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Bad weather and soaring costs blamed as ‘Boris Bike’ hires fall to lowest level for 10 years

The number of journeys made using London’s Santander Cycles hire scheme so far this year has also dropped by 33 percent compared to 2022 – as users point to rising costs introduced last year

Recent figures released by Transport for London (TfL) have revealed that the number of journeys made using the capital’s Santander Cycles public bike hire scheme in 2023 are at their lowest level in a decade, with TfL blaming the recent “consistent bad weather” for the sudden drop in hires – though some Londoners have cited the scheme’s soaring costs as the major contributory factor behind the fall in demand.

In 2022, usage of the Santander Cycles, or ‘Boris Bikes’ scheme – first introduced in 2010 during Boris Johnson’s tenure as Mayor of London, hence its lasting epitaph – reached record levels, as 1.3 million journeys were recorded in July alone, and 7,383,232 made between January and July that year.

However, in the same period this year, just 4,976,813 hires have been recorded – a drop of 33 percent compared to 2022 and the lowest number since 4,807,338 journeys were made during the first half of 2013, when there were much fewer bikes and docking stations available.

> E-bikes finally coming to London’s Santander Cycles Hire Scheme

TfL’s head of cycle hire David Eddington has claimed that “a number of factors” are behind this substantial drop, while singling out the “consistent bad weather recently” for its “significant impact on casual hires”.

“Last year was a record year for the scheme and a number of factors have contributed to a lower number of hires this year, including the consistent bad weather recently, which has had a significant impact on casual hires,” Eddington said.

“We will continue our work to make cycling more accessible than ever by continuing to open and extend Cycleways across the capital and making further improvements to Santander Cycles, which could include increasing the number of e-bikes in the scheme.”

Despite Eddington and TfL’s focus on the recent inclement weather, other users of the scheme have noted that the steep drop in journeys has coincided with the body’s decision to increase the cost of an annual subscription from £90 to £120.

This price jump was reported to have prompted a sizeable drop-off in subscriptions last year, though this was linked by TfL to the inability of riders to “auto renew” their memberships because of the new charges, forcing them to manually reactive their subscriptions for another year.

The cost of single journeys was also changed to a £1.65 flat rate per 30 minutes of use, replacing the £2 access fee which gave users access to the bikes for the whole day, provided each separate journey lasted less than 30 minutes.

Speaking to BBC London, Daniel Berube said he stopped regularly using the scheme when “the significant pricing change came into effect last year” and that “the expense hit a tipping point and outweighed the convenience the scheme offered”.

On Twitter, another former user of the scheme, Brian Salmon, wrote: “Since the abolition of the £2 day fare, I now bring my fold-up bike every time I take the train to London. Before I would always use Boris bikes to get anywhere around London. Many people are probably doing similar.”

> UK cycle hire schemes reduce car mileage by 3.7 miles per user each week, report shows

Meanwhile, the growing competition in recent years from rival dockless e-bike companies such as Lime and Tier was also noted by users as a possible factor in the Santander scheme’s steep decline.

Last October, TfL introduced 500 e-bikes as part of the network for the first time, almost nine years after Johnson first announced plans to trial such a scheme in hillier parts of the capital. According to the government body, over 500,000 hires have been made on the e-bikes since their introduction to the network.

In June, TfL also said it would “be exploring the possibility of, subject to funding, adding concessionary fares” to its scheme “to support the most disadvantaged Londoners”.

TfL said: “This could include discounts for job seekers and/or council housing residents – as we have done on other modes or on other cycle hire schemes outside London and the UK. We will also explore ways to support more disabled people to access the scheme.”

Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.

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20 comments

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matthewn5 | 1 year ago
0 likes

I used to have an annual membership when they first appeared, for £45 /year it was a good deal. £120? No way.

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OldRidgeback | 1 year ago
1 like

Can we please call them Livingstone bikes? It was his idea. All the fat liar did was not cancel the scheme when he became mayor.

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NOtotheEU replied to OldRidgeback | 1 year ago
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And paint them all red obviously.

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Rich_cb replied to OldRidgeback | 1 year ago
1 like

Because ideas are the difficult part.

By contrast, planning, funding and implementation are an absolute doddle.

It wasn't even Livingstone's idea, he copied it from the Lib Dems who copied it from Paris IIRC.

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chrisonabike replied to Rich_cb | 1 year ago
2 likes

Well, then Red Ken deserves some credit also for what became the "cycling superhypeways" too then.  Plans were modified under Boris, initially not going ahead with some central routes and with a quality / design which was criticised.  Though in the end Boris did come good on this.

