As a user myself, I’ve been interested to see the unveiled new extension to the area in which 'Boris bikes' will be running. Perhaps unsurprisingly, with the Olympics coming up, it appears to favour the Docklands and those areas adjacent to the site, with a few extra stations added in ‘North Shoreditch’ (i.e. about as far as the Geffrye Museum). Understandable, of course, with such an enormously significant event coming up, but I still can’t see why the catchment area for the bikes at the moment has to be so saturated while many others areas and boroughs, all of which are broadly ‘inner London’, have been crying out for the scheme and yet have not been serviced by a single docking station. With the current extension I can’t help but feel that while Boris ostensibly is addressing the tournament this summer, in reality the extension is equally there to serve the suits in Canary Wharf.
If he’s serious about the scheme being a meritocratic service for the general public, and not just for a coterie of bankers, there needs to be docking stations in most of Hackney (including Dalston), lots of Islington which currently isn’t serviced (Holloway Road for one), all of Haringey – which, remember, stretches from Muswell Hill to South Tottenham – and preferably some of Waltham Forest. These are vast areas, with an enormous population combined. South of the river, too, areas such as Brixton, Clapham and New Cross haven’t had a look in.
Instead of building dense collections of docking stations streets away from each other in the catchment areas, it strikes me as far better to build outwards with less density of the stations. That way, a larger area is included within the cycle scheme, if one where the stations are dispersed much more sparsely. Stoke Newington, for example, might only get a handful, but it’ll still be better than nothing. Otherwise, I can’t help but shake the feeling that Boris is only aiming for where the bankers live.