London bike hire scheme coming to the capital in July
Want to try out the new London hire bikes before their introduction in July? Simple, just fly to Saguenay, Quebec. That’s where the bikes - built by Canadian company Bixi – are rolling of the production line even as I type.
And at their official unveiling this month we got to see exactly what the much-touted bikes – London’s answer to the hugely popular Velib scheme in Paris – will look like.
Well first up is the colour – a deep, very Tory, very Boris, blue. Then there are the reams of anti-theft devices that indicate that, although the whole street-bike hire scheme involves a level of trust in the capital’s populace, there’s an acceptance here that bike theft in the city is pretty endemic.
Saddles are welded in place so no enterprising type can make off with a comfy new seat for his old bike, and all the cabling and the chain are neatly tucking away beyond the reach of light fingers.
There are concessions to the sad state of London’s roads too. Tyres are double the normal depth of rubber and those so-light-you-can-lift-it-with-one-finger alloys are ignored for something a little more, well, industrial.
But these aren’t meant to be racing bikes – they’re workhorses and idlers – and Bixi have an enviable reputation in Canada with the Montreal scheme seen as one of the most popular in the world, racking up over a million rides in its first month. One innovative Bixi policy that won’t be making its way across the Atlantic though is their commitment to solar power. The Montreal docking stations were solar powered, while London’s will run on more conventional power sources, suggesting that although the makers are thousands of miles away, they at least know what to expect from London weather.
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