posted by admin on Jul 30

London is shaping up for a greener future after the first day of its latest ‘Green Scheme’.

The idea is that many other European cities are bicycle friendly, and thousands of people use bikes all the time when in town – and having stood outside of Amsterdam Train Station on a week day, I have seen the sheer numbers involved!

So, London have taken the initiative and offered a ‘bicycle hire’ scheme to get people on to 2 wheels without the expense of buying a bike outright and worrying about storing your own bike in small flats on chained to fences overnight!

The Scheme:
At the moment you have to sign up to the scheme in advance for this - so you can’t just put a £1 in the meter like a shopping trolley and ride off!  You pay for access to all the bikes for a 24 hour period, and then pay your time-based hire charges on top.

Once signed with the scheme, the organisers (Transport for London and operator Serco) send you out a key (for £3) which will allow you to unlock any of the bikes on the street – currently there are 500 available cycles, stored at 315 docking stations across the city – including places like 32 docking stations in Westminster, 14 in Camden and many across the Royal Parks.

Currently you control your account online, and are charged for using the bike (up to £1 a day) and then the period of time you use the bike for – basically, when you release a bike using your key, your account gets debited as per the charges you can read online.  The first 30 minutes of a ride are always free but you can be charged up to £50 for a full 24 hour period (and a further £150 if you keep it longer than that!).

So if you buy a years membership at the current price of £45, and plan to ride for less than 30 minutes at a time (which is free), you will be paying around 12p a day to ride to and from work every day. 

For casual riders, they are hoping to allow people to pay for bikes at paypoints in the future – (at £1 to use the bikes during a 24 hour period and then hire charge on top) but they are starting with accounts only at the moment – and so far over 12,000 people have signed up!

The Benefits:
You can arrive in London on the train and then just hop on a bike instead of waiting for buses or going underground with everyone else!  You could cut your journey times massively in the rush hour!  When you arrive at the docking station closest to your workplace, you just park it up and leave it there.  No chaining up - no worries!

Alternatively, you could use the bikes for a day-trip to the city, and casually ride around back streets, through Hyde Park, out to Kew Gardens or London Zoo.  You just dock the bike whenever you have finished and head off home.

You can of course just hop on and off whenever you want and use as many bikes as you want through the day – so park up after arriving at your destination – maybe a museum, then after that you can hop on another bike and stop somewhere for lunch, then hop on another bike to go to a West End Show in the evening!  As long as you dock each bike securely in the docking station – that is your hire period over with, and someone else can hire the bike while you are feasting on some gourmet food or singing along to Dirty Dancing!

The Problems:
Well, as you may have calculated – 500 bikes: 12,000 people.  Let’s hope they all don’t want to ride at the same time!

Needless to say, there will always be teething problems when a new scheme starts up – and the main one will be that the operators don’t know when people will be using the bikes – and for how long, so they need to see what happens over the first few weeks.

So, there is a possibility of there not being a bike at the docking station closest to you when you arrive!  And the possibility of there being no free docking station for you to drop of your bike into after use!

There are maps showing the closest alternative docking stations and up to 15 ‘free’ minutes to cycle to it – but that could mean up to 45 minutes before you are back where you started (15 minutes to cycle there and 30 minutes to walk back to where you wanted to be!).

There will be staff at most of the main docking station over this first week, but other than that you are on your own, so if you card doesn’t work, your bike is faulty or you travel to a second docking station to find it full or empty too – you might need to make a call.

The Result:
I think that this could be a great scheme if they keep it as members only – as if they start letting anyone hire the bikes without signing up first – you will get problems.  Just as people make up fake names and addresses to get freebies, I think those same people will damage these bikes (activists have already stuck stickers over some of the bikes) or not return them (like the 4 shopping trolleys in my local park!).

However, the green potential is fantastic – and I would love to see big cities more pedestrian and cycle friendly. I’m fed up of having to walk around miles of metal barricades to cross a road, or standing in the rain waiting for the traffic lights to change, or even risk my life cycling among lorries and coaches in tiny streets. 

People and bikes should get the straight routes and priority lights – ad I hope that this is a step in that direction!