Hire Bike Scheme: First day full report

We had a full day of wheeling round London on the new hire bikes yesterday. Our second impressions are much as our first: there are many teething troubles, some urgent but straightforward to fix, others more challenging and long-term. But we're still very positive about the way the hire bikes will add to the capital's cycling culture.

First, the urgent but straightforward-to-fix. There are too many bikes with overtightened brakes whose rear wheels hardly go round - about half of them, I'd guess. Some stands had few, or no, bikes with acceptably smooth rear wheels. This must be addressed over the weekend, or else a large proportion of the bikes aren't usable.

Second, and potentially more challenging, is the problem of cycle flows. During the afternoon, every docking station we saw had both bikes and docking stations available.

But in the evening rush hour it was different. Round Elephant and Castle, presumably because of commuter flows outwards, the docking stations were empty of bikes. We had a quarter-mile jog from this one, at Hampton St, to the next station with available bikes. (At least the information screens telling you where to find the nearest available bikes were mostly working.)


Conversely, the magnet-stations around the South Bank were all full. This is more serious. If you can't dock your bike you can ask for extra free time somehow (I never quite found out how in my rush to redock) and cycle to the next station with free docks. This wasn't easy at the South Bank last night, where the six nearest alternative docking stations offered a total of one free space, which had gone by the time I got there.

It was all rather exciting; I've always wanted to go orienteering. I found a vacant space near London Bridge eventually, almost a mile away, but it meant a long jog back to my intended destination, and that did rather defeat the point of hire bikes.


(Yes, this full docking station in the picture is in front of the Gherkin, not the South Bank. I didn't have my camera during my South Bank exercises, and anyway the pictures would have been too blurred.)

This, we expect, will be sorted out eventually. It's trickier than taking a spanner to a few thousand back brakes, though. The transfer-trailer wagons that scoop up spare bikes and ferry them back to empty docking stations will be very busy in the coming weeks as TfL work out how the flow patterns work. We pioneers are also guinea pigs, and there could be a few more unscheduled jogging sessions for some of us.

I didn't know the hire bikes were going to keep me so fit.

A few other niggles too: some docking stations weren't letting you take bikes out (St Paul's); some screens weren't working (Godliman St); sometimes the docking post didn't register your bike as docked even when you couldn't get it out again.

But it's remarkable that the scheme is working to any extent, given the Boris-induced schedule it's been put together to. We're pleased to have it working, even if it is only eighty per cent right at the moment.

And all those provisos apart... we still had a great time shuttling round between all that London stuff: free outdoor concerts, cafes, museums, sights, and surprise table tennis at the Barbican. There was a camaraderie among the first-day pioneers, and lots of smiling double-takes from passers-by.


We're convinced the scheme will bring a new dimension to exploring and commuting round London. Several times yesterday we were shouted at by blokes in vans and taxis - not telling us to get off the effing road, as usual, but giving us thumbs-up and saying whoa, nice bike, how do I take one out?

And every docking station had curious and bemused groups of tourists and locals poking about the stands and prodding the screens, asking us what was going on and then nodding thoughtfully.

Problems? Yes, lots. Inevitably. But we still think it's a very promising start.

Sign on for the Bike Hire Scheme today... if the system will let you

From today, you can sign up to be a keyholder for the London Cycle Hire Scheme, which starts on 30 July. For the first few weeks only keyholders will be able to use the bikes. After that it goes live to casual users.

Signing up to be a keyholder costs three quid, and enables you to access the hire bikes a day or a week at a time. They key is sent to you in the post.

We're very enthusiastic about the cycle hire scheme, and were up early this morning to sign up.


Apart from the sort of irritations put in by dozy techie people - such as your address being forced to have three lines in, so that the second two of mine are 'London, London' - the process is quick and easy.

You simply fill in a few forms, give your credit card details, and... oh. How do I contact the 'system adminstrator'?

Testing, testing: Hire bike docking stations installed

The first five docking stations for the London Hire Bike Scheme have been installed, and were being tested this morning by the techies from installation company Serco.

The five stations are all in Southwark, not far from Tate Modern.


