Barclays Cycle Hire – Extending East

Alexander Baxevanis, maker of the excellent free Cycle Hire Map app for the iPhone, has obtained a list of 227 proposed sites for the eastwards extension (and expansion of the existing area) of the Barclays Cycle Hires scheme through a Freedom of Information request on MySociety’s What Do They Know. Unfortunately TfL didn’t provide the exact locations of the proposed new docks, rather just the street names, or occasionally junctions.

I have taken the list and geocoded it – using Google Maps and Google Fusion Tables as a first pass, then manually geocoding the 40 or so that failed using OpenStreetMap data.

Red dots show the proposed new locations, with yellow dots showing the existing stands as of January 2011.

You can download the locations from the Google Fusion table here or view a larger version of the map here. See the FOI response for the source data set.

Very important caveats: Because the names are often only street names, the “dot” representing the new dock is placed fairly arbitrarily along the street – in reality, the actual location may be quite far along the street from this place. Consider that these locations are simply my guesses. Also, it is really important to emphasise these are the proposed locations – TfL has not yet started the planning process or consulted with the councils/residents yet. It is likely that quite a few of these will not actually be built, or will be relocated elsewhere, come later this year or early 2012 when the expansion goes live.

Along the way I discovered a number of curiosities, such as:

• the official name for College Green – the bit of grass outside the Palace of Westminster where MPs are often interviewed – being Abingdon (or Abington?) Street Gardens.
• a street that has just been born (photo) and doesn’t appear on any public web maps except OSM (now).
• the various “marketing” names for the new residential skyscrapers appearing around Canary Wharf, such as Streamlight, Ability Place and Pan Peninsula.

Indeed, many of the proposed sites are outside these large new residential blocks, and also outside many of the DLR and train/tube stations in Tower Hamlets – unlike the initial launch of the scheme, there seems to be no shying away from placing stands right next to the stations, where commuters are likely to be piling onto them.

(I was very impressed with Openlayers/Canvas heatmaps the other day, so the first picture above is a heatmap showing dock density, for the fully extended scheme. The background for that picture is OpenStreetMap.)