Category: Bike Share

The GLA published an interesting report last week: Future transport – How is London responding to technological innovation. It focused mainly on drones, driverless cars and app-based services (as an example, CityMapper’s experimenting on turning its huge desire-line dataset, created from the data of its millions of users and their journeys, into a group-based taxishare service), but also included some details on bikeshare, and in particular the dockless “revolution” that is currently underway in the capital.

Not Looking Good for Santander Cycles

Some tidbits from the report include some depressing news from Transport for London regarding future of the Santander Cycles dock-based bikeshare system – “the scheme is also limited geographically to central London, with TfL having no plans to extend it.” Ouch.

Well, that’s a pity, but not entirely surprising. The reason are both political and financial:

• It was a system launched and promoted by a previous mayor, of the “other party”, who was more focused on cycling and also less afraid to challenge the status quo. The existence of the system (despite its problems), and the associated disruptive – but brilliant – segregated cycle lanes – have been revolutionary. But they will be ever associated with a previous mayor.
• Also despite the system being almost eight years old, TfL is still subsidising the system by over £3m a year. Too much unnecessary redistribution going on – using vans – presumably because they always have done it or other schemes have. Vans and drivers are expensive! And they clog up the streets. Incentivise users to do their own distribution – by using the bike itself – for rewards – much cheaper! The New York City system has “Bike Angels” (pic below) which actually has pretty decent rewards for riders who rebalance. There has also been an, I think, frankly misguided focus on keeping docking station density unnecessarily high throughout the area, and a focus on journey numbers over user utility, means the main beneficiaries are city workers getting from Waterloo to the Bank during weekdays and tourists circling Hyde Park at the weekends. Both groups have numerous other options, so the bikeshare here isn’t really solving any “last mile” mobility problems.

A flat rate of say 50p/20 min or £1/30 min, similar to the dockless systems (generally 50p/30 min), and moving the 20% least used docking stations so they were outside every tube/train station and inside every park and larger open spaces in Zone 2 to provide a ready source of obvious rides, would probably end up being more profitable, as there would be a massive surge in usage (right now it’s cheaper to get the bus!), particularly if it was integrated into Oyster card/contactless and was covered by daily/weekly capping. Why does it need to be profitably anyway? The buses (in London) aren’t, and the bikes encourage healthier outcomes, both to the user and surrounding pedestrians, than sitting on a bus emitting pollution.

London-Wide Regulation of Dockless

One important point from the report is suggesting that TfL should take the lead in regulating and so controlling the provision of dockless bikeshare systems on London streets, instead of the individual boroughs as present. This is an “obvious” thing to do – it is time consuming and inefficient for each operator to, assuming that they want a pan-London rollout, have 33 sets of negotiations with the 32 separate borough councils and the City of London, when much of London’s other transport operations are specified, operated or regulated by one entity – Transport for London. It also slows the rollout, makes the systems very expensive for operators to maintain if they are fragmented, particularly if each borough has slight differences in their specification (e.g. on maintenance response times). More importantly, it makes it less useful and more confusing for the user – both the start and the end of an intended journey need to be within an operating zone. Borough boundaries are somewhat arbitrary to most people living in London, and not easily noticed when crossing them. “London” is a more familiar area. Most commute journeys in London are radial – going towards or away from the centre (see pic below). The reluctance of many of the operators to even publish their operating zone except on their individual apps, also makes discovering the allowable area of a system – let alone using it – a challenge.

Curiously, a lot of the press leading from this report seemed to suggest that the recommendation of TfL taking on regulation of dockless bikeshare in London was in some way a clampdown on their operations, or a tightening of the environment, and would be therefore bad for the operators and presumably therefore good for those wanting to see these bikes off the streets. Rather an odd, negative spin. I don’t think it’s not that at all. Having TfL specifying and setting operational parameters for dockless systems, rather than 33 geographically limited entities doing so, can only be good for everyone concerned.

Smarter City? It’s All About the Data

My own take is that TfL regulation would be welcomed, but it should be linked with an incorporation of data into TfL’s own open data platform. A smart city is an open city, one where availability data on useable assets in the public realm is accessible to all, not to those tied to a particular platform (even if the transaction part needs operator control) or hidden to hide poor public value for money or failing/missing assets, as is happening for a system in a certain city up north. There is a need to democratise the information, in order to digitise the city. To this mind, dockless operators should be mandated to open up data on the location of bikes available to hire, hubs (preferred parking areas) and operating zones. This kind of information has generally always been made available by dock-based systems, dockless systems have so far not been compelled to release this as open data yet – at least in the UK.

To this mind, I am contemplating launching an operator data openness scoreboard for the UK – similar to one that was unveiled at a recent bikeshare hackathon event in Washington DC. I’ve also put together an interactive map showing the current coverage in London of the four active systems (Urbo, Ofo, Mobike and the dock-based Santander Cycles), plus known “hubs” where you are most likely to find bikes available for hire – N.B. not all the operators are using a hub-based approach across their whole areas. Because of the lack of open API data from most of the operators, much of this map is manually put together and so may be a little out of date – I will do my best to keep it current. The crucial data missing here of course is the current locations of bikes available to hire. For now, you’ll need to use each individual app.

How Dockless Might Work in London

Personally, I think that hub locations are one of the most important features of the new dockless systems. They can act as a point that is regularly stocked with bikes, meaning that regular users might not need to keep doing different journeys on foot to hunt down a bike. They also help the system keep order – they may help to minimise the amount of inconsiderate parking. Currently, the reward for finishing a journey at such a hub is minimal. Operators will have to be more ambitious if the hub-inducement model work. Something like halving the fee to finish a ride in a hub, and doubling it to finish a ride outside of an operating zone altogether. It should also be possible to have hubs outside of operating areas, for example, on specific pieces of private land where access has been granted, but the local authority has not granted permission.

