First experience of Boris Bikes

First experience of Boris Bikes

The other day my wife and I tried the Barclays Cycle Hire bikes for the first time. Although a keen cyclist I had never actually hired one of these ubiquitous hire bikes, which are the highlight of Boris Johnson's flagship scheme to get London on 2 wheels and kick start a cycling revolution.

We had thought it would be a great idea to visit a few museums across London with the help of Boris bikes.
The price is very reasonable £1 per 24 hours for casual one off users. In that time frame you can hire a bike as many times as you want, but you have to return your bike after 30 minutes to a docking station or you will incur an extra fee. All you need to use the scheme is a debit card - you can just rock up and hire and off you go. No need to register beforehand.

We started off at Waterloo bridge after having viewed a photo exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall,  cycled across to Parliament Square (scary for my wife) and onwards through St James Park to Leicester square where we found a docking station with no problems. Our 30 minutes were up. We then hired another couple of bikes and cycled to the Natural History Museum. Again no problems finding a docking station nor free docks for the bikes. Finally at South Kensington we hire another 2 bikes and cycled back towards Victoria.

So what was the verdict? 

• Definitely very cheap (the whole day costs us £2)  10/10
• The Canadian-made bikes are very sturdy with great brakes and have working flashing LED lights, and very low gears to compensate for their heavy weight  8/10
• However the payment station on-screen instructions are not the most intuitive - TfL need to review their instructions and make them easier to understand for people who have never used the system before
• Also 3 times the release code issuing system at the docking stations at 3 different locations told us that it couldn't process our request with no other information than that and after spending 20 minutes trying to get it to work we eventually had to call TfL to resolve the situation. So that gets a 4/10
•  Cycling in London on a Boris bike? Pedestrians are  happy to see you on a bike as long as you go slowly through pedestrianised streets. Still a lack of quality cycle paths but lots of improvements recently. We could do with more pedestrian-only paths converted to joint pedestrian/cycle access, also 1 way streets for cars should be made 2 way streets for bikes.We didn't get any dagger looks. Cars in London are still somewhat aggressive, and my wife was scared going round Parliament Square but I guess it's just a matter of drivers getting used to see slow moving, chilled Boris bikers on the roads, but on the whole the cars and buses gave us space. 6/10
• Overall : 7/10 good positive experience overall, but we could do with better release code issuing system and yet more cycle paths. I would encourage you to try the Boris Bike out for yourself, it's a great way to visit London.