West to east, they're on Stamford St, in front of Kings College; the junction of Stamford and Rennie St (top three pics); Southwark St, Bankside; Union St, opposite Ewer St; and Southwark St opposite Borough Market (fourth pic).

The most complete docking station is the Bankside one: some of the others still have fencing round the terminal posts.


The docking posts are all up, shiny and new. The hire terminals themselves won't be turned on to the public until the scheme goes live on 30 July, but we gatecrashed the enthusiastic and friendly Serco party.

We surreptitiously became possibly the first civilians to use the touch-screen technology. Until we were asked, politely, if we wouldn't mind stopping, because, er, it's crashing the system.


Enticingly, the screens suggest that the hire points will operate in a variety of languages - German, Spanish, French and Italian straight off, as well (eventually) as Arabic, Bengali, Mandarin, Hindi, Gujarati, Greek, Polish, Punjabi, Turkish, Tamil, Urdu and Vietnamese.

There have been 506 planning applications for docking stations so far, reports the Planning Blog. Of those, only 404 have so far been approved, with 78 withdrawn or refused.

A YouTube animated video has just gone up explaining how the scheme will work.


So, nip along to north Southwark and get a glimpse of what's to come this summer. We think it's good news in anyone's language.

Hire education: Cycle scheme roadshows get going

The first of several dozen London Cycle Hire Scheme roadshows was in a hot and sunny London Fields on Saturday. The roadshows display a hire bike for you to sit on (though not actually ride around), information boards and videos, and examples of the street furniture and signage that will decorate the docking stations.

You can also pick up very handy free docking station maps, something that doesn't seem to have it to the TfL Hire Scheme web pages yet.



Forthcoming roadshows, from 19 June to the end of September, will visit many of the busiest parts of London (Leicester Square, Hyde Park etc) and some of the quietest (the Emirates Stadium, for instance).

The bikes are generously-saddled three-speed jobs with the manoeuvrability of a washing machine, but they seem sturdy and easy enough. The saddle range looks just about OK, roughly catering for anyone between five foot and about six-four; or in metric, 150-195cm; or in tourist, Japanese girl to Dutch bloke.

Some worry about the safety aspects, complaining about lack of helmets. But it's impractical to issue helmets to everyone at risk. How could you provide them for all those pedestrians anyway, in the path of an inattentive tourist riding a wheeled anvil?


If you live in Southwark or Lambeth and want to try out a hire bike before the scheme starts on 30 July, you can do so if you sign up for free or subsidised cycle training, reports the SE1 website. We're strongly in favour of the bike hire scheme and are very pleased with what we've seen so far. So I'll be right in the queue - anyway, I could do to work on my biceps.

My art belongs to Glasgow: Free hire bikes coming on trust

Exciting news from Glasgow, where 50 white bikes will be left out around the city for the public to use for free from 16 April to 3 May.

It's an art event called the White Bike Plan, and organisers say they hope karma will prove effective at punishing anyone who nicks one of the bikes.

Theft and vandalism has plagued similarly trusting schemes in the past, most notoriously in 1960s Amsterdam (right), when most of them ended up chucked in canals, stolen, or smoked.


Well, trust is a wonderful and precious thing. Too precious to waste on people, if you ask me.

After all, look what happened to this bike (right) we spotted at East Midlands Parkway station this weekend. It had only been shackled up by the carrier rack, so the thief merely had to undo the bolts to get at the bike.

It would have a time-consuming, though not unpleasant, task. Simply cutting through the cheap cable lock would have been quicker. But as anyone knows who's waited for a train at the desolate and remote station, any way to fill in time is welcome.

Let's hope that karma catches up with the thief. A karma with two bottles of Buckfast inside it.

More bike lane mental blocks

Perhaps enthused by yesterday's post on the unveiling of a new map of London Bike Hire Scheme stations, one reader of this blog went out to inspect the progress of the one by Lambeth North station on Baylis Road. This is what he found.


Charlie writes (and snaps): "I can't help but feel that the car with its Highway Maintenance banner that is parked in the cycle lane protected by a plastic bollard may be something to do with the construction team adjacent who are hard at work on... installing the cycle hire station.