More generally, I think, for large western cities like London, where pedestrian space will always be at a premium, the dockless model, as it stands, will not work. Either there won’t be enough bikes, so that no one uses the system, or the labour costs will be too high for the operators, or there will be too many bikes causing clutter. The system for London that I envisage, will work, is that Zone 1 gets around 1000 “mandatory hubs”, boxes painted on the ground, each around the size of a car parking space but mainly on the pavement, where any cycles from any of the dockless cycles may be left. TfL or boroughs get tough with the operators and users and impound bikes left outside of these zones by users, with operators getting fined for each impound and the operators passing on these fines (should they choose) to the delinquent user. Outside of Zone 1, the system could work as present, with recommended hubs. However boroughs/TfL need to stop operators creating hubs branded with only their own logos and signs, and instead create generic hubs. They can still just be painted lines on the ground – the bikes themselves should be all the branding needed.

See also my borough by borough scores, or the interactive map.

[Updated] Following Ofo’s recent expansion to Islington and the City of London, Mobike has also expanded to Islington and the City – here’s a set of operator-placed bikes outside Cally Road tube station:

This presumably means that you can now cycle from Acton in Ealing, the original London location for Mobike, to Islington, for 50p/half hour. You can’t end your journey in between the two boroughs, though. It would probably take you over an hour, so it would work out the same price as getting the London Overground between the two (£1.50 off-peak via Willesden Junction), in a slower but more healthy way.

The bikes have registration numbers starting “A02”, I think this means they are unfortunately the same design as the cramped and uncomfortable Manchester bikes (which are, I understanding going to be replaced soon with new European-market-designed bikes). Mancunians presumably would have been unimpressed with London getting the new ones first!

The new bicycles are not appear in in the Mobike app yet, although this may just be because the app is a bit flakey – you have to pan and zoom very close to the location to see it on the map, and the app regularly reports “servers busy”. Now if they just released an open bike location API it would make it a lot easier for everyone to find their bikes…

Just down the road, here’s another operator-placed set of Ofo bikeshare bikes, near Mount Pleasant, right on the borough boundary line between Islington and Camden:

The latter location is also served by the dock-based incumbent, Santander Cycles, for example seen here a few hundred metres further on, in Holborn Circus:

Ofo and Mobike bikes are allowed to be parked in the City, along with Santander Cycles (at docking stations). Only Santander Cycles can be parked in Camden borough, but that hasn’t stopped many Ofo bikes appearing available for use in Camden borough anyway – in theory, all of these users would get a penalty:

In practice, Ofo (and the other operators) want to expand, it’s the boroughs that are moving slowly (with good reason, after the oBike debacle) so I would imagine they will be slow to penalise such out-of-zone journeys. It’s all a bit confusing for the average person who just wants to do a quick one-way journey on a shared bike.

The bikeshare wars continue, meanwhile, plenty of London’s 33 boroughs* still don’t have any bikeshare system in them (see map at top, which shows grey shading for areas with an established commute-by-bicycle residential community).

Surely it’s only a matter of time though…

*Including the City of London which isn’t technically a borough.

Bikeshare system coverage in London, November 2017. Shading: Proportion of people who cycle to work.

Updated map showing bikeshare system coverage in London, June 2018

There are now five bikeshare systems operating in London:

Santander Cycles (Central London)

Photo: Copyright TfL.

Santander Cycles are red, they launched in July 2010 and currently have 9500 bikes on the street (around 12000 in total), covering an area of 110km across 11 boroughs and the City of London – this sounds impressive, but it is only 7% of London’s area (based on a 500m station buffer), and equates one bike for every 950 people in the capital. You can see the live state of the system (in terms of empty/full docking stations) on Bike Share Map. As a publically funded system, Santander Cycles have an excellent open data policy and release live docking station data which can be readily mapped, location information and historic journeys through TfL’s Open Data Portal.

Santander Cycles last week unveiled their “50000-series” bikes which are part-manufactured in the UK, with smaller wheels, bluetooth asset tags and a number of other enhancements, although in technology terms they still very much third-generation bikeshare bikes (“dumb” bike, smart dock) and the system remains expensive to use with a complicated pricing structure (£90/year or £2/day membership for journeys under half-hour, £2 per extra half-hour), with any expansion hamstrung by the very expensive docking station installation costs – so its footprint has only slightly expanded in the last few years. There have been some other innovations, such as widespread use of Blaze laserlights, and its current sponsor has also invested considerably in promoting the system. The Santander Cycles system looks expensive and rigid, particularly compared with the newer alternatives. It is, however, in terms of bike quality, maintenance and use, and public acceptance, the “gold standard” of bikeshare in London.

Mobike (LB Ealing)

Mobike (orange bikes) were the first dockless fourth generation* (smart bike, dumb dock) compliant (working with local authorities) system in London, which launched in Ealing in July this year – a far from obvious place to launch, as Ealing has a very low tradition of cycling in general (no dark areas in the map above). However, Mobike did have UK experience before, having had a bigger and higher-profile launch in two of Greater Manchester boroughs. Mobike persevered through initial bad publicity due to vandalism and can be seen on many streets of the city. Personally, I found Mobike extremely uncomfortable to cycle – their bikes have been shipped from the far east with little customisation, and their frames are designed for the far eastern rather than the European build (Europeans are typically bigger!) At its maximum extended saddle position, it was uncomfortably tiny to pedal one. This is a pity, presumably the extremely cheap mass manufacturing costs of sticking with their global design were too tempting.

