Boris Bikes Watch

This bike hire van parked in the cycle lane on Southwark Street has received a parking ticket.

Originally delivery and collection of bikes was all going to be done by 'Green' electric carts, but somehow that never quite worked out…

Back to the future:

If we assume that the bike hire scheme really does reach the number of trips that its proponents say, this means it has a capacity to replace one in 400 trips. 0.3% of the total. And that's the best case if they complete the scheme.

i.e. on average these bikes will account for just 0.002 trips per person per day.

That's tiny. Barely a start, in fact. Where people really cycle they use their bikes an awful lot more than that.

There are 6,000 bicycles but instead of the projected 10 trips a day or 60,000 in all, at present

There are about 25,000 trips each day.

When a compulsive spinner like TfL says 'about 25,000' trips you can be quite certain this means 'less than 25,000 trips'.

Or to put it another way, as things stand

this is the equivalent of the average Londoner going out and returning home again about once every three years by using these bikes.

What’s more

a residual concern remains who is using the scheme: overwhelmingly white men aged between 25 and 44, many of whom earn more than £50,000 a year. For a scheme that has already cost £79m, with a further £45m for the extension to cover the Olympic Park next year, can we really justify this "posh-boy toy"? "If you look at the normal demographic for cycling, it's exactly the same," says Ranger. "But that will change as we move into year two or three and we see people getting comfortable with it."

So, is London in the midst of a "cycling revolution"? The mayor would say yes, but others are more sceptical. "It just isn't a cycle-friendly city," says writer Will Self, a "bikie" who is mildly disdainful of Barclays Cycle Hire. "I sort of approve of the idea of using crap cyclists to slow down the traffic stream but it's a bit suicidal – like throwing people over the top in some conflict."

Sounds like Will hasn’t heard of safety in numbers!

Eight cyclists on Blackfriars Bridge: what they tell us about cycling culture in Britain

I happened to be on Blackfriars Bridge on Friday afternoon and I took some photographs. When I looked at them it occurred to me that they reveal a lot about cycling in Britain.

First of all, take a look at the pic above. Four cyclists. They were riding fast and with confidence. Nearest are three male cyclists and in the distance is a woman cyclist. Two of the cyclists are wearing helmets; three are wearing high viz gear; the three males are all riding road bikes with skinny racing tyres, no panniers, and no mudguards (except for a rear mudguard on one bike). Two of the male riders have drop handlebars. The woman is riding a more normal utility bike with panniers. All four cyclists are riding alone; they are almost certainly commuter cyclists. They were probably all in the age range 25-35. Two of the male cyclists are wearing lycra shorts. In one sense the cover of the latest issue of London Cyclist is spot on. People like this dominate London cycling (a statement which is a description, not a moral judgement).

A moment later I spotted four more cyclists coming in the same direction over the bridge, all on hire bikes. They were evidently a family - mum, dad, and two young teenage children. My guess is that they were visitors to London. They were cycling in the relaxed fashion you see in the Netherlands - a cluster of people in normal clothes, without high viz gear or helmets.

The only difference, of course, is that they were shunning London's cycling infrastructure and using the footway instead. Their logic is not hard to understand: cycling on the footway felt safer, there were no traffic lights to hold them up, and they could cycle alongside each other. And who knows - maybe they made it as far as Westminster Bridge, and had an agreeable pedal back along the South Bank to their docking station. Or maybe they met someone in a dark uniform who gave them penalty notices, deterring them from ever going near a bike again in nasty, scary London...

By the way, look carefully at the pic above and you'll see a powered two-wheeler displaying an 'L' plate, who has already discovered that using a mandatory cycle lane to undertake motor vehicles is something you can do tens of thousands of times without fear of any enforcement.

(Below) Only a very confident and assertive cyclist is prepared to cycle in conditions like this:

Blackfriars Bridge is a cycling route which is not only subjectively very dangerous, but is also objectively dangerous:

The sign refers to this crash.

The battle of Blackfriars Bridge is, of course, now notorious.

What is to be done? Personally I think retaining a 20 mph speed limit and tinkering around with the design at the north end would be a very dismal outcome which would fail to change the reality that Blackfriars Bridge is only for the fearless cycling commuter. In that sense people like Futilitarian are quite right. But if TfL and Boris Johnson aren’t even prepared to yield even on the issue of a 20 mph limit, then pragmatically this makes a very good battlefield, because it draws together a very broad range of opposition. Victory for a permanent 20 mph limit on Blackfriars Bridge can then be followed by the demand for this speed limit on ALL the central London road bridges. This would need to be followed by more protests, demanding enforcement, because the existing 20 mph limit is plainly being flouted. After that? Cycle tracks on all the major routes in London. Easy-peasy.