"Luckily there was an emergency telephone number on the site fencing so Serco, who are running the cycle hire scheme, were informed of the obstruction and hopefully managed to remove the offending vehicle.


"Meanwhile it would appear that pavement cycling is being encouraged on the London Cycle Network 3 where, despite quite prominent on road signage to the contrary, someone has managed to inadvertently block the entire width of Cornwall Road with Heras fencing."

Hire-bike map unveiled. Now what about loos?

London's bike hire scheme will be rolling out this summer, and someone's knocked up an Open Street map with all the confirmed docking locations.

Such maps have been available for individual boroughs on council websites, but this - on the website of a company that's putting together a hire-bike-finding iPhone app - is perhaps the first publicly available to show all of them in one.

We're very pro the bike hire scheme, having seen it work with varying effectiveness in other major international cities such as Paris, Krakow and Copenhagen. And Cardiff.

We like it partly because it will offer even everyday, Real Cyclists like us new flexibility - organising trips with visiting friends, replacement-bikes for when ours are being repaired, or asymmetric journeys that involve peak-hour train trips. Partly because it will encourage potential cyclists onto the streets, who'll realise how rubbish the facilities are and might just make a fuss about it. And partly because the focus of popular discontent will wander away from 'lycra louts' to 'tourists on hire bikes' wobbling around on the wrong side of the road while taking pictures on their iPhone.


And there'll be a whole new subculture of Docking Station trivia-inspired trips to make, as there is with tube stations. What's the closest two docking stations? The most isolated one? The prettiest? Which ones generate the best free 30-minute journeys, with the most postcard views, the best riverscapes, the best mews to nose into, the best parks to explore, the quirkiest sights, the most stunning architecture? This blog will be making some suggestions.

For the moment, sights like this (right) are popping up all over the centre. After some surprisingly sandy digging for a few days behind Serco's rattly metal barriers, the black hopscotch-squares of the docking unit bases are revealed, waiting for the magic posts to be plugged in when the scheme starts.


This one's on Cartwright Gardens, near the British Library, and if you ask me they should keep the plastic toilet cubicle as a feature of all bike hire stations. There's something about cycling that stimulates the bladder, and wandering round trying to find a central London toilet that also does bike parking can be a frustrating task. (Tip: Lincoln's Inn Fields.) Someone should do an iPhone app for that.

Bike hire cities 5: Hamburg

Had JFK ever come here, he'd've no doubt said 'ich bin ein Hamburger'. (The idea that he made a comical error in saying 'ich bin ein Berliner' is an urban myth; he was quite correct.)

Actually, Hamburg is a bit like a hamburger: flat, big, meaty, rather enjoyable. And recently reconstituted after being torn to shreds, because we bombed the hell out of the city in the war.

And Hamburg's new cycle hire scheme, StadtRad - it only started a couple of months ago - is probably the best model for London to watch as our own velorution approaches in May 2010. Hamburg's a similar geographical size to London. It's a lot more sprawling than you might guess. And it has a similar spread of places the A-to-B cyclist might want to get to. It also has a rather hit-and-miss system of cycle paths, mostly separated but abruptly disappearing or transforming into footpaths at junctions, and poorly lit. And there's loads of traffic. So the London cyclist feels pretty much at home.


The Hamburg system is the standard model: you register online, paying a nominal and one-off five-euro registration fee. The website has an English version (accessed via the easily-missed flag at the top left). To hire a bike from one of the 70-odd docking stations round the centre, you swipe that card at a hire station and follow some clear instructions (supplied in English if required) on the touchpad screen (right). Handy, free little pocket-sized maps have docking locations.


After a few seconds' typing in code numbers here, and onto a small electronic unit attached to the bike (right), you're off. (The instructions for using this small unit aren't entirely clear the first time - you spend five minutes looking for its screen and eventually realise it's under a metal flap.) The first half hour is free, then further periods rack up gradually in cost.