The Ealing launch had a reported 750 bicycles although as ever you have to take the numbers with a pinch of salt. A quick look at the app reveals around 160 bikes in the preferred zones and around 10 parked elsewhere. Mobike is very cheap and has a simple to understand pricing model (£29 joining fee then 50p per half-hour ride). One nice touch is that if you have a membership of the Manchester system, it will work fine in London too. Ealing is not a densely populated inner-city borough and the 750 bicycles serve a huge 56 square kilometres – in practice, as shown on the app map, the bikes (and zones, shown with a “P”) are clustered in the eastern edge of the borough, around Acton. I wish Mobike good luck but they need more comfortable bikes and to get into a borough with an established cycling tradition, and operate around a larger area than the few square miles in the eastern end of this borough. Mobike, as a fully commercial operation, does not release bikeshare open data for Ealing (dockless bikeshare data does have theoretically considerable economic value), although they have plans to release it for Manchester (likely a stipulation from the local authority there) so maybe it will come here too in time.

Ofo (LB Hackney, LB Islington and City)

Ofo (yellow bikes) are, like Mobike, a big global player in dockless fourth generation bikeshare. They launched in Hackney – London’s spiritual home of regular cycling – in September, and have just announced (this week) an expansion to the neighbouring borough of Islington and the City of London, meaning serious commute potential of these bikes.

I have ridden an Ofo bike (a one-off in Manchester) and found it extremely comfortable – it felt like riding a “real” bike rather than an approximation of one. Like Mobike, Ofo have a low joining fee, a flat rate for usage and the membership can be used in their other systems (including Cambridge in the UK). Ofo has targetted boroughs with a good cycling tradition and also is, in some parts of the boroughs, in direct competition with the incumbent Santander Cycles – the only one to do so (see map below). Hopefully this competition will lead to innovations on both sides and not damage either.

Urbo (LB Waltham Forest)

Photo: Paul Gasson on Twitter.

Urbo (green bikes) are another dockless fourth generation bikeshare operator. They are an Irish company, although they are buying the bikes and technology (e.g. the smart lock and the apps) from China and customising locally. Their bikes are the most attractive of the new dockless bikeshare bikes I have seen (with a nice curve design on the frame) and appear (I haven’t ridden one yet) to be similar in overall build style, and so hopefully comfort, to Ofo’s bikes. Waltham Forest (39 sqkm in east London with some tradition of cycling, on its western edge) is their first system and it has only just launched this week. They also do not yet release open data (although they have only just launched). Ofo may be most useful for residents of Higham Hill, Poets Corner, the top of Walthamstow Village and certain other parts of the borough to get quickly to the stations on the efficient Victoria Line or Overground to central London.

Like Ofo and Mobike, Urbo have designated zones in their host boroughs and induce users (via cheaper journeys) to end their journeys in these zones (shown with the STOP icon on their app’s map, here). These zones come with a bespoke street sign erected by the local authority, as well as the usual taped/painted markings on the ground. It is a little surprising that Waltham Forest have included the operator logo on the signs (presumably to Urbo’s delight) as there is no good reason why other dockless systems, when they inevitably arrive here too, should use these spaces too. It is kind of like the council painting new car parking spaces on a street and putting up a sign, with the Ford logo, saying they are spaces for Ford cars only. They are just spaces on a road/pavement…

oBike (Withdrawn)

Then there’s oBike (orangey-yellow) which launched in July without coordinating with boroughs (using the Uber-style “forgiveness is easier than permission” modal), had a number of its bikes impounded by Wandsworth borough and withdrew from the capital – almost all of its bikes are lurking behind locked gates in an industrial park in Rainham so they aren’t included on the maps here. There is the odd one that got away from the purge and remains in central London. They will return, I’m sure, once the company has a strategy for compliance with TfL and the boroughs. oBike did at least wake up authorities to the fourth generation revolution, and force some much-needed policy documents to be hastily released. I rode a few oBikes and found them more comfortable than the Mobike but not as good as Ofo, Urbo or Santander Cycles.

November 3rd Snapshot

System	Type	Locations	Area /km2	Launch Date	Reported Bikes**	Available Bikes (Estimates)
Santander Cycles	Dock  -based	Central London	110	July 2010	12000	Was 10800 now 9600***
oBike	Pure  dockless	All London, but withdrawn	1570	July 2017	400 initially 5500 planned	Was 1500 now 6
Mobike	Zoned  dockless	West: Ealing	56	July 2017	750	160
Ofo	Incentive  dockless	North: Hackney, Islington & City	37	Sept 2017	300-400	Around 200
Urbo	Zoned  dockless	East: Waltham Forest	39	Nov 2017	250	40 (so far)

Of course, it’s hard to know how well these systems are being used, particularly as dockless systems don’t generally release this information (except if the numbers are particularly good, as occasional press releases). Santander Cycles reliably gets around 20000-40000 usages a day (i.e. 2-4 usages/bike/day), and certainly, on the more central parts of the Cycle Superhighways during rush hour, there is a sea of red Santander Cycles amongst the other cyclists. Anecdotally, I’ve a couple of Ofo bikes in use, but this is a bit unfair on Ofo and Urbo – I regularly cycle through Hackney on my own bike, but don’t generally pass Waltham Forest and Ealing. My sneaking suspicion is that Ofo will do quite well, by targeting the boroughs where there are going to be a lot of cyclists, and that Mobike and Urbo will either have to expand or will stay irrelevant in London’s overall cycling picture. This sounds harsh, but, as DataShine Region Commute and TubeHeartbeat show, Londoners move beyond their borough boundaries a lot. We shall see, we live in interesting times for bikeshare.