Incidentally, notice how much of the 'traffic' in the background to these photos consists of black cabs.

Bike hire revelation

A TfL spokeswoman said: "We find that the busiest docking stations are around Hyde Park, where people can hire a bike and tour the park."

Away from all that horrible traffic…

Boris bikes blunder

Cyclists using the cycle hire scheme are directed up one-way streets the wrong way by maps at the docking stations.

As anyone should know, Fitzrovia is the area bounded by Gower Street to the east and Great Portland Street to the west; and Euston Road to the north and Oxford Street to the south. This is stated in several books about Fitzrovia and London, including The London Encyclopaedia. But it seems the folks at Transport for London (TfL) and Legible London (LL) can’t find their way around as well as they should do.

What’s more

The new cycle hire station on Charlotte Street has the maps on the wrong way round. Cyclists are directed west to Bloomsbury where they will actually end up in Marylebone, and directed east to Fitzroy Square where they’ll actually end up in Russell Square; and directed north to Soho where they’ll actually end up in Camden Town.

‘Pedal power: the cycle hire scheme and cycle superhighways’: going nowhere

If only this cycle lane could be painted blue and made mandatory, what a difference it would make… Not. The westbound A503 in Walthamstow, a major route into central London.

What was the winner of the best cycle facility in London in 2010, awarded by the London Cycling Campaign at its AGM earlier this month? The bike hire scheme.

With well over a million journeys taken so far and over 100,000 users signed up, the scheme — more than any other — has given everybody in London secure, convenient and safe access to the best mode of transport there is. The scheme’s sheer visibility and practicality were the deciding factors in awarding this to Transport for London.

Everybody in London? It’s another reminder that the London cycle campaign establishment is lodged in a little bubble world made up of the West End, a bit of the South Bank and the City. But as we know, boroughs like Greenwich, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest and Newham are strange unvisited regions, “out there” to LCC full-timers.

This LCC award seems to me a little ironic in the light of yesterday’s report by the London Assembly Transport Committee, entitled Pedal power: the cycle hire scheme and cycle superhighways.

The Transport Committee discovered that:

Around one-fifth of respondents had started cycling as a result of the cycle hire scheme.

Around one-fifth reported using the hire bikes instead of just the Tube, eight per cent instead of just the bus and seven per cent instead of just walking. Less than one per cent reported using the bikes instead of the car.

So less than 13 people gave up driving and switched to cycling. Not exactly a cycling revolution.

TfL’s original exaggerated estimates of 10 uses per bike per day have nowhere near been met. TfL claimed a "5% shift from car to bike", but defined it misleadingly as 5% of the bike trips replacing car trips. TfL thought it would get 3000 trips converted from cars, but the reality turns out to be less than 150 trips converted from cars to hire bikes.

The hire bikes are currently being used three times every 24 hours, which means that if the sample used in this report is at all representative the bike hire scheme is contributing at best to a cycling modal share in Greater London of 0.02 per cent. Which makes it the most expensive cycling project in history.

The report also reveals that TfL has preferred not to release its own findings about what users think of the bike hire scheme and cycle superhighways:

There are various pieces of information which TfL could publish immediately. This includes: the ‘raw data’ from its Ipsos Mori survey of users of the cycle hire scheme and its survey of users of the cycle superhighways

Why is TfL being so coy? Presumably because the results of these surveys are embarrassing. TfL is all about spin, not reality. There are plainly lots of disgruntled cyclists out there but in the smiley-smiley world of cycle promotion no one wants to hear from them.

The bike hire scheme is attractive to Boris Johnson and Transport for London because it gives the appearance of promoting cycling while doing nothing whatever to challenge the dominance of the motor vehicle by reallocating road space to safe, convenient cycling. The bike hire scheme challenges nothing; it’s a substitute for the cycling infrastructure that London so desperately needs. The basis of mass cycling is there – look at the examples supplied by SkyRide – but bike hire does nothing to develop it because shortage of bikes isn’t the problem.