The bikes (top right) are really good, well-engineered, machines for town use: seven speed hub gears, saddle that adjusts from Hello-Kitty-sized Japanese exchange student to Dutchman height, wide comfy tyres, dynamo lights, and a mysterious rear rack that people mistake for a child seat, until the child keeps sliding off. The system seems popular - we always found a bike, but the half-empty racks suggested there were plenty in use.


Lessons for London: 1. Redistribution of bikes is a big deal. Commuter drifts wash lots of bikes one way in the morning and the other in the evening. A lot of people in Hamburg spend a lot of time in big vans shuttling bikes from crowded commuter foci back to near-deserted start points. London won't have docking stations quite as near train and tube stations as Hamburg, but with even stronger commuter tides, this is something we'll have to watch if we're not to end up with empty docking points.

2. There'll be teething problems. On our trip Hamburg was deluged by two days of rain. Something must have seeped into the wires, because the screens at the docking stations weren't working properly. You could check bikes out but not back in, and lots of anxious people were phoning the helpline worried that they'd be charged heftily for 'unreturned' bikes. We'll need to copy the Germans' friendliness, flexibility and generosity - and no I'm not being sarcastic: common sense prevailed and no unfair charges were levied on us. (When something like this happens in London, we'll just have to resign ourselves to the inevitable overreaction from the media.)

3. Make instructions crystal clear - Hamburg's are very good, except perhaps for that flap business mentioned above.


Hamburg's is the most successful of the five schemes I've tried recently. I'll be very happy if ours is as good. Hamburg has some fun cycling bits - the long-distance Elbe path, some parks, ferry hops round the heavily-watered landscape (above right), and a cool tunnel under the Elbe (right) that puts Greenwich's to shame - and offers you a polite, orderly, friendly and high-quality lifestyle.

But, ah, you find yourself missing that edge and dynamism of London, the free stuff, the cheap eats, the quirky history, the whatever-you're-into possibilities of things to do, the melting-pot whirl and the whoosh and the buzz... I may be from Yorkshire, but ich bin ein Londoner.

Bike hire cities 4: Brussels

Brussels' bike hire scheme, Villo!, started a few months ago. It's the usual deal - register online, pay a fee, then use your credit card to take out a bike from one of the docking stations (right) and return it to that one or any another. The yearly sub is a bit steep compared to other schemes at 30 euros, but the first half-hour of rent is free. They claim 2500 bikes at 180 stands all over the 'Brussels region', which surely must be 'Belgium'?

The Villo! website looks good, and (are you listening, Krakow?) provides thorough versions in English, French and Dutch.

I had a brief encounter with Villo! during a six-hour wait between Eurolines coaches, shuttling between Brussels-Noord and the Grand Place. Not many people using it, but it seemed OK. (The layover was otherwise dismal, unpleasant and sinister, though: backstreet-city Brussels in the dark is not enjoyable cycling. The football hooligans down by the Grand Place were somehow reassuring by comparison.)

Bike hire cities 3: Cardiff

Cardiff is the capital of Wales (a small country in the north-west of the EU, about the size of Wales). At the end of September this year it beat London to the status of bike-scheme-capital when hire company Oybike started running their custard-coloured bikes (right) round the city.

Well, kind of beat. Oybike had been running a similar scheme in Hammersmith for a few years; but that stopped in late October, made redundant by the forthcoming London scheme in May 2010. They're still running similar ventures in Reading and Farnborough, though.

It works in the standard way: you register online, paying a fee of say £18 a year, and then you can take out a bike from one of their stations for up to half an hour for free; there are increasing charges for longer periods.


In Cardiff this looks promising, because there's one obvious journey to do by bike. The centre is small enough to walk around all the important cultural things - for instance, it's only five minutes' stroll from the art gallery (which has arguably the world's greatest collection of Welsh paintings) to Cardiff Castle and then to the Millennium Stadium, which is right opposite Wetherspoon's.

But the hike down from the centre to the bistro-run at the Bay is just a bit too far and too boring to walk comfortably, a mile or two maybe. The road is no oil painting, not even by those Welsh impressionists. A bike is ideal, though, and there's a separated bike path all along the straight main road between the two.