This map (an inset of the map above) shows the reach of the four systems (excluding oBike) in London. The shading behind shows the proportion of residents there who cycle to work (2011 Census data, Copyright ONS) and therefore likely enjoy good cycle infrastructure and community (e.g. cycle cafes, cycle repair workshops) that would help integrate bikeshare. Parts of Southwark and Lambeth look woefully underserved.

* The first generation of bikeshare systems were free bikes, left on streets for people to use. Inevitably they were stolen or broken. Second generation bikeshare systems used “dumb docking stations” where cash was used to release them. Users were therefore only out by the cash amount if they didn’t release them, and operators didn’t know where they were without visiting the docks, so again they got stolen and/or broken. Third generation bikeshare systems require the user to use credit cards (and so charge a large amount for non-return) and use smart docking stations which can report the status of themselves and their bikes. They have been very popular for the last few years, but require a large up-front investment and are very expensive to operate and maintain, so most are publically subsidised. Minor advances to these (such as GPS on some bikes, or integration with transit smart cards) are sometimes termed as fourth generation but are actually really just usability tweaks to fundamentally the same third generation concept. I am terming the new dockless systems, where the bikes know where they are (through an app, or their own communications) as fourth generation. Physical docking stations can still exist on the ground, to manage the bikes or provide a known starting location, but the bikes don’t have to be left there, if inconvenient – the “hybrid” model, as used in Brighton. Zoned dockless systems (Urbo, Mobike) have tapes on the ground as “preferred” docking zones, replacing the physical docks. Incentive dockless systems (Ofo) don’t even have the tapes – just virtual locations that appear in the app). The Pure dockless systems (oBike) don’t even have anything – inevitably resulting in bikes being scattered through an area.

** These numbers, reported in media and press releases, will invariably be higher that the “available bikes” currently on the streets (or visible in the app, in the case of the dockless systems). The difference can typically be explained by bikes will be in repair or reported broken, some will be in active use (although generally I try to measure at night to avoid this) or in redistribution, some will be in the warehouse, ready to come out in the near future. Ultimately though, if the bikes aren’t available for use, then they aren’t really any good to anyone, so bikes on streets is the number the operators should be reporting!

*** For larger, commuter heavy systems (like Santander Cycles) that are dock-based, there are good operational reasons to slightly reduce the numbers of bikes available during the winter months (where the commuter mode share will be higher) as the flows are more undirectional and therefore full-dock pressures are otherwise worse. In the summer, tourist use acts as a natural rebalancer.

London has a new bikeshare system – and it’s appeared by surprise, overnight. oBike is a dockless bikeshare. The company is based in Singapore, where it runs a number of large dockless systems there and in various Chinese cities, Melbourne, Amsterdam and Zurich, it is also likely coming to Washington DC in the USA and to Berlin in Germany, based on some recent job postings.

And now they’ve shipped 29 lorry-loads of nearly 5000 bicycles to London, the number being revealed in a now-deleted tweet by a logistics company:

Just under 1500 have been released so far, initially being “seeded” in groups along the major roads in Tower Hamlets and Hammersmith & Fulham boroughs (400 in each), and more recently in Wandworth, Clapham, Kennington, Lewisham, Waterloo, Harrow* and Enfield*, with “organic” use moving the bikes out as far south as Kingston, and as far east as East Ham (plus possibly in the river near Erith…) There have been several hundred journeys already, with the great majority of bikes having been moved at least once from their initial deployment.

Other players in the space are MoBike (in Manchester), OfoBike (in Cambridge – N.B. website currently down) and YoBike (in Bristol). Another company, GetBike, claimed to have launched in London a few months ago but the bikes, to date, have not appeared. Possibly, they got mired in council discussions. MoBike is also launching a system in Ealing, west London, at the end of the month. All five companies are based in Asia, where mass cycle manufacture is cheap, which had led some cities there ending up with huge heaps of dockless bikeshare bikes, being piled up by desperate city councils trying to keep their pavements clear.

As the bike is the only physical presence on the street, there are no permanent structures for the system and so authorities are not always involved in the process, but have to pick up the pieces and clear the streets – leading some in the dock-based bikeshare establishment to term the systems as rogue bikeshares. The European Cyclists Federation have this week published this timely position paper, where they term the systems slightly more politely as “unlicenced bikeshare” and suggest a potential framework to make the concept work in a European urban context. Whether the operators take notice of course is another matter…

Meanwhile, oBike’s rollout continues. In the map below, red dots with yellow borders show the most recently organically moved bikes (i.e. areas of red/yellow = popular use) while the blue dots with turquoise borders show ones which have not moved since their initial deployment. The other bikes (which someone has moved, but not recently) are shown with purple dots. The map is just a snapshot, and is manually created by myself, so I may have missed some bikes (but I think I’ve got almost all of them):

So far, most of the rollout has been to areas already served by bikeshare – the Boris Bikes (aka Santander Cycles). The real value add for London will be when Zones 3-6 (i.e. non-tourist, non-hipster “real London”) get the bikeshare. After 7 years of the Boris Bikes and no sign of them extending outwards, it’s about time the rest of us got the value of bikeshare too, particularly as our alternative options are more limited.