The biggest obstacle to mass cycling in London is, of course, Transport for London itself. It’s a fundamentally car-centric body which prioritises motor vehicle flow above all other considerations. Secondly it prioritises parking for motor vehicles. This culture also permeates local authority transport planning. It’s all about accommodating the motor vehicle and the driver. This is the number one priority. If someone in a property with no off-road parking chooses to own three cars, then that person must be accommodated, and if necessary the footway will be turned into a car park to make their vehicle ownership possible and so as not to inconvenience other drivers. As the streets reach saturation point for parking, they are then made one-way to smooth vehicle flow, irrespective of how this might affect cycling. (I’ve just obtained the latest TfL Local Cycling Guide 4, November 2010. It is laughably out of date, since it shows local Waltham Forest cycle routes which have long since been denied to cyclists by being made one way.)

You are never going to get mass cycling while this transport culture persists and it is delusional to pretend otherwise. But this is the illusion that almost all U.K. cycle campaigning buys into. The vehicular cycling philosophy is all about thinking you can generate mass cycling on roads shared with traffic while simultaneously accommodating mass motoring. This is the common ground shared by the Mayor of London, the members of the London Assembly Transport Committee, the London Cycling Campaign, the Cyclists’ Touring Club, cycling campaigners like Carlton Reid, and numerous others.

It is a bleak irony that among the obstacles to mass cycling in London is the capital’s most progressive politician in the sphere of transport. Jenny Jones, shown below handing over the LCC prize, is a cogent critic of the Met’s traffic policing and a feisty defender of Critical Mass. But she represents a political party which asserts that Cycles are a vehicle and, as such, cycling should, wherever possible, take place on roads

























Photo: road c.c.


Bike hire is a massive waste of money which would have been much better spent on infrastructure. It will do nothing for modal share, and may yet turn out to be a gigantic white elephant. As the report acidly notes

The costs and funding arrangements for the cycle hire scheme remain opaque.

What’s more

TfL has reported that, in the first four months of the scheme, it has achieved £1.9 million of income from charges. This is just 10 per cent of the amount it expects to generate from charges by March 2011 (£18.7 million).

That that extra £16.8 million will be generated in the next 4 months seems highly unlikely, especially if it turns out to be a long snowy winter.

The report reveals (on the seventh page) that the scheme is actually absolutely nowhere near "breaking even" as TfL was claiming a few months ago. And even then there's a very long way to go to ever pay back the set-up costs. Realistically, it is probably impossible for the scheme ever to do this

TfL has not revealed how much income from sponsorship it has received to date. It is possible that it has received less than anticipated because the scheme has not rolled out as planned. The agreement with Barclays provides for £25 million of funding over a five year period (equating to £5 million per year) providing TfL meets key performance indicators such as the number of trips generated through the scheme.1

TfL has not told the Committee how much Barclays has paid to date for its branding of the scheme. The argument that all details of the relationships between TfL and Serco and Barclays are confidential is not a compelling one.

Needless to say the ostensible Green credentials of the scheme have also turned out to be bogus:

It was originally expected that only electric vehicles would be used for redistribution. Serco is now using 14 electrically powered vehicles, 10 Focus/Mondeo vehicles and, on a temporary basis, three 7.5 ton lorries and four Sprinter vans. It also uses 10 Nissan vans for on-street maintenance.

As for the Cycle Superhighways:

The two pilot cycle superhighways are attracting 5,000 cyclists per day and only one per cent of respondents to our survey had started cycling specifically as a result.

60 per cent of respondents did not feel safer using the cycle superhighways and two-thirds did not feel they were respected by other road users.

No surprises there.

In the face of this devastating evidence, what conclusions does the Committee draw?

The Committee welcomes the introduction of the cycle hire scheme and cycle superhighways. These schemes have an important role to play in increasing cycling in London.

Cognitive dissonance on the grand scale yet again. People won’t cycle in motor traffic and the Committee therefore welcomes schemes to encourage them to cycle in motor traffic. Mass cycling requires the reallocation of road space from the car to the bicycle and the Committee therefore welcomes the continuation of the car-centric status quo on London’s streets.

The way forward is acknowledged by cyclists, if not by those who claim to represent them:

Many people want more measures on the cycle superhighways which reduce motor traffic, traffic speeds and/or provide better segregation amongst road users. Respondents to the Committee survey have commented on other vehicles frequently driving on the cycle superhighways. One said "[the cycle superhighways] need to be physically segregated from other traffic. There are too many lorries drifting into the cycle lanes despite the blue paint." Sustrans has highlighted that the greatest barrier to Londoners cycling, or cycling more, is fear of traffic yet the cycle superhighways generally follow busy arterial roads and provide no or minimal segregation from traffic. It therefore concludes that in their current form the cycle superhighways have limited scope to facilitate an uptake in cycling, particularly by new cyclists.