Once at the Bay you can cycle around in front of the majestic Millennium Hall (right), and continue (right) down all the way to the barrage and across to the other side, before returning to enjoy a pleasant dinner in a chain restaurant overlooking the water whose price may come as a shock if you had lunch in Pontypridd.

And there are bike hire stations handily sited round Bay itself, and round the main rail station. The bikes (and the self-service hire machines) are, of course, bilingual, with English on one side and Welsh on the other ('Free to ride' / 'Seiclo am ddim', which means 'bike for nowt', below right).


So what's the lesson for London? Too early to say yet, but there's one point of interest to watch. The Oybikes are shaft-drive, meaning they're a bit more effort to ride but won't stain your trousers and don't suffer from chain problems. London's bikes will be standard chain-drives, so it'll be interesting to compare the two when both are in full swing. Though your views on the seriousness of stained trousers may depend on whether you buy them from Regent St and Bond St, or Matalan and TJ Hughes.

I'm tempted to finish with some jokes about Splott, but d'you know, I rather like Cardiff.

Bike hire cities 2: Krakow

Hmm. Nice-looking bikes they've got here: good, sturdy, step-through frames, saddles that adjust for all sizes, smooth hub gears (?five), back rack, front basket and city map (below right), dynamo lights... and some handily located hire stations round the city, such as right outside the main rail and bus terminus (right).


Trouble is getting to use them. The pattern for modern city hire schemes seems to be this: you register online with your credit card details, paying either a one-off fee or some periodic rate, for a day or week or year; then you can take out a bike from the automated unit at the bike hire station, using that same credit card, and checking the bike back in at the same or some other station. Short periods of up to half an hour are free or very cheap, perhaps a pound or less; but the price jacks up so that a full day would be about the same as commercial bike hire, perhaps £15 or more.


Krakow's scheme is no exception, and that means going to the bikeone.pl website to register... which is in Polish. There are a couple of English language pages (you might find the 'ENG' link hidden down at the very bottom right) but not for the vital bits of registering. If you know someone who speaks Polish then maybe not too much of a problem (and if they can fix a chronically stiff bathroom tap, give me their number). Otherwise, you may find the information that, for example, three miesieczny is an okres waznosci of 90 dni and a cena of 50 pln, less than helpful. It hardly encourages you to start entering your credit card details into forms you don't understand.

So that's a lesson for London: make the booking process as easy as possible, make the website foolproof, and don't make it available only in the local language, or we'd end up with an Ess-charry Inglish site saying 'Ar long jer wonna rint it for?'.


And so I didn't manage to rent a bike in Krakow, but it doesn't really matter because everything you'd really want to see in the city is within walking distance anyway. There are a few bike lanes, and people do cycle around the vast and pleasant main square (right) where you can sit and sip a Tyskie or Zywiec and listen to the hourly trumpet call to the four points of the compass echo around the historic facades.


And actually there aren't too many promising bike tours from Krakow, though you might possibly cycle along Route 4. This roughly follows the Vistula river (above right) from the city centre, where it snakes round the iconic castle of Wawel, out west for 50km to the town of Oswieczim - known to most of us, more soberingly, as Auschwitz (right).

Bike hire cities 1: Copenhagen

London's Bike Hire scheme is due to start in May 2010. It's coming a bit late to the citybike party: Barcelona and Paris have had popular, and generally successful, schemes running for a few years now.

And many other cities have them, each with some lessons for what London might want to copy - or avoid. So this week I'll be talking about some of the other European city hire schemes I've used recently, starting with Copenhagen's.


Uniquely, among the cities to be considered here, Copenhagen's scheme is free and requires no registering or booking. You look for one of 110 special bike racks round the city which hold the city bikes (top right). Though a range of colours, they're characteristic in appearance, with solid rear wheels, clear branding, and a metal map of the city centre (with rack locations) fixed on the handlebars (right).

To release the bike from its chain, you simply insert a 20 kroner coin - a bit more than two quid, so just about enough to buy a can of coke - into a slot (visible on the right), just as you would with a supermarket trolley.

In fact, the bike rides very much like a supermarket trolley too. The saddle goes no higher than four inches off the floor, meaning anyone over the age of seven will find their view of the road continually blocked by their knees.