What is it?

Dockless bikeshare is different from the so-called “third generation” dock-based systems like London’s existing Santander Bicycles or “Boris Bikes”. It does away with docking stations and credit card terminals for charging and storing the bikes and administering the access, instead the bikes themselves have locks which contain a solar panel GPS receiver and SIM card for broadcasting their location, and are controlled by an app on your smartphone. It massively cuts down on the costs of the system because no docking stations are needed. London’s docking stations are very expensive as they have to go through the planning process, and also need to be wired up for power. There are also fewer staff needed – oBike do not employ drivers to redistribute the bikes, and also don’t have an established call-centre. Payments are handled entirely through the app. Maintenance teams are also, I suspect, likely to be minimal on the ground.

The bikes themselves are similar in size to the Boris Bikes, but come with solid rubber tyres (so no punctures). They feel around the same weight. The bikes only have only one gear, set quite low, so you can’t get up much speed. The bikes don’t feel heavier than a Boris Bike. They have the same, chunky “tank” feel to them and feel sturdy – the livery being bright yellow helps with visibility on the streets, which is a bonus.

Trying it Out

I took an oBike out for a spin yesterday afternoon. I noticed a pair parked (orange pins) close to the Facebook office at Euston Square – maybe some Facebookers trying out the latest thing?

On arrival, I was a little surprised to see the bikes were parked on the other side of the road (small blue pin). Still, my own phone’s GPS was saying I was on the other side of a large building (blue dot)…

The process of getting the bike was straightforward – I had already paid the £29 refundable deposit (£49 from August) by entering my card details into the app on my phone, so it was just a case of clicking “Unlock” and the scanning the QR code on the bike’s stem. Around 10 seconds later (with communication through your phone’s Bluetooth or through the SIM card on the lock – I’m not sure) the lock on the bike clicked open and the app’s timer started. Neat! The whole signup process was far more streamlined than with the Boris Bikes, where you have to go to a docking station, use the terminal there, page through tens of screens of information and put in your credit card at least twice. Here, you can be on board in less than a minute, with subsequent hires even quicker.

My bike already had its seat raised to the highest position (or higher still, as there was some brown scuffing there) so no adjustments needed. I headed across Euston Circus and down to the British Museum. Unfortunately, my bike had a distinct squeak every time the back wheel rotated, although squeezing the brake stopped it for a few seconds. The brakes themselves are excellent (perhaps I noticed this particularly as my own bike brakes are poor) and everything seemed OK. The bike appeared in good condition, no rubbish had collected in the basket. The handlebars are very wide, so I couldn’t squeeze through the usual gaps between cars and buses. I didn’t find the handlebars very grippy – they are plastic rather than rubber, and my left hand slipped off at one point (I was juggling a mobile phone at the time). In all, not the fastest cycle but perfect fine for utility riding and definitely still faster than walking or getting the bus.

There were various Boris Bikers around, I must have passed at least 10 in my 15 minute ride, but no other oBikes – yet! At the end of my journey I dropped the bike beside a bike rack beside Euston Square station. It wasn’t immediately obvious how to end the journey – you don’t press anything in the app, instead you pull the lock switch manually back across the back wheel, until you hear a reassuring click. A few seconds later, as long as you have Bluetooth switch on, on your phone, then the app beeps and confirms the journey as complete.

On finishing, the app presents an attractive display showing your start and finish, time, and a “route”, however the route is simple the Google Maps route for bicycles rather than the actual journey taken. The distance also bears no correlation to either the Google Maps “shortest path” route on the map, or the actual distance taken, which is very odd. For the finish location itself, the GPS had once again not given a particularly accurate result, and it looked like I’d cycled the bike straight into the A&E department at University College Hospital. Only 100m or so off again, but not ideal for discovery:

I tried another bike out a bit later. This didn’t have a squeak, however the basket was tilted slightly to one side – not a biggie but still a bit worrying that quirks like this are appearing so soon into the deployment. The bike coped just fine with the rough surface on the River Lea towpath, including over several speedbumps. However, on a return journey, the unlocking process proved to be rather fraught. The QR code was read fine by my phone, but the communication to the lock was not working well, and it kept timing out. Only after around 6 attempts, including moving the bike around. The area we were in had quite poor mobile reception so this may be part of the problem. Still, the few minutes delay to the journey was frustrating. However, once we were moving, the bike itself performed well.

Opportunities

I really like the app, and the payment structure is excellent – 50p flat rate per 30 minutes represents much better value than the £2/day for 30-minute-max journeys on the Boris Bikes. I really didn’t like that, before oBike, it was cheaper to get a bus than a bicycle in London. The reward system is a great idea, it always made sense to incentivise riders to do the tasks of the operator, and the lack of redistribution is another good thing – I always thought it was a huge waste of time redistributing bicycles to one place, only to redistribute them back later.

The fact that, rather being constrained to docks, the allowed operating area is the whole of London, is great. Already, one bike has ended up at Heathrow in the far west of London:

The lack of docks mean that the users set the area of coverage. Finally, Hackney and Haringey, Lewisham and Rotherhithe, have the bikeshare that I am sure would always have been popular there.

I do also like the name – oBike (five letters, two syllables) rolls off the tongue a lot more easily than Barclays Cycle Hire or Santander Cycles.

