The London Bike Hire Scheme: the cost rockets

Boris Watch discovers that

the estimated cost of the project has gone up 60% in a year and has a benefit/cost ratio estimated to be substantially below other projects currently in the pipeline.

BW asks

Is this really the best use of £92m in the week bus fares go up 20%?

What’s more

when Boris was pleading Ken-induced poverty, TfL had nearly a billion pounds more cash than it expected, due to taking advantage of favourable interest rates to borrow more and because of the aforementioned underspends. The expected extra cash floating around at year end is £238m, for a total stash of north of £1.3bn. Now, where’s that black hole?