I think putting your head above the parapet by proposing and actually initiating a plan for mass cycling level anything in the UK does deserve more credit than the usual "they had a big idea, whoopee" talk. Certainly orders of magnitude more than most of the chat about "we'd like to see much more active travel" / "encouraging cycling" empty words we normally hear.

Witness quarter-century anniversaries of previous initiatives coming and going, as we discover than money is promised and then doesn't materialise as normal.

Khan thankfully hasn't reversed matters although despite recent controversy it seems he's been fairly tepid on the active travel.  All London mayors are constrained by the Boroughs of course - good luck if Ken and Chelsey is in the way of your cycle route!

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Rich_cb replied to chrisonabike | 1 year ago
1 like

My point was that funding and implementation are the hard bits.

Boris, for all his flaws, got the bike hire scheme from idea to reality, same with the 'cycling superhighways'.

If it had been left to Livingstone they might have ended up as another lamentable anniversary.

The Lib Dems stuck their heads over the parapet, Livingstone just copied them.

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Rendel Harris replied to Rich_cb | 1 year ago
2 likes

Rich_cb wrote:

Because ideas are the difficult part. By contrast, planning, funding and implementation are an absolute doddle. It wasn't even Livingstone's idea, he copied it from the Lib Dems who copied it from Paris IIRC.

1. All the plans for the scheme were unveiled by Livingstone when still in office in February 2008, and Johnson used them almost verbatim. No blame or criticism there, it would have been foolish and wasteful to start from scratch when the work had already been done.

2. Of course Livingstone copied the Paris Velib scheme and made no secret of the fact that he did. I expect the LibDems did also suggest it, after the success of the Velibs everyone in London was saying why can't we have the same. Unless he was the first person in the world ever to think of having a bike hire scheme clearly he would draw on the expertise and experience created by previous schemes.

3. Johnson can take credit for arranging the sponsorship, it's true. With whom did he arrange it? Barclays, with whose Chief Executive, Bob Diamond (later to be forced to resign over the Libor scandal), Johnson had a close personal relationship. At the time Barclays' £50M sponsorship was questioned as being far too cheap a price to pay for such a spectacular advertising opportunity. A later inquiry by the London Assembly budget committee found the tendering process had been questionable and that Johnson had not secured the best possible funding for the scheme that he could have done had there been an open bidding process. Barclays announced in 2013 that they were pulling out of sponsorship, despite the fact that Johnson had announced in 2011 that it would run to 2018. They only paid half of the £50M they had agreed with Johnson for sponsorship.

4. Johnson promised when he launched the scheme that it would not cost London's taxpayers a penny: at the point at which Barclays pulled out the sponsorship revenue and user fees were only covering half the cost, with the rest being made up from tax revenue. In the first eight years of the scheme (2010-2018) it cost the taxpayers £200M.

In precis, it was Livingstone's idea, of course drawing on inspiration from similar schemes elsewhere, and the planning and logistics were completed under his administration. Johnson secured the funding, unsurprisingly given what we have seen subsequently, in a less-than-transparent (aka shady/corrupt) manner, giving a cutprice deal to his mates who only paid half their obligations, leaving the scheme in serious deficit. He then claimed all the credit for the whole scheme and declared it a great success even though he failed to deliver what he had promised and forced taxpayers to make up the shortfall.

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Rich_cb replied to Rendel Harris | 1 year ago
1 like

Livingstone copied a scheme in use elsewhere, secured precisely no money to pay for it and delivered precisely zero bikes.

Sounds like he should definitely get the credit.

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Rendel Harris replied to Rich_cb | 1 year ago
1 like

Rich_cb wrote:

Livingstone copied a scheme in use elsewhere, secured precisely no money to pay for it and delivered precisely zero bikes. Sounds like he should definitely get the credit.

He delivered precisely zero bikes because he was voted out of office before he could implement his plans which he revealed not long before the election. Johnson took his plans, gave the sponsorship at a ridiculously reduced rate to a corrupt friend of his (who only ever paid half the money promised) and implemented a scheme that ran up £200 million in debt for the taxpayer in its first eight years, having promised it wouldn't cost them a penny. Yay, kudos Bozza!

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Rich_cb replied to Rendel Harris | 1 year ago
1 like

Who to give credit to is the question.