Challenges

I’m not totally convinced that oBike will survive long-term – despite assertions to the contrary by some operators of these dockless bikeshares, the bikes will need maintenance due to the rough weather, roads and people in London. Whether they get any will be interesting to see. The bikes I tried out have only been on the streets for four days, and for the first one I tried have picked up a loud squeak so quickly, and the second one to have a wonky basket, is not great. The bikes are also a little too small for the British frame – having said that I am 6′ and I got around OK on one, but with the seat-post extended to its absolute maximum. There have been some cases of the seat-posts easily coming right off when extended further.

Also – some people will inevitably be hard on the bikes. They are not that indestructible, and some people will see them as a cheap way of getting a bike. Some will end up in the Thames. Councils will end up confiscating some, as Hammersmith & Fulham has already threatened to do. Not getting the council involved is brave – they may have looked at the Cambridge example where the council insisted that another operator reduce its launch from 500 bikes to 20 – there are obvious advantages with not having to deal with 33 separate councils in London (+ the City + TfL and the GLA) and just sticking the bikes out there – but oBike could have made life easier for themselves by distributing them more discretely, to avoid the ire of grumpy councils and pedestrians – placing one or two bikes together, at the most, ad on side roads rather than main roads, beside existing cycle parking racks, rather than obstructing pavements, and focusing on Zones 3-6 first (even if that results in a slower initial takeup). And a commitment to maintenance or organised disposal would also be good – at the moment no one knows what will happen to the bikes after they start to wear out. The scenes of “bicycle graveyards” and huge heaps of brightly coloured bicycles, in the cities of the far east that are full of dockless bikeshares, are worrying.

I hope that oBike is a success, and the bicycles survive grumpy councils, the kids who just want a free bike, and the weather. If it provides an incentive to give the Boris Bikes a kick up the backside (50p per 30 minutes flat rate and all-London low density coverage please!) then that on its own would be a result. Providing a bikeshare out into London’s Zone 3 and further is a real winner for shared mobility options outside London’s already well connected central core.

* These have since been removed, I understand, following discussions with the councils there. The company however did not switch off the GPS trackers on the removed bikes, and so have revealed the location of their depot, at Rainham on the very edge of east London:

Map background Copyright HERE Maps. Top photo Copyright JC, bottom photo Copyright SR.

Here’s an interesting graph, which combines data on total journeys per day on London’s bicycle sharing system (currently called “Santander Cycles”) from the London Data Store, with counts of available bicycles per day to hire, from my own research database. The system launched in summer 2010 and I started tracking the numbers almost from the start.

You can see the two big expansions of the system as jumps in the numbers of available bikes – to all of Tower Hamlets in early 2012, and to Putney and Fulham in late 2013. Since then, the system has somewhat stagnated in terms of its area of availability, although encouragingly at least the numbers of available bikes has remained constant at around 9500, suggesting that at least the operator is on top of being able to maintain and repair the bikes (or regularly source new ones). Some of the individual bikes have had 4000 trips on them. There is a small expansion due in the Olympic Park in spring 2016, but the 8 new docking stations represents only a 1% increase in the number of docking stations across the system, so I doubt it will have a significant impact on the numbers of available bikes for use.

There is a general downward trend in the numbers of uses of each bike per day, since the halycon Olympic days of Summer 2012, over and above the normal seasonal variation, which concerns me. The one-year moving average recently dipped below 3 uses of each bike per day, this summer, and I am not confident it will pick up any time soon. (The occasional spikes in uses/bike, by the way, generally correspond to sunny summer bank holidays, tube strikes and Christmas Day).

To rejuvenate the system and draw in more users, rather than relying on the established commuter and tourist flows which likely dominate the current usage, I am convinced that the system needs to expand – not necessarily in terms of the number of bikes or docking stations, but in its footprint. I think the system would be much improved by dropping the constraining rule on density (which approximates to always having one docking station every 300m) and instead redistributing some of the poorly performing docking stations themselves further out. It’s crazy that, five years on, there are no docking stations in central Hackney, Highbury, or Brixton, three areas with an established cycling culture and easily cycle-able into the centre of London. Conversely, Putney and Tower Hamlets simply don’t need the high density of docking stations that they currently have, except in specific areas (such as around the train/tube stations in Putney, and Canary Wharf).

Ideally we would have a good density of docking stations throughout cycleable London but, as docking stations (and bikes) are very expensive, I would suggest that TfL instead adopts the model used in Bordeaux (below). Here, the city retains a high-dense core serving tourists, commuters and other centrally-based workers, but adopts a much lower density in the suburbs, so that, while tourists can still “run into” docking stations they don’t know about in the centre thanks to the high density, local users can benefit from the facility in their neighbourhood too, even if it requires a little longer walk to get to it.

Technical note: Before November 2011, the London numbers included bicycles that were in a docking station but not available to hire (i.e. marked as broken). This exaggerates the number of available bikes (and correspondingly reduces the number of hires/bike/day from the true value) in this period by a small amount – typically around 3-5%, an effect I am not considering significant for this analysis.

A big announcement for the “Boris Bikes” today, aka Barclays Cycle Hire. London’s bikeshare system, the second largest in the western world after Paris’s Velib and nearly five years old, will be rebranded as Santander Cycles, and the bikes with have a new, bright red branding – Santander’s corporate colour, and conveniently also London’s most famous colour. As well as the Santander logo, it looks like the “Santa Bikes” will have outlines of London’s icons – the above publicity photo showing the Tower of London and the Orbit, while another includes the Shard and Tower Bridge. A nice touch to remind people these are London’s bikes.