What recommendations does the Committee make? Apart from coming up with such flaccid generalisations as “all junctions on each route will be improved”, its concrete proposals are all vehicular cycling ones:

The Mayor and TfL could establish a minimum level of features which should be introduced. This could include:

all the blue cycle lanes will be 2 metres wide and mandatory

all the advance stop lines will be 5 metres deep

There's not a squeak about car-free streets or segregated cycle paths with priority at side roads and dedicated cycle lights at all junctions - you know, the sort of stuff that has a proven record of massive success elsewhere in Europe.

Nor do the Transport Committee's feeble recommendations address the fears of the majority of existing cyclists who have so far used the two pilot superhighways (they also ignore the reality that existing ASLs are mandatory and ignored by drivers on a colossal scale), let alone the fear and the inconvenience which deter the vast majority of Londoners from cycling.

As another blog cogently observes

advance stop lines are not the solution.

The London Assembly Transport Committee exposes itself here as a collection of provincials, either ignorant of or indifferent to what has been achieved elsewhere in Europe. London’s atrocious modal share is never mentioned. Even the cycling infrastructure of Paris doesn’t rate a mention, let alone Amsterdam’s.

As always, we enter the realm of faith detached from all reality:

It is hoped that the cycle superhighways will help create the potential for a critical mass which will eventually encourage others to get on their bikes and help realise the Mayor’s ambition for a cycling revolution in the capital.

In much the same way, alchemists in the middle ages believed you could turn base matter into gold.

You can read the report here.

The Committee welcomes feedback on its report.

email: laura.warren@london.gov.uk

(Below) A 'cycle friendly' street on the model recommended by the London Cycling Campaign - a cycle lane leading to an Advance Stop Line cycling reservoir. The westbound A503.

Cycling: the gender divide

The London Bike Hire Scheme:

According to Transport for London (TfL) data released by Mayor of London Boris Johnson in response to a written question from Labour Assembly Member Murad Qureshi, only one in four of the first 92,000 members of the scheme are women.

However, the three-to-one male to female split revealed by the figures is in line with data from the Department for Transport that show that on average, men make three times as many trips by bicycle as women each year.

Similarly, national cyclists’ organisation CTC told road.cc that its membership “is 76% male 24% female

A spokesperson for TfL said: “We are doing everything possible to encourage women to cycle.We know that women's two main concerns when choosing to travel by two wheels are safety and changing facilities; that's why we are working extremely hard to make sure both of these continue to improve. Our Cycle Safety Strategy includes a whole raft of initiatives to keep cyclists safe.

“This includes signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the Freight Transport Association to get lorry drivers and cyclists sharing the road safely and training courses including adult cycle training to improve confidence and skill on the road.

Safety issues apart, concerns over feeling hot and sweaty at the end of a bike ride don’t seem to deter female cyclists in The Netherlands, where cycling in everyday clothes is the norm.

Marc van Woudenberg of the Amsterdamize.com blog told us that the gender split in the Dutch city is 55% women and 45% men

(Below) Transport for London’s new ‘road improvement’ in Walthamstow on the A503 involves moving the cycle lane closer to overtaking lorries, in order to create free parking bays on the pavement at cost of just £20,000 per bay. With attractive cycle lanes like these who can doubt that the women of Waltham Forest will be rushing to take up cycling?

Boris bike injury crashes: the facts

Transport for London figures show there were 34 incidents involving the Barclays Cycle Hire bikes between 30 July and 30 September.

There were also five incidents related to the Boris bike scheme — including one where a woman was knocked off her cycle by one of the trailers used to transport the bikes between docking stations.

One cyclist suffered a head injury when he was hit by a bus and a seven-year-old narrowly escaped injury when a docking station fell on the child after it was hit by a car.

In the first recorded accident, five days into the scheme, a male hire bike user was squashed against a kerb by a lorry.

According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, 3,674 cyclists, or 10 per day, were killed or injured in London last year.

Cyclist hit by Boris Bikes trailer

A cyclist told how he was knocked over by a trailer being used to transport the Mayor's hire bikes.

David Ellis, 37, suffered cuts and bruising as well as injuries to his neck and hip after he was thrown from his bike and dragged under the trailer's wheels while cycling with a friend in Theobald's Road in central London.

