On bicycle's, on Boris

Having finally gotten around to reading the excellent Dave Hill newsletter I see we are ever closer to having our own version of the velib in London, as part of Boris' legacy of his first, and hopefully, final term.

I'm all for a velib type scheme, it was in fact a Lib Dem policy going into the last Mayoral elections but I do have some reservations about whether London is ready for such a scheme.

Firstly, it's due to start in central London only - which means that it, like most of the other city schemes across the world, will be used mostly by tourists, rather than Londoners (who will still have their travelcards and therefore have no financial incentive to use velib) but it will be paid for by Londoners.

Secondly, are the roads in central London ready for a few thousand wobbly tourists who are coming to terms with cycling on the left? I don't cycle in central Lonond because I find it far too scary. I'm not ging up there until they have proper cycle lanes, with phsical barriers (as in a raised curb) between me and the lorries; so what's it going to be like for the tourists. We don't have the wide boulevards of Paris, in London (obviously). So, in addition to the bike scheme, more money needs to be spent on improving cycle lanes.

And lastly, although most of these schemes have ended up going out into the suburbs, wouldn't it have been better to start there? After all the majority of the very short journeys that are made by car now, and that we want to stop are in outer London, not inner London. Getting people out of their cars and onto a bike for a trip to the butchers on Lordship Lane will surely make a greater difference to people's quality of life?

So, none of these problems I have raised are insurmountable, and I am in principle in favour of a velib type scheme - however, if it is going to benefit all Londoners and not just be a bit of fancy window dressing then it needs to be better thought through.

Liberal Democrats to bring velib to London

I was in Paris last weekend (yes, lucky me!) and was rather taken with their new 'bike transit system' known as Velib. In fact I was so taken by it that I couldn't resist pointing out each and every Velib bike that I saw going by; that wasn't at all irritating for my partner (unlucky him)!

Velib is a short term bike rental system. There are cycle racks dotted about all over the city and about 20,000 bikes in total. You have to purchase a subscription card and off you go! The first 30 mins is free and then as time goes by the charge goes up exponentially. This is to make sure you return the bike to the racks at the first opportunity rather than keeping it just in case you need it!

It looks great and the bikes are very snazzy looking – I was certainly keen to try and if we'd had more time….

It might be too early to tell yet and I was only there at the weekend but I would be interested to know how the people I was travelling by Velib would have travelled? Were they taking walkers of the pavement or people off the buses? According to some of the contributers to this piece the number of cycles has doubled or trebled – even gone up fivefold; more objective reports said that a million trips had been undertaken on velibs within 2 weeks of that start of the scheme last summer!

Like I said I was only there at the weekend and we more or less stuck to the 8^th arrondissment on this trip. Certainly from this article it seems to be a success and it's true to say that we didn't find our selves in a traffic jam once over the weekend! That said during my previous major experience, when I spent a few weeks in Paris as a teenager one summer, I didn't come across many traffic jams either; but that was because I was forever riding pillion on a motorbike (don't ask!!)

So it makes it very good news that Brian Paddick is looking into bringing velib to London!!