It’s great that London’s system can attract “big” sponsors – £7m a year with the new deal – but another document that I spotted today reveals (on the last page) that, despite the sponsorship, London’s system runs at a large operating loss – this is all the more puzzling because other big bikeshare systems can (almost) cover their operating costs – including Washington DC’s which is both similar to London’s in some ways (a good core density, same bike/dock equipment) and different (coverage into the suburbs, rider incentives); and Paris’s (right), which has a very different funding model, and its own set of advantages (coverage throughout the city) and disadvantages (little incentive to expand/intensify). What are they doing right that London is not?

In financial year 2013/4, London’s bikeshare had operating costs of £24.3m. Over this time period, the maximum number of bikes that were available to hire, according to TfL’s Open Data Portal was 9471, on 26 March 2014. This represents a cost of just over £2500 per bike, for that year alone. If you look at it another way, each bike is typically used three times a day or ~1000 times a year, so that’s about £2.50 a journey, of which, very roughly, the sponsor pays about £0.50, the taxpayer £1 and the user about £1. In those terms it does sound better value but it’s still a surprisingly expensive system.

As operating costs, these don’t include the costs of buying the bikes or building the docking stations. Much of the cost therefore is likely ocurring in two places:

1. Repairing the bikes – London’s system is wildly* successful, so each bike sees a lot of use every day, and the wear and tear is likely to be considerable. This is not helped by the manufacturers of the bikes going bust a couple of years ago – so there are no “new” ones out there to replace the older ones – New York City, which uses the same bikes, is suffering similar problems. (* Update: To clarify, based on a comment from BorisWatch, this assertion is a qualitative one, based on seeing huge numbers of the bikes in use, in certain places at certain times of the day. Doubtless, some do remain dormant for days.)
2. Rebalancing/redistribution activity, operating a fleet of vehicles that move bikes around.

I have no great issues with the costs of the bikes – they are a public service and the costs are likely a fraction of the costs of maintaining the other public assets of roads, buses, railway lines – but it is frustrating to see, in the document I referred to earlier, that the main beneficiaries are in fact tourists (the Hyde Park docking stations consistently being the most popular), commuters (the docking stations around Waterloo are always popular on weekdays), and those Londoners lucky enough to live in Zone 1 and certain targeted parts of Zone 2 (south-west and east). Wouldn’t be great if all Londoners benefited from the system?

Here’s 15 ways that London’s bikeshare could be made better for Londoners (and indeed for all) – and maybe cheaper to operate too:

