The paradoxes of London cycling

Docking station near Warren Street

The Barclays cycle hire scheme has been running for a year. The Londonist blog shows that the scheme has had mixed reviews. The bikes have proved remarkably robust and very few have been stolen. However the IT system for  hiring and charging is unreliable. Some users have been frustrated by the fact that they cannot reliable find a bike to hire when they want one or that there is no dock free at the end of their journey. However others have been inspired to buy their own bikes.

The scheme has also stimulated technical ingenuity, such as the London Bike Share map devised by Oliver O’Brien, a researcher and software developer at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), an interdisciplinary research group at UCL in London. This continuously tracks and displays the number of parked bikes and free docks at each of the docking stations. 

It might seem that Transport for London wants to promote cycling, yet today there has been a big protest on Blackfriars Bridge because TfL's traffic engineers are making the bridge more dangerous for cyclists by adding more lanes of traffic and raising the speed limit. The political campaign been led by bloggers who have exposed the failure of TfL's engineers to treat all travellers as equal while giving priority to the smooth flow of motor vehicles. They seem to ignore the fact that, over 24 hours, cycles make 16% of the traffic. That rises to nearly 36% of the traffic in the morning rush hour.

So TfL provides the means to cycle - at least for some - but does not engineer the roads so that cycles have their rightful amount of space to ride safely.