The photographer, from Stoke Newington, said the trailers were “a danger to cyclists” because they are wider than the electric vehicle towing them.

Boris Bikes and the Evening Standard

The shocking truth.

London bike hire: what ‘cycling revolution’?

Rejoice!

London has notched up its millionth Boris bike journey - just ten weeks after the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme was launched.

The scheme has more than 92,000 subscribers and 1,002,789 journeys had been made by midnight on Thursday.

Which, if you bother thinking about it, works out at 11 journeys for each subscriber over 10 weeks, or one bike ride every six days. The cost of the scheme makes those the most heavily subsidised bike rides in history. And the vast majority last less than 30 minutes.

But there’s nothing like a shiny PR statistic to excite journalists.

Cycling is becoming a normal transport choice in the capital in a way that it was not a decade ago.

Now we need a cycling revolution across the capital to match that of the chunky grey-and-blue bikes weaving their way through Zone 1.

And a Guardian editorial gushes:

Without turning the clock back to 1904, when 20% of journeys were made by bicycle, London is being gradually liberated from the tyranny of the combustion engine. Copenhagen or Amsterdam are already well on the way – more bikes means both quicker journeys and more pedestrians.

These claims are without foundation. Far from London being ‘gradually liberated from the tyranny of the combustion engine’, the reverse is true. London is becoming MORE car-centric, not less. Transport for London has reduced crossing times for pedestrians at signalled crossings, and plans to get rid of hundreds of crossings for cyclists and pedestrians, purely in order to ‘ease congestion’. The number of one-way streets continues to grow across the capital. More and more pavements are being seized for car parking. Unbelievably, Transport for London is funding schemes which involve reallocating road space for cars, at the expense of cycling.

The vehicular cycling infrastructure, such as it is, is badly designed, badly maintained and, where enforceable, not enforced. Indeed, London’s policing is now increasingly targeting errant cyclists to a disproportionate degree when contrasted with drivers. From every angle, cycling is going nowhere. There is no ‘cycling revolution’ and the next set of modal share figures for London will simply reproduce the same tired old story of a capital city where cycling accounts for between one and two journeys in every hundred.

The notion that the London bike hire scheme involves a ‘cycling revolution’ is laughable. No bike hire scheme anywhere in the world has significantly transformed modal share. Bike hire schemes are also phenomenally expensive. Ironically, in London the bike hire scheme has had one unintended minor consequence – extra journeys by white van man!

The promoters of the scheme in London claimed that the bikes would each be used ten times per day, though this has never happened on any other public bike share scheme. If every one of the bikes was used ten times per day, between them they would have adequate capacity for just 0.3% of journeys in the city. If each is ridden just once per day per bike you're talking about 0.03% of journeys by bike share bike. And these numbers only really count if everyone who rides the bike share bikes wouldn't otherwise cycle. If existing cyclists use the bikes then that has a neutral effect on the modal share. Does this look like a transformation ?

A shortage of bikes was never the reason for the low cycling rate of London.

The problem is not a lack of bikes, but that Londoners in the main don't cycle because conditions for cycling in London, as with the rest of the UK, are terrible when you compare them with Dutch cities. Londoners are scared to cycle, and it's quite obvious why. This problem cannot be resolved by making fractionally more bikes available. It can only be addressed by making conditions for cyclists better.

For a Guardian editorial to suggest that London is catching up with Copenhagen or Amsterdam is stupid. What success these cities have in getting people on bikes has nothing at all to do with bike hire or marketing and everything to do with infrastructure. London has no infrastructure for cyclists worth talking about (its funny how often you see an article about cycling accompanied by a photo of an attractive young woman riding through a car-free royal park). In any case, neither Copenhagen nor Amsterdam should be regarded as iconic, since there are much better examples of how to reverse car dependency.

London remains a car-sick, car-sodden city, devoted to prioritising motor vehicle flow, and this is institutionalised:

London's road space is something that is entirely modelled around car use. We're never going to get people out of cars and onto their bikes if the only measure of success is how much impact a scheme has on motor traffic.

My photos today show a short section of the A112 (Chingford Road) outside the Sir George Monoux Sixth Form College. You are never going to get ‘a cycling revolution across the capital’ when the cycling infrastructure is like this – one metre wide cycle lanes which run alongside parked motor vehicles with the ever-present danger of ‘dooring’. Many drivers are breaking the 30 mph speed limit, and the ‘advisory’ speed sign flashes hundreds of times throughout the day. Here, the A112 could easily be transformed for safe, segregated cycling on the Dutch model. It’s the only way you are going to transform modal share, yet the London Cycling Campaign is not asking for it. Instead, tinkering with the vehicular cycling infrastructure remains the central preoccupation of most cycling campaigners.

