Today the Standard have published a big double-page spread, entitled: Are the wheels coming off the Boris bike commute?
It says that the availability issues flagged up in the TfL report of Dec 2012 have got better not worse, and that the scheme is virtually unusable for many commuters.
Link here http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/are-the-wheels-coming-off-the-boris-bike-commute-8479654.html
They probably are, but it’s not surprising really since despite what Boris says, the scheme could never cope with the numbers of commuters willing to cycle in London if the means was available.
Even if 5,000 bikes were waiting for commuters arriving at Waterloo every morning, after a week or so it probably wouldn’t be enough, and where would people park them? It would simply make the tidal flow of bikes even more unmanageable than it currently is.
It’s never going to become part of an established commuting infrastructure and TfL and the mayor’s office ought to have realised and admitted this before they launched the scheme, and stuck to this instead of applying ‘superdock’ band aids to the situation at Waterloo. As such, the question ‘are the wheels coming off the Boris bike commute?’ is irrelevant as the ‘Boris bike commute’ is very much a straw man.
If it’s done anything, the scheme has probably encouraged many people, including Londoners and commuters into the centre who have discovered the joy of travelling through the city under their own power, to buy or use their own bikes in order to avoid all the disadvantages associated with depending on the bike hire scheme as an everyday commuting option.
Got a similar response from TfL that @barclayscycle was aimed more at casual users #fail
The scheme is still massively under-engineered, for instance compared to Paris: The Boris bike vs. the French vélib -unfair comparison?
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