A trip on the London Barclays Cycle Hire thing
Posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 3:28pm. #
(Update: I’ve since written a more considered piece.)
You join me greedily drinking a coffee after my first trip on a London Transport bicycle, on the launch day of Barclays Cycle Hire.
At the moment, you need to be a Member of the Cycle Hire service to use one of these bikes. That involves signing up on the web and giving them your credit card details, after which they send you a little plastic key. Go and find a bicycle, insert they key in the lock, and you get charged a quid for a day’s access (but nothing more unless you use the bike longer than 30 minutes).
I like cycling, so was quite excited to test it out, so this afternoon gave it a go, cycling from Kings Cross to Covent Garden.
Yay: there were some free bikes on the stands where I wanted to pick up a bike.
Yay: my key worked, and I gained quick access to the bike.
Hmm: the bike is really, really, really heavy. Far heavier than my little Brompton.
Yay: it works well though. Nice comfortable ride, if a bit spongy.
Hmm: I’m used to wheels on a bike going round and round, not under some sort of constant brake. I suspect it’s the dynamo for the flashing LED headlights. (Aren’t flashing lights illegal? I was always told they were.)
Yay: the bike feels very sturdily built and should be decently free from vandalism.
Hmm: the bike’s huge.
Hmm: the gears are very low (presumably so you don’t end up going too fast).
Yay: on reaching the other end, there were a few spare spaces and the bike docked easily into the thingie.
Yay: it only took 13 minutes (according to my Android Cycle London app, which helpfully times it).
A good experience, even if I was a bit wobbly.
They’ll clearly get more people cycling, and this is clearly a good thing. I guess I’m slightly worried that people will assume that cycling means a really, really heavy bike, and very low gearing; certainly I was being overtaken by every other cyclist on the road. Let’s see whether my next trip – over the river this time – is quite as slow and ponderous.
–
My second trip (Covent Garden to Canvey Street) went without a hitch. This bike felt faster and more responsive, but I suspect that was because mostly I was cycling downhill; it felt leaden going over Blackfriars Bridge. Putting my bag on the basket in front of me (with the very strong elastic holding it in) made the cycling that little bit easier, too. The bike rack in Drury Lane was nearly full; this one in Bankside is probably two-thirds full. It must be a delicate balancing act, keeping enough bikes in each thingie.
As I set off, a bloke watched me leave and asked how much the bikes were to hire. It’s a shame it’s not very easy to answer that. “Well, it’s a pound a day, and then it’s free for any journey up to 30 minutes” is a difficult answer, when it ought to be “just a quid to you, guv”. Which is what I answered, incidentally, without the Guy Ritchie impersonation.
I wonder if I’ll be able to see where I travelled on the TFL website?
Lewis
Chris
Thanks for the review.
It’s not clear on the website whether you can just dock the bike in a spare slot at your destination and retrieve your plastic key when you reach your destination (which makes me wonder why one would need ‘up to four keys’) or whether the key remains in the original slot until you take the bike back, which would mean a maximum of 15 minutes radius (and no shopping) before you had to come back (which just seems daft).
The former would make sense, but would mean one could ‘bike hop’ across London without paying anything, but the latter means.. yeah.. more money for The Man (insert incredulous and raving mention of Hitler etc here).
Can you clarify this for an eejit like me, please?
Thankoo