(Below) No cyclists were available for these photographs of the cycling-friendly A112.

Boris bikes and helmets

My admiration for the work of Brake has just diminished:

Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act, show there have now been a total of five people who have injured themselves after hiring the bikes since the scheme's inception on July 30.

A spokeswoman for road safety charity Brake insisted helmets should be introduced before a cyclist is killed on London's busy roads. She said: "We recommend all adult cyclists wear one as well as children, whether you are cycling on or off road.

But demanding that cyclists wear helmets is simply demanding that they adjust and conform to dangerous road conditions. Brake simply hasn’t understood that the key to safe cycling is not helmets or high viz gear but a safe cycling environment, and the only way that is going to be achieved is by imitating the Dutch bicycle master plan, rather than pursuing the catastrophically failed policy of attempting to ameliorate the conditions of vehicular cycling.

Boris Bikes: sending a message

A blogger who reckons that 4X4 drivers are borderline sociopaths has some interesting ideas for stickers.

One in six London hire bikes not yet available

Councils have refused to grant permission for 76 docking stations, meaning that Transport for London can only put 5,000 of the 6,000 hire bikes on the street

The shortage of docking stations — there are 335 at present, 65 short of the 400 that should have been in place for the £140 million scheme's launch on July 30 — has left 1,000 bikes, each costing around £350, stranded in TfL contactor Serco's depot in Islington.

Camden council's planning committee turned down an application for a 30-bike docking station in Torrington Place, Bloomsbury, after 30 residents turned up to complain.

More fantasy campaigning from Sustrans

Sustainable transport charity Sustrans has welcomed the arrival of Barclays Cycle Hire in London, but warned the scheme isn't based in the areas where the potential to increase cycling is at its highest.

Outer London areas have the potential to see a 70 per cent rise in cycling, but won't stand to benefit from the central London-based scheme, according to the charity.

"The London Cycle Hire scheme is a positive move for helping to mainstream cycling and raise its profile," commented Carl Pittam, Sustrans’ Director in London.

Cycling doesn’t need its profile raising. I think everyone in London by now has heard of this revolutionary means of personal transportation. What cyclists need is serious infrastructure, which is the one thing neither Transport for London nor London's car-centric councils are remotely interested in supplying. In any case, as David Hembrow has pointed out:

The hire bikes simply don't have enough capacity to make any great difference. That's why it can never be "a success" if you're interested in modal share. You don't need to wait for the scheme to be better established in order to be able to perform these simple calculations.

The London Urban area has around 8 million people. They'll make on average about 2.5 - 2.8 "trips" per day each (this is roughly the same anywhere in the world - to work and back again counts as two "trips"), meaning at least 20 million trips per day are made by Londoners, or at least 60 million trips over three days.

14000 hire bike trips out of the total of 60 million shows that around 0.02% of the modal share in London over those three days was the hire bikes.

London doesn't actually have a shortage of bikes. There are already plenty of bikes in London, but many of them permanently stay in sheds because people are simply too scared to ride them.

And even within that framework, bearing in mind the massive publicity the bike hire scheme has had, and also bearing in mind that the scheme is geared towards use of less than half an hour (free) or less than two hours, this is not an encouraging statistic for bikes which are available 24 hours a day:

The 5,000 bikes are each being used on average once a day.

If Carl Pittam really believes that a bike hire scheme in Waltham Forest would be of the slightest significance in helping bring about ‘a 70 per cent increase in cycling’ (whatever that is supposed to mean) he needs to take a look back over the local conditions for cyclists shown on this blog over the past three years. He could even start by clicking on the link for posts under Sustrans.

Or even look at the conditions for cyclists at the waterworks roundabout subway complex, where cyclists are diverted down convoluted routes in a literally rat-infested wilderness in order not to inconvenience motor vehicles. Where the A104 meets the A406. It's a major route linking Woodford and Walthamstow and forms part of the glorious London Cycle Network. Sustrans was so impressed by this infrastructure that it recommended it as forming part of an Olympic Greenway, until Waltham Forest squashed the idea.

I have only once ever met another cyclist on all the occasions when I have used this facility. I wonder why? How can a bike hire scheme possibly make the slightest difference to the comprehensively crap experience of cycling in the London Borough of Waltham Forest? Modal share here is one per cent, and there is not the slightest reason to think that this is going to change in the future, no matter how many posters of pretty girls on bicycles you put up.

