The streetscape of large parts of East London will be transformed this week as the Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme makes its long awaited expansion into Tower Hamlets, including Canary Wharf, as well as North Shoreditch in Hackney. The scheme will also be expanded to Westfield White City in West London. The operation will see 2,300 new bikes made available, increasing the size of the fleet by more than a third to more than 8,300, with 4,800 new docking points coming onstream, taking the total to 15,000.
The new bikes will be put in place overnight on Wednesday in time for the new docking points to go live on Thursday morning. Sometimes nicknamed ‘Banker Bikes’ – possibly a reference to the office worker types who make up many users, although we suspect there’s a bit of a Cockney rhyming slang influence going on too – the new zone also includes the Canary Wharf headquarters of the bank that sponsors the scheme.
Speaking about the planned expansion last month, Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays UK Retail and Business Banking, said: “Barclays Cycle Hire has undoubtedly been a huge success and the extension to east London will mean even more people will benefit from this bold and pioneering initiative.
“Barclays Cycle Hire now reaches our global headquarters in Canary Wharf so we are excited about the opportunity to mobilise our colleagues in the Capital. This scheme is a demonstrable example of our commitment to the communities in which we serve,” he added.
Transport for London said last month that nearly 10 million trips had been completed on the bikes since the scheme was launched in July 2010, comprising 7.7 million by the 150,000 members of the scheme and a further 2.1 million carried out by casual users since it was opened up to them in December 2010.
Last year, Mayor of London Boris Johnson instructed TfL to draw up plans for an eventual further expansion of the scheme to asked TfL to prepare plans for a westward expansion of the cycle hire scheme through Wandsworth, Hammersmith & Fulham, Lambeth and Kensington & Chelsea.
In terms of the numbers of bicycles, the Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme is the second largest in Europe behind the Vélib’ scheme in Paris which has around 20,000 bikes; even that is dwarfed, however, by a scheme in Hangzhou, China, which boasts more than 60,000 bikes, while Beijing plans to extend its own scheme to 50,000 bikes by 2015.
Straight into the sun is perhaps an exaggeration, but at that time it would be about ESE, and there are bits of the road which head roughly SSE, so...
7 October was just a bit of harmless fun until the "msm" ramped it up.
It's not censored if you just pirate it
an example of Kesgraves "best cycling infrastructure in the country" https://maps.app.goo.gl/GsCMbzDUTPdq59qS9
They are not going full gas at every point. They would destroy themselves. And tactics, they save themselves for when effort is really needed....
It turns out that that is national police policy. We found out from this process that there is national 'secured by design' policy which causes...
Been available for quite a while, full GRX mechanical 12 speed. Probably around the same time as 105 mechanical 12 speed if I were to guess.
Less harmful citrus degreaser is easy to find at £8 or less for 5 litres. Works ok for me, even diluted up to 4:1. Both paraffin and white spirit...
Nope, it's to keep your straps down and quieter. Plus most sunglasses are polycarbonate and aren't going to shatter like glass anyway
And, more seriously, where's the coverage of the closure of the cycle lane which forces you to cycle on the Totton bypass.