, whether he keels over tomorrow or makes it to the very top, I suspect his finest legacy will always be that London’s bikes are Boris Bikes – a spontaneous and popular rebranding that no amount of sponsorship money is going to reverse.
What a wonderful mid-summer gift to the city.
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All photos are by Charlotte Gilhooly on Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution licence.
Tags: Barclays Cycle Hire, Boris Johnson, cycling, Legible London, london
Excellent article Adrian. I agree 100%, it’s a fantastic service that I’m quickly falling in love with.
Thanks for mentioning my http://www.borisbikes.com. You might want to post a link to your blog entry on my forums when you get a chance.
Sadly I am having a terrbke experience with the computer glitches. I understand the problems and glit he’s but having not recorded a docking on the first day I have had at least 8 calls to the Call Centre staff trying to sort out the problem. And not one could see on their system that I had logged the problem before. Eventually they fiund the rogue bike and released my account suspension only to suspend me again this morning. It’s enough to try the patience of a saint.
Nice article.
I really want this scheme to succeed. The billing and docking glitches will quickly get fixed and forgotten about, but there’s a longer-term problem that won’t go away. It’s illustrated by your first picture. I have no idea where it was taken, but I’m willing to bet that it’s on a one-way street with no cycle contraflow. No effort has been made to make central London streets safer for cyclists. The main roads are very congested and with few exceptions have no cycle facilities. The bus lanes are full of taxis, and what should be safe, quiet back streets are made dangerous by taxis and other traffic rat-running to avoid the main-road congestion. Research shows the main reason people don’t cycle is safety/traffic fears, so until the roads are made a lot more cycle-friendly, the scheme won’t reach its full potential. Maybe another bank can be persuaded to shell out another £25M to fix the streets?
Hi JW,
These things are always chicken-and-egg. By setting up the cycle hire scheme they’re changing the amount and nature of the demand for cycling. That can only be good for all cyclists in the long term and I certainly hope that street-level improvements will get the priority they deserve — for pedestrians, too.