1. Scrap almost all rebalancing activity. It’s very expensive (trucks, drivers, petrol), and I’m not convinced it is actually helping the system – in fact it might be making it worse. Most cycling flows in London are uni-directional – in to the centre in the morning, back out in the evening – or random (tourist activity). Both of these kinds of flows will, across a day, balance out on their own. Rebalancing disrupts these flows, removing the bikes from where they are needed later in the day (or the following morning) to address a short-term perceived imbalance that might not be real on-the-ground. An empty docking station is not a problem if no one wants to start a journey there. Plus, when the bikes are in sitting in vans, inevitably clogged in traffic, they are of no use to anyone. Revealingly, the distribution drivers went on strike in London a few months ago and basically everything carried on as normal. Some “lightweight” rebalancing, using cycle couriers and trailer, could help with some specific small-scale “pinch points”, or responding to special events such as heavy rainfall or a sporting/music event. New York uses cyclists/trailers to help with the rebalancing.
2. Have a “guaranteed valet” service instead, like in New York. This operates for a certain number of key docking stations at certain times of the day, and guarantees that someone can start or finish their journey there. London already has this, to a certain extent, at some stations near Waterloo, but it would be good to highlight this more and have it at other key destinations. This “static” supply/demand management would be a much better use of the time of redistribution drivers.
3. Have “rider rewards“, like in Washington DC. Incentivise users to redistribute the bikes themselves, by allowing a free subsequent day’s credit (or free 60-minute journey extension) for journeys that start at a full docking station and end at an empty one. This would need to be designed with care to ensure “over-rebalancing”, or malicious marking of bikes as broken, was minimised. Everyone values the system in different ways, so some people benefit from a more naturally balanced system and others benefit from lower costs using it.
4. Have more flexible user rules. Paris’s Velib has an enhanced membership “Passion” that allows free single journeys of up to 45 minutes rather than every 30 minutes. London, like Paris, is a large city, and the current 30 minute cutoff seems short and arbitrary, when considering most bikes are used around three times a day. Increasing the window would therefore have little impact on the overall distribution of the system and might in fact benefit it – because the journeys from the terminal stations to the City or the West End, which are the most distinctive flows seen, are acheived comfortably in under half an hour. In London, you have to wait 5 minutes between hires, but most systems (Paris, Boston, New York) don’t have this “timeout” period. To stop people “guarding” recently returned bikes for additional use, an alternative could be make it a 10 minute timeout but tie it to the specific docking station (or indeed a specific bike) rather than system-wide. Then, if people are prepared to switch bikes or docking stations, they can continue on longer journeys for free.
5. Adjust performance metrics. TfL (and the sponsors) measure performance of the system in certain ways, such as the time a docking station remains empty at certain times of the day. I’m not sure that these are helpful – surely the principle metric of value (along with customer service resolution) is the number of journeys per time period and/or number of distinct users per time period. If these numbers go down, over a long period, something’s wrong. The performance metrics, as they stand, are perhaps encouraging the unnecessary and possibly harmful rebalancing activity, increasing costs with no actual benefit to the system.
6. Remove the density rule (one docking station every ~300 metres) except in Zone 1. Having high density in the centre and low density in the suburbs works well for many systems – e.g. Bordeaux, Lyon (above) and Washington DC, because it allows the system to be accessible to a much larger population, without flooding huge areas with expensive stations/bikes. An extreme example, this docking station is several miles from its nearest neighbour, in a US city.
7. Build a docking station outside EVERY tube station, train station and bus station inside the North/South Circular (roughly, Zones 1-3). Yes, no matter how hilly* the area is, or how little existing cycling culture it has – stop assuming how people use bikes or who uses them! Bikeshare is a “last mile” transport option and it should be thought of as part of someone’s journey across London, and as a life benefit, not as a tourist attraction. The system should also look expand into these areas iteratively rather than having a “big bang” expansion by phases. It’s crazy that most of Hackney and Islington doesn’t have the bikeshare, despite having a very high cycling population. Wouldn’t be great if people without their own bikes could be part of the “cycling cafe culture” strong in these places? For other places that have never had a cycling culture, the addition of a docking station in a prominent space might encourage some there to try cycling for the first time. (*This version of the bikes could be useful.)
8. Annual membership (currently £90) should be split into peak and off-peak (no journey starts from 6am-10am) memberships, the former increased to £120 and the latter decreased back to £45. Unlike the buses and trains, which are always full peak and pretty busy off-peak too, there is a big peak/offpeak split in demand for the bikes. Commuters get a really good deal, as it stands. Sure, it costs more than buying a very cheap bike, but actually you aren’t buying the use of a bike – you are buying the free servicing of the bike for a year, and free distribution of “your” bike to another part of central London, if you are going out in the evening. Commuters that use the bikes day-in-day-out should pay more. Utility users who use the bike to get to the shops, are the sorts that should be targetted more, with off-peak membership.
9. A better online map *cough* of availability. The official map still doesn’t have at-a-glance availability. “Rainbow-board” type indications of availability in certain key areas of London would also be very useful. Weekday use, in particular, follows distinct and regular patterns in places.
10. Better indication of where the nearest bikes/docks are, if you are at a full/empty docking station, i.e. a map with route indication to several docking stations nearby with availability.
11. Better static signage of your nearest docking station. I see very few street signs pointing to the local docking station, even though they are hard-built into the ground and so generally are pretty permanent features.
12. Move more services online, have a smaller help centre. A better view of journeys done (a personal map of journeys would be nice) and the ability to question overpayments/charges online.
13. Encourage innovative use of the bikeshare data, via online competitions – e.g. Boston’s Hubway data visualisation competitions have had lots of great entries. These get further groups interested in the system and ways to improve it, and can produce great visuals to allow the operator/owner to demonstrate the reach and power of the system.
14. Allow use of the system with contactless payment cards, and so integration with travelcards, daily TfL transport price caps etc. The system can’t use Oyster cards because of the need to have an ability to take a “block payment” charge for non-return of the bikes. But with contactless payment, this could be achieved. The cost of upgrading the docking points to take cards would be high, but such docking points are available and in use in many of the newer US systems that use the same technology.
15. Requirement that all new housing developments above a certain size, in say Zone 1-3 London, including a docking station with at least one docking point per 20 residents and one new bike per 40 residents, either on their site or within 300m of their development boundary. (Update: Euan Mills mentions this is already is the case, within the current area. To clarify, I would like to see this beyond the current area, allowing an organic growth outwards and linking with the sparser tube station sites of point 7.)

London has got much right – it “went big” which is expensive but the only way to have a genuinely successful system that sees tens of thousands of journeys on most days. It also used a high-quality, rugged system that can (now) cope with the usage – again, an expensive option but absolutely necessary for it to work in the long term. It has also made much data available on the system, allowing for interesting research and increasing transparency. But it could be so much better still.

Washington DC’s systems – same technology as London’s, not that much smaller, but profitable.

The above graphic (click for full version) shows 12.4 million bicycle journeys taken on the Barclays Cycle Hire system in London over seven months, from 13 December 2013, when the south-west expansion to Putney and Hammersmith went live, until 19 July 2014 – the latest journey data available from Transport for London’s Open Data portal. It’s an update of a graphic I’ve made for journeys on previous phases of the system in London (& for NYC, Washington DC and Boston) – but this is the first time that data has been made available covering the current full extent of the system – from the most westerly docking station (Ravenscourt Park) to the the most easterly (East India), the shortest route is over 18km.

As before, I’ve used Routino to calculate the “ideal” routes – avoiding the busiest highways and taking cycle paths where they are nearby and add little distance to the journey. Thickness of each segment corresponds to the estimated number of bikeshare bikes passing along that segment. The busiest segment of all this time is on Tavistock Place, a very popular cycle track just south of the Euston Road in Bloomsbury. My calculations estimate that 275,842 of the 12,432,810 journeys, for which there is “good” data, travelled eastwards along this segment.

The road and path network data is from OpenStreetMap and it is a snapshot from this week. These means that Putney Bridge, which is currently closed, shows no cycles crossing it, whereas in fact it was open during the data collection period. There are a few other quirks – the closure of Upper Ground causing a big kink to appear just south of Blackfriars Bridge. The avoidance of busier routes probably doesn’t actually reflect reality – the map shows very little “Boris Bike” traffic along Euston Road or the Highway, whereas I bet there are a few brave souls who do take those routes.

My live map of the docking stations, which like the London Bikeshare itself has been going for over four years, is here.

[Update – A version of the map appears in Telegraph article. N.B. The article got a little garbled between writing it and its publication, particularly about the distinction between stats for the bikeshare and for commuter cyclists in London.]