There are no brakes on the handlebars: the only ways of stopping are either to engage the back-pedal brake, usually by accident; or to collide with a lamppost. This being cycle-friendly Denmark, the insurance company generally assumes the lamppost was responsible.

They make some interesting noises, too. This one sounds like a corncrake; that one, a distant car alarm; the other, a looming cloud of tsetse fly. The quality and variety is remarkable. I know musicians at Goldsmiths who've got PhDs in electronic music with less.

And there's the cobbles. They don't cope well with cobbles. If you try nipping out to the shops for a pint of milk on one, it'll be butter by the time you get home.


You're only supposed to use them in the couple of square miles of the city centre - there are big fines for taking them outside the boundary. (Your basket-mounted map shows you if you're near border country.) In practice, twenty minutes on a city hire bike is enough. They also don't have lights, and are only available from March to November.

If you're a local, of course, you don't need them: you have and frequently use a bike of your own, even going shopping with the kids (right).

Still, the scheme is popular: the racks are often empty at peak times, so you can't guarantee instant use. And they are handy if you're a visitor and just want to shuttle between the station, youth hostel, mermaid, and city-centre musts such as the Bog Museum. (That's 'book museum', sadly.) And they're free, in a city that feels about 50 per cent pricier than London. (There is 'normal' bike hire available from various places, for similar rates to Britain, about £15 per day or so.) And they are, indeed, enormous fun.


You might also use one to grind your way out to Christiania (right), the semi-legitimised hippy community on Christianshavn. Cars are not allowed there, along with other dangerous and immoral things such as hard drugs and photography. Soft drugs on the other hand are virtually compulsory. At the market stalls you see mighty blocks of cannabis resin on sale the size of breeze blocks. There are also several scruffy but atmospheric bars and restaurants.

So what are the lessons for London? Well, having a soft-drugs-tolerant enclave such as Christianshavn would obviously be a fantastic... oh, I see, the bike hire lessons for London. Only that free unregistered bikes wouldn't work, I suppose. After the first week, half would be in canals and the other half in Lithuania or somewhere. It may be shorter on pound shops, but in terms of social discipline, Copenhagen does rather put London in the shade.

Tomorrow: Krakow...

Lambeth puts Bike Hire Scheme on map

Hooray for Lambeth. The borough is first off the mark with its proposed list of locations for docking stations in London's definitely-happening Bike Hire scheme. We went to see and comment on a presentation of the proposed sites last night (right).

A map of the proposed sites is on the Lambeth website. Not all these sites will go through (which is why there are some clusters - they're alternatives).

The whole scheme is being pushed through in some haste from the top: work has to start in May 2009 and the first bikes have to be available by May 2010. So, for Lambeth and the other eight central London boroughs involved, coming up with the list of docking sites has been a frantic cross between Pin the tail on the donkey and Countdown.

We enjoyed a short promotional film in which Boris enthuses about the scheme and calls for our support. It's actually pretty good, giving the right sort of reasons and portraying cyclists in the right sort of way.

In the film, the scheme is imaged as a convenient, quick, easy, instant alternative to tube and bus, which are already at bursting point. Cyclists are portrayed, hooray, as not all wearing helmets, bright jackets and lycra, like mobile belisha beacons; but as normal people, unhelmeted and in jeans and skirts and everyday shoes, just getting from A to B.

(Helmets will not be provided as part of the bike hire, and quite right too. Boris stresses in the film that all research shows that more cyclist on roads means better safety. More cyclists on the road, many of them novices. Some road users won't like that. Well, get over it.)

So now starts the horse-trading over where docking stations can go. They are supposed to be every 300m or so, but some of the 'obvious' sites - such as on Belvedere Road, behind the old City Hall - are on private land. And private landowners sometimes have an attitude problem to two wheels. Such as when they block cycle lanes with planters the size of a small car, as they have done on Belvedere Road.

But we're very positive about the scheme. We take the simple approach: anything that gets more people cycling more often is good. Lambeth has set the pace; now, come on Southwark et al.