Transport for London have announced a slightly odd idea in their Boris Bike’s scheme which involves removing extra bikes from popular locations.
Old scheme: To meet demand in popular locations, employees of Serco who operate the scheme would have extra bikes standing by and would partly re-fill the bike hire stands to ensure that all those who wanted a bike to hire would have one available.
New scheme: However, in what seems a slightly bizarre idea, Transport for London have announced that certain popular locations will now have no extra bikes available as the extra bikes clog pavements and were “unsightly”.
If the bikes were indeed taking up most of the pavements then this would be understandable, but by virtue of the fact that the stands have to be placed in quite spacious areas to operate properly, this really doesn’t appear to make sense.
First station: One of the first to suffer this loss will be the Concert Hall Approach close to the Royal Festival Hall and South Bank, but others are apparently also planned. This site alone serves around 350 people a day, so is not a small location.
This bike station will have it’s daily bike total reduced from 1000 bikes to just 300 for the entire day, plus any which finish their journey at that station of course.
Idea questioned: Transport for London’s argument is that there will still be plenty of other stands within a 400-metre radius. This however assumes three things:
1) People are actually willing to walk around the streets to find which stations actually have bikes left.
2) Tourists and non-London visitors wanting to use the scheme will know where the other bike stations even are and not give up finding one.
3) With such a drop in numbers, it isn’t clear that the surrounding bike stations themselves will have enough bikes to cope. One assumes that the other bike stations also won’t be refilled by TFL and Serco?
It would seem that TFL and the mayor’s office have gotten themselves in a slight muddle over the whole popularity aspect of the bikes which are presumably saving quite a lot of taxi journeys and overcrowding on the Underground?
Extra bikes: We’d also like to know, if they have all these 100s of Boris Bikes which now aren’t being used to refill stations, what are they going to do with them?
No doubt there’ll be more answers forthcoming, but with the tourist season approaching very soon, it would seem Boris Bikes may be a scarce resource afterall for the casual traveller.
More Boris Bike & London Resources:
Boris Bike web site
Boris Bike independent community
Tourist attractions in London to visit on a Boris Bike
Hotels in London