The man who delivered 0 bikes and 0 funding or the man who delivered both funding and bikes?

It's a tricky one.

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Rendel Harris replied to Rich_cb | 1 year ago
3 likes

Rich_cb wrote:

Who to give credit to is the question. The man who delivered 0 bikes and 0 funding or the man who delivered both funding and bikes? It's a tricky one.

Come now, even for you this is somewhat absurd. Politician A creates a plan, gets voted out shortly after presenting it. Politician B is elected, takes over plan wholesale, implements it by selling sponsorship at a ridiculously low rate to his cronies (who later pull out having delivered only half of even the ridiculously low amount promised) and having promised it wouldn't cost the taxpayer a penny, runs the scheme so badly that after eight years it's £200M in debt, and you think this is a matter of credit for Politician B?

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chrisonabike replied to Rich_cb | 1 year ago
2 likes

Rich_cb wrote:

Who to give credit to is the question. The man who delivered 0 bikes and 0 funding or the man who delivered both funding and bikes? It's a tricky one.

I think both - assuming you can draw a line between Ken setting the thing in motion* and Boris overseeing this get done.  Which seems to be the case.

In a way this is sad because merely saying "I think we should have a hire scheme for bikes in a place well-suited for it and there should be more cycling infra to encourage people to cycle" shouldn't be seen as revolutionary ideas nor as something particularly bold.  But in the UK it was both.  Indeed still is to some extent over a decade later.

* Which it seems he did - as opposed to "gee wouldn't it be nice if there were bikes you could rent and places to cycle on".

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Rich_cb replied to chrisonabike | 1 year ago
0 likes

The Gilligan quote elsewhere in the thread would seem to indicate that Ken didn't do very much at all.

A manifesto promise isn't usually worth the paper it's printed on. I'm not sure why, in this particular case, people are so keen to give credit where it's clearly not due.

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Steve K | 1 year ago
1 like

The biggest factor must be the competition from Lime etc.  My personal observations suggest more and more hire bikes are being used in London, but Santander bikes are reducing in proportion of these. 

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Dicklexic | 1 year ago
3 likes

What sort of numbers are the cycle lane counters recording this year? Are they showing a similar reduciton in usage, or is it perhaps that there are still lots of people cycling, just that they are using other hire bike companies or have purchased their own bike?

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Rendel Harris replied to Dicklexic | 1 year ago
3 likes

Dicklexic wrote:

What sort of numbers are the cycle lane counters recording this year? Are they showing a similar reduciton in usage, or is it perhaps that there are still lots of people cycling, just that they are using other hire bike companies or have purchased their own bike?

Not sure of the counter numbers but, anecdotally, riding in central London most weekdays I'd say there are more commuters this year than ever; definitely people are using Lime and HumanForest much more this year. A couple of years back I reckon I'd see five Santanders to every one of another company's, that ratio seems pretty much reversed now.

ETA just looked up the figures for the Embankment counter, 1,730,202 journeys as of yesterday, can't find an exact match but at the end of July last year it had recorded a shade under 1.8M, so a small dropoff from last year which could possibly be down to the weather but nothing like the 33% drop TfL has experienced in hires.

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Velo-drone | 1 year ago
3 likes

I use them to get back to Euston on days that I run in to work - which used to be 1-2 times per week.

It is now a lot less for various reasons.  The price increase doesn't really affect me since my journey is always under 30 mins and only one in the day - so it's actually a little cheaper.

But if a Lime is right outside the door when I come out, the convenience is sometimes hard to resist, especially if the nearest Santander Bike stand is empty or has 1/2 bikes left (which usually means they are unreleaseable, or else risk that they have gone by the time I get there).

But most of all, my work pattern has substantially changed - I am in London 1 day a week now compared to 4 days a week before.

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Zjtm231 | 1 year ago
4 likes

Er hello all the electric scooters and bikes that are now everwhere??

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BaselGooner | 1 year ago
7 likes

As someone living outside UK i used to use the Santander bikes a lot - the £2 charge was brilliant BUT was probably too low. What is really annoying is there is no fare cap as there is with buses and tubes. After 3 bus rides (same cost per ride as bike) the cost is capped and so all bus rides after are free. They don't do this for bikes (they want people to subscribe - so tourists are the cash cows as you cannot subscribe without UK address) - a day cycling around London now is significantly more expensive.

 

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AidanR | 1 year ago
5 likes

The number of hacked Lime bikes being ridden around for free probably hasn't helped, either

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