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.
Excellent - I think I'll replace my emergency tube that is a real squeeze to get into the little Topeak bottle cage bag thingy.
I'm genuinely shocked by his their reaction.
I enjoyed this guy I captured with his hound on New Oxford Street a few years ago.
That's perspective though - not a small number of americans would consider the current UK government "socialist"....
I know this is a bit late but one thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is the extra wear and possible damage to the cycle lane surface due to being...
*bursts back into the room hours after the conversation has moved on*...
Damn, that sucks. I generally feel pretty relaxed with my bike on Avanti trains because the compartment is locked and I don't have to worry about...
They are ugly, and presumably require registration to use them. But the argument "it should be car parking instead" is absurd. Surely a camera and...
It's endemic now. Watched a skip lorry jump two reds within 100m on my commute this morning. No intention of stopping.
I strugle to think other as cool bikes as this. If my city was flatter and I fitter, I would drool over it....