As I woke up this morning after a long weekend recovering from Morocco there was an announcement in my inbox from TfL:
“Work starts today on London’s biggest cycle hire docking station”
As any Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme user will know Waterloo is one of the busiest cycle hire stations. In fact it has been so busy that Serco, the company who is contracted to run the cycle hire scheme, has been placing employees to manage the huge influx of bikes at rush hour.
In one incident there was even a bike stolen as so many bikes were being handed over to employees that it became almost impossible to manage.
By mid-December the new super station should be complete.
Waterloo however isn’t the only place with cycle hire issues. Perhaps the earliest criticism of the Cycle Hire Scheme was the lack of availability around key rail terminals. Places such as Kings Cross and Liverpool Street would also clearly benefit from additional space. It is often at these key commuter locations that space is at such a premium.
The addition of the larger Waterloo station would suggest that TfL are embracing the commuter as one of the key users of their cycle hire scheme. However, the motivation behind this move may just as easily be the additional cost of all the support staff that were required for the volume of hire bikes. Either way it’s good to see the scheme making progress.
See also:
- Cycle hire bike 14964 < my horror story!
- Cycle hire tips < insider tips to using the scheme
- Cycle hire routes < 3 great routes to try on a cycle hire bike
Image by Nic Price Flickr
I do think this is great but…. where are they going to dock??? All the central docking stations are full before 9 am….
It seems that the scheme is a victim of its own success.
It is good to see so many more cyclists on the road, since the scheme started.
I agree with the question where will they go? If this is just a tube replacement they will be displaced to central london (e.g. mayfair) in a moment and wait there until they are shunted back to somewhere and then the stations will have to be cleared in the evening for the rush hour. I’m not sure that this is what they are for? More suited to random movement around the city during the day. Getting from Waterloo to central London at rush hour may be better handled by the tube and busses.
Is the appearance of doing something, and/or the interests of Barclays the driving force behind this, or is it a solution to the lack of capacity – see the TfL feasibility study which states a minimum requirement for 6,000 bikes for trips in the Boris Bike zone, but excluding journeys to and from railway stations… Bike-sharing (as we know it) and large commuter railway stations (with large, one-way flows of traffic) are not compatible.
TfL want to work harder, not smarter.