Here’s a map I’ve made of the five crossings in the London Borough of Sutton that are under review.

Download the map data as KML for Google Earth etc.

Councillor Lester Holloway is campaigning to retain the crossing at Collingwood Road / Bushey Road as has been reported in the Sutton Guardian and on his blog.

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.

—

All photos are by Charlotte Gilhooly on Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution licence.

Merton Council are running a consultation called moreMorden until 10 October 2008 on outline proposals for regenerating Morden town centre. What follows is my summary of the main consultation document (PDF) and its supporting fact sheet (PDF). I don’t work for the council, so these are just my words, not my ideas.

Members of the public and local organisations can make their views known via a paper questionnaire (PDF), an online form and unusually, on a moreMorden Facebook group.

Photo of Morden town centre by Charlotte Gilhooly.

—

Morden has a lot of potential and a lot of problems. On the upside, it has the Tube station, good bus connections and is reasonably near to the tram. It has good access to nearby parks. It has the potential to build more housing, improve the number, range and quality of the shops and attract other businesses to the town centre.

On the downside, many of the existing town centre buildings and streets are poor quality, outdated and poorly maintained. While many people pass through Morden centre on the way to other places, few stop to shop or use other leisure or social facilities. Few people live in the town centre, while those that live in the surrounding residential neighbourhoods tend to shop, work and socialise elsewhere. Bigger shops and new businesses don’t want to open in Morden because few people use it at present. At the same time, few people use it at present because it doesn’t offer much. It’s a vicious circle.

The council would like to build more and better shops, office space and housing in the town centre. It expects that if more people lived in the town centre it would make Morden an attractive place for shops and other businesses to come. These new town centre residents would be potential customers and workers for the new shops and businesses. Having more people living in the town centre would also provide the opportunity to build better community, cultural and leisure facilities.

As well as new buildings and facilities, the council would also like to improve the quality of the streets by removing clutter (eg. excessive signage, bollards and railings), using better materials for pavements, proving more trees and greenery and installing more attractive benches, signage, lighting and other “street furniture”. The council would also like to improve facilities for pedestrians and cyclists and in places would like to give them priority over motor traffic.

At the moment, the council has an idea of the general direction for future developments and would like members of the the public and local organisations to outline their priorities and suggest any other ideas which the council may have not considered. This feedback is important as the council wants to design for the real needs of local people, not just what it imagines those needs to be.

The issue of the amount of new building development in the town centre is very important. Once the area plan has been decided, the council will invite private property developers to submit plans for each new building or group of buildings. The council is able to make these property developers pay for improvements to the local area as a condition of giving them planning permission for their proposed buildings. The more building the council allows, the more money it will get from the property developers to pay for general street improvements and other facilities to benefit local people. (This process is called “planning obligation” or a “Section 106 agreement“.)

Therefore, the council is asking people both what kinds of facilities they would like locally and how much new building they are happy to see in Morden town centre to pay for those facilities.