Survived Afghanistan, killed cycling in England

An Army officer died after being hit by a lorry while swerving on his bicycle to avoid a massive pothole a council had refused to repair, an inquest heard today.

Captain Jonathan Allen, 29, who had recently returned from Afghanistan, suffered major head injuries in the collision on the A338. He was cycling the 'dangerous' eight-mile route in the rain from his Tidworth barracks to his home near Burbage, Wiltshire, when the accident happened. It is thought Mr Allen, who had served in the army for eight years, did not see the pothole until the last minute and swerved to avoid it.

The hole, at the Leckford crossroads, Tidworth, was reported to Wiltshire County Council by a concerned driver three weeks earlier and inspected.

But under the criteria used by the town hall, it was 0.2in too shallow and not wide enough to be repaired within seven days, the hearing in Salisbury was told.

The real problem is expecting cyclists to use lethal A roads like this (below). The scope for Dutch-style cycle paths is blindingly obvious from this photograph but still no one in the world of transport or organised cycle campaigning wants to accept the simple truth: if you want mass cycling and safe cycling you’ll have to do it the Dutch way. Everything else, including the wearisome cycle helmet debate, ‘cycle superhighways’ and bike hire, is a massive diversion.

Is London’s bike hire scheme the tipping point for mass cycling?

I think this could be a tipping point for the way London travels

enthuses Jenny Jones

Jenny is not alone.

Carlton Reid, executive editor of BikeBiz, a trade magazine, said the London scheme, which follows the Vélib network launched in Paris in 2007, would have a "massive impact on cycling in London and elsewhere".

And

Roger Geffen – campaigns and policy director at CTC, the national cyclists' organisation – says Liverpool, Edinburgh, Newcastle, York and Birmingham have shown interest in proposing similar operations.

He added: "Britain had a very strong cycling culture through the start of the last century, but lost it from the Fifties, when cars filled our streets in greater numbers. That's starting to change and we can do it much faster if more people discover the convenience and joy of cycling through hire bikes. The London scheme could be a really important step in re-creating our lost cycling heritage."

Mr Johnson's utopia is for one in five journeys in the capital to be made by bike.

And now let’s have a reality check, shall we?

The greater London area has around 8 million residents. In most places, people make an average of around 2.5 "trips" by all modes each day, so that's around 20 million trips per day in total. If we assume that the bike hire scheme really does reach the number of trips that its proponents say, this means it has a capacity to replace one in 400 trips. 0.3% of the total. And that's the best case if they complete the scheme.

i.e. on average these bikes will account for just 0.002 trips per person per day.

That's tiny. Barely a start, in fact. Where people really cycle they use their bikes an awful lot more than that. For example, here in Assen the population make just short of 1.2 bike trips per day (the population of 65000 make over 70000 trips, more than the total capacity of the London scheme). Up in Groningen that grows to 1.4 bike trips per day.

It's great to see anything which encourages people to cycle. However, this is not the sort of scheme which genuinely results in a large cycle culture. It can only ever be a small part of the picture.

It seems to me that public cycle hire is being picked on by many cities largely because it's the smallest thing can be done which will make it look as if something is being done. No longer do you need to do anything complicated and expensive like re-arranging the streets to make them more suited for cycling, or risk alienating motorists as you do it. Just allow a company to set up doing bike hire and the world's press will be amazed by your achievement.

And for some up-to-the-moment scepticism, see this.

Most Londoners never go near a bicycle all the year round. Whereas

On average, half of Amsterdam's population rides a bike at some point every day.

Euphoria about London bike hire, however, remains the order of the day:

Labour Assembly Member Val Shawcross said the new scheme was “one of a number of measure that are necessary to make London a safer and easier place for cyclists to get around.”

The bike hire scheme certainly makes short trips by bicycle in central London more convenient for the bike-less but it does not in any sense make London a safer place for cyclists to get around. Only infrastructure will do that. It is only a matter of time before we get the first bike hire fatality. So what does Shawcross mean? 'Safety in numbers' I suppose. A common mantra:

“The Institute of Advanced Motoring predicts that, with the critical mass of cyclists going up, drivers will be more aware and be looking out for people on bikes around town, hopefully leading to a more positive sharing of the road.

“Providing all parties behave courteously, and give each other the necessary space, the scheme will encourage more Londoners to take up cycling, and benefit from the health, economic, and environmental rewards it brings.”

