Yesterday evening, Central London was awash with trailers carrying dozens of bikes at a time as the city’s new hire bikes – which we reviewed here yesterday on road.cc – were ferried to their docking stations ahead of the Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme going live at 6am this morning. However, Mayor of London Boris Johnson has warned that there are likely to be some teething problems.

Tomorrow. That's when the early adopters will be able to rock up to a Barclays Cycle Hire station and pick up a bike for their free half hour. With 6,000 bikes and 300 stations throughout central London in the first phase it's certainly going to be a genuine alternative to the car, bus, tube or your feet. But what will the bikes actually be like to ride?

It has been revealed that a succession of problems with equipment have been one of the chief contributory factors to Alberto Contador’s decision to leave Astana, announced yesterday.

The wife of Olympic rower James Cracknell has revealed that he suffered brain damage after being hit by a truck last week while cycling in the United States and that she had initially feared that his life support machine would have to be switched off. TV presenter Beverley Turner added that it could be six months before Cracknell makes a full recovery from his injuries.

Tiffin has been a bit of a damp squib today, as no-one was willing to leave the office to get caked up and we instead had to rely on Zipvit strawberry energy bars; not bad at all, but not tiffin. Anyway they've certainly perked us up enough to fire up the road.cc randomiser, and the names punched in binary on the ticker tape today are...

sfisher0, jak001 and jova54!

There are three types of folding bikes. On one end of the scale, there is the folding bike that concentrates completely on the fold and ride quality is therefore a secondary consideration. At the other end of the scale is the bike that is designed for riding but that you can also fold if you have enough time and the right tools to hand, in other words a bike that you wouldn’t want to fold multiple times per day.