London has joined in a new concept of bike sharing as part of the drive to cut down on short journeys being made by car.
The scheme currently known as Barclays Cycle Hire* allows people in Central London to hire bikes from automated docking points, ride them to their destination and drop the bike off at a nearby docking point, only being charged for the time the bike is being used. Journeys under 30 minutes are free of charge.
At launch on the 30 July 2010, the scheme had 315 bicycle docking stations and 5,000 bicycles available with a total of 400 docking stations and 6,000 bicycles being available by the end of summer 2010.
The scheme currently covers 17 square miles with the City of London and parts of 8 London Boroughs and is proving quite popular with a reported 100,000 bikes being used during the first 2 weeks.
Fees are split into access fees which are a daily charge (around £1 a day), and usage fees for the hiring of the bikes. Although probably a lot cheaper than car rental or similar, the fees do rise rather steeply with 1 hour being £1; 1 1/2 hours £4; 3 hours £15 and 24 hours a whooping £50. Possibly not surprising to find that the official web site suggests the bikes are best for short journeys.
The concept of this isn’t new with Paris and Montreal’s both having similar schemes. The London scheme is based on the Montreal Bixi scheme.
* The name comes from the £25m sponsorship of the scheme by the UK bank although the reported cost over the next 6 years is estimated to be around £150m.
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[...] this year London launched it’s pay-per-day London bike sharing scheme, but there’s no a campaign for a unified map of London cycle routes to go with [...]