‘Safety in numbers’ is always justified with reference to the Netherlands and Denmark, entirely missing the point that it’s not the numbers of cyclists there which creates the safety but infrastructure which effectively segregates cyclists from drivers. And even in those countries there are very significant variations in modal share, entirely rooted in perceptions of safety and the available infrastructure.

The euphoria around the bike hire scheme is rooted in the notion that mass cycling can be achieved through the medium of vehicular cycling. The belief seems to be that as more and more people cycle, an unstoppable momentum for change will be created and by some mysterious alchemical process in ten years London will be ‘like Copenhagen’. The problem with this argument is that even where London cycling has reached, by London's dismal standards, impressive proportions (1000 cyclists an hour on some commuter routes, 8 per cent modal share in Hackney) nothing whatever is being done in terms of providing the kind of infrastructure which will build on these figures and encourage mass cycling. Hackney, for example, is a rubbish borough in which to cycle. But other places which are touted as cycling cities – York, for example – are no better. Cycle planning in Britain remains an adjunct to the greater priority of planning for motor vehicle traffic flow and motor vehicle on-street parking.

The snowball theory of mass cycling in Britain – more and more people cycling will get more and more people cycling - ignores the massive exposure to risk which cyclists face in a vehicular cycling environment. The continuing reluctance to cycle by the overwhelming majority of Londoners is indicated by this interesting revelation:

Boris Johnson's Cycle Friday scheme has been scrapped after the total number of Londoners taking place dropped to just five.

At one meeting place just one Londoner turned up and at five others the rides were cancelled due to no Londoners turning up at all.

Which is a bit rum when there’s a ‘cycle revolution’ going on. But then most people in London have no interest in taking up cycling if it involves cycling in conditions like this (below). Photo taken yesterday on the A503, a commuter route from outer London into the West End. It's a typical main road in London, deeply hostile to cycling and with a wide pavement filled with an amazing collection of clutter. Beyond the lorry is a faded one metre wide cycle lane.



























It’s worth bearing in mind that when it comes to euphoria, we’ve been here before. Back in 2000 London’s cycling campaigners were enthused by the vision of a modal share of ten per cent by 2012 – a target which is just, er, eight per cent short and which doesn’t stand the remotest chance of being achieved in the next 18 months. But, hey, amnesia is an essential condition of cycle campaigning. Let’s not dwell on the past, let’s just invent another fantasy target for ten or fifteen year’s time. And when that fails, another one will be invented. One in five by 2050!

Luckily I have the advantage of cycling around the London Borough of Waltham Forest, which the last time I looked formed part of London and where cycling’s modal share has for a long time flatlined at one per cent. Conditions for cycling are not only mediocre and off-putting, they are about to get worse, entirely as a result of a council which believes that economic regeneration is best achieved by encouraging people to drive short distances to their local shopping centres and by creating as much on-road car parking as possible.

London’s ‘cycling revolution’ has yet to begin, and the notion that Cycle Superhighways and the bike hire scheme are going to get the masses on their bikes is the stuff of fantasy. Vehicular cycling has failed, is failing and will fail.

As for exposure to risk and a deterioration in the conditions of vehicular cycling in London, here’s one more small example. Motorbikes in bus lanes.

The report clearly shows that allowing motorcycles into bus lanes is increasing collision rates for both cyclists and motorcyclists, and is encouraging motorcyclists to break the law more. On this basis, the only defensible decision is to stop the trial immediately, to minimise further casualties.

Instead, the Mayor has chosen to gloss over the casualty increases and continue the trial. The proposed education and enforcement is an obvious attempt to reduce casualties to a more acceptable level.

This trial proves that allowing motorcycles into bus lanes increases road danger, both for motorcyclists and cyclists. It should be stopped forthwith and no further trials to be conducted.

By the way, the first photo in this post taken from here. Which reminds me, on the positive side, at least the bike hire scheme is helping to promote the fortunes of a bank which is heavily involved in financing the arms industry, which can only be Good For The Economy:

Barclays invest in companies that produce cluster munitions and depleted uranium.

Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland are bankers to four of the biggest ten arms firms. Last year the UK topped the list of global arms exporters with a record £10 billion ($19 billion) in orders, more than any other country.

(Below) Long Acre, Covent Garden. Don’t bother asking for ‘three feet please’ when cycling on this car-centric central London street, where motor vehicle flow and parking takes priority over walking and cycling.