The London Cycle Hire Scheme (or Velib as the Parisians call it) will be launching in London on 30th July 2010.
Based on the French model the public bicycle sharing scheme for short journeys in and around central London will be available for residents and tourists alike.
You’ll be able to pick up a bicycle, use it as you like, and then drop it off, ready for the next person to use. There will be 400 special docking stations to choose from. Pick up and drop off at any station you fancy.
To hire a bicycle you will need to pay an access fee (right to use the scheme) and a usage charge (based on the duration of the journey).
Mr Brown said that London would start with 6,000 bikes in the summer of 2010, but this would quickly double if there was strong demand. Paris started with 10,000 bikes and now has 20,000. He said that concerns about street clutter meant that London would not be copying the Parisian idea of giving an advertising company free hoardings in return for funding the scheme.
Unlike Paris, where the cost of the bikes and docking stations is funded privately in return for advertising space, London council tax payers will have to contribute much of the £75 million cost of the scheme. That apart, Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London, is copying almost every other aspect of “Velib”, the Parisian scheme, which takes its name from a contraction of vélo (bike) and liberté (free).
So how is it going to work? The scheme will cover an area approximating the ‘Fare Zone 1′ area of around 44 square kilometers, roughly from Tower Hill in the east to Kensington in the west and from Elephant and Castle in the south to King’s Cross in the north.
Let’s hope London will learn from Paris’s mistakes as Velib over there has been plagued by vandalism and theft alongside logistical issues. Also while access and usage charges start only at £1.00 the scheme can be quite expensive if you need the bike for longer than a couple of hours. A good idea is to sign up with TFL and gain membership in the same way that you do with an oyster card, this will omit any access charges. The membership fee is a mere ₤3.00. Should you wish to use a bike for a longer time then perhaps it might be cheaper for you to use a company that specializes in hiring bicycles. One such option is Oybike, which specializes in cycle rental in Cardiff, Reading and Farnborough.
TFL’s main aim for the project is to relieve pressure from the overstrained buses and tubes. The market research estimates that 39 per cent of the users of hire bikes will be people who had previously walked their journey, 30 per cent will be former tube passengers and 24 per cent will be former bus passengers. A secondary, but important, aim is to make London more of a cycling city.
This will be a fantastic way to open up cycling to people who have never considered riding a bike in London. To that end, it must be accessible, creatively marketed with an emphasis on the grace, speed and sheer thrill of riding a bike around the centre of London. Velib had a dramatic impact on street life in Paris: overnight it became a festive city where people flirted at the traffic lights and took bicycle picnics by the Seine. Cycling lifts the spirit and brings joy to the soul.
