Are the wheels coming off the Boris bike commute?

The Mayor wants more of us to be Boris Bike commuters. But new figures cast doubt on the system’s performance, says Joshi Herrmann
P20-21 Boris Bike in Paris Pic: Cavan Pawson
4 February 2013

By 7.30am, the suited hordes are already swarming out of Waterloo, Britain’s busiest station — South West Trains commuters marching half-awake towards Tubes, buses and one of 117 Boris Bikes in the station’s “super-dock”, the biggest one in the capital.

At this time there are plenty of bikes to take, and the suits unlock them with their membership keys, pedal off and flow over Waterloo Bridge. Wait half an hour, though, and there is a problem. By 8am there are only a few bikes left, and 10 minutes later the super-dock is completely empty.

Oliver O’Brien, a researcher at UCL who maps usage of the scheme on his website, says the Waterloo bikes are often all gone by 7.45am. This is not unusual — unpublished City Hall figures obtained by the London Liberal Democrats show that in May last year an astonishing 381 stations were entirely empty for more than an hour each day on average, and that 83 stations were empty for six hours or more each day — rendering them futile for long periods.

As the Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme is extended south and west, with councils stumping up £2 million to have the bikes, the Standard has obtained figures under the Freedom of Information Act that cast serious doubt on the whole system’s performance.

Empty and full docking stations have rendered the network “useless” for commuters, says e-retailer Michael Ross, 43, who asked for FOI figures on them last year. Along with further requests by the Standard, the figures raise serious questions about the management of the scheme by TfL and the service company Serco.

Since its launch, the hire scheme has notched up nearly 19 million journeys, and at this time of year the 7,000 bikes in service are used about 10,000 times a day, a figure that will more than double when spring arrives. Despite its cost (£225 million by 2015/16, up to £50 million of which will be covered by sponsor Barclays), the scheme has proved many of the early doubters wrong — recording very low rates of theft and damage compared to foreign schemes.

But by December 2011, the problem of empty docking stations was identified in a progress report by TfL as the most pressing issue for Boris Bikers. Their second biggest gripe was not being able to find docking points to park their bikes at the end of their journeys. “Just fed up walking around London trying to find a bike to ride and find a docking station,” complained one user, another telling TfL that the system “must be reliable for people to be able to trust the transport for regular commutes”.

Asked how satisfied they were with availability of bikes, 38 per cent of members rated their satisfaction at 0-4 out of 10. Figures were even worse for the question about “availability of free docking points”, with 42 per cent rating their satisfaction at 0-4. The message was clear — the issue of distribution is preventing the hire scheme from becoming genuinely useful as a commuter mode of transport.

The Standard’s new figures show that, if anything, the problem has worsened. The amount of time whole docking stations sat entirely empty (with not a single bike available for use) rose 58 per cent in the year to November 2012, meaning docking stations were on average completely empty for almost two hours a day. TfL says “we continue to refine our rebalancing efforts” and that it is “pleased” that stations are empty for “only eight per cent of the time”. In August last year, docking stations were empty for just under two-and-a-half hours per day, more than 10 per cent of the time, the highest figure since the teething problems of the scheme’s first year.

The amount of time docking stations were on average completely full (with no space to dock bikes) also rose over the year after the critical report, although by a smaller margin.

As commuters ride from the peripheries of the Boris Bike zone, including the major railway stations, into the City and central London, they leave empty docking stations behind them in the morning and fill up the ones where they park their bikes, so that those arriving later either cannot find a bike to ride, or cannot dock it when they arrive at work. The problem happens in reverse in the evenings.

Serco, the services company that won the £140 million contract to run the scheme, is supposed to redistribute bikes so that empty and full periods don’t happen, especially in priority commuter stations at peak times. Its fleet of vans and cars is supposed to ensure that if a docking station does not have a bike or docking point available, there will be another nearby which does, but the figures, and stories from users, suggest that isn’t being achieved.

“My experience is that when it works it is fantastic,” says Ross, “but you can’t rely on it because you can either find no bikes or you won’t be able to park them.” Ross, who runs online retail business eCommera, commutes from London Zoo to Oxford Circus, a journey that should take eight minutes but often takes 30 — either because he can’t find a bike and has to walk or because he can’t dock it and has to cycle halfway back to do so. “I bump into people all the time cycling around like headless chickens, all looking for a place to park their bike. It’s a really big issue.”

Web developer Matt Pope, 22, has similar problems at the end of his working day in Westminster. “If I don’t leave work by half five, I go straight to the Tube and don’t even look for a bike.” Pope has started mapping the live data TfL provides for the various bike tracking apps, and the picture is stark. “In Westminster you can pretty much guarantee that you won’t be able to get a bike after six,” he says.

Redistribution is made more difficult by boroughs, some of which ban the Serco vans in the evenings. But Ross, once a management consultant at McKinsey, says TfL has a responsibility to ensure its system works for Londoners — even if that means rewriting the contract with Serco. “It is not rocket science that you need to redistribute the bikes more aggressively and cleverly than they are doing it, and that the cost of that needs to be met,” he says. “Harder problems of this type have been solved. I fear TfL is locked into a bad contract where no one is incentivised to fix the system.”

In a recent answer to a complaint, TfL said the scheme didn’t have “the resources” to redistribute more than it does. Yet almost all of the commuters who spoke to the Standard would be willing to pay more service if it made the system more reliable. After the recent 100 per cent price hike, members pay £90 per year — or 25p per day — and most pay no extra because they hire for less than half an hour. “I can’t see what the problem is with charging £1 or £1.50 for every peak-time journey — at the moment there is no marginal cost for me of using the bikes every morning,” said one.

TfL says: “The free 30 minute usage period remains popular with our customers with around 93 per cent of hires completed within this time.”

Ross is hoping for the best. “You want things to work as expected the vast majority of the time, which isn’t happening at the moment,” he says. “This is a problem with TfL — it has a broken system and needs to fix it. I love the scheme, but it is wonderful and useless.”

Travellers’ tales of frustration

Andrew Lopez, 23, advertising worker

Tried to commute to work with the bikes from his home in Bow but found it “near impossible to find a spare dock at Canary Wharf in the mornings any later than 8.15 or 8.30am”.

Phil Szomszor, 28, PR director

Stopped using the scheme because he often couldn’t drop off his bike at Soho Square in the mornings and found it “virtually unusable” for the evening commute back to King’s Cross.

Kara Dolman, 30, journalist

Stopped commuting on Boris Bikes because her five-minute journey between Notting Hill and Kensington often turned into 30 minutes plus as a result of always struggling to dock. “I could see the docking station from my window, and only once saw a Serco van replenish the bikes.”

Matthew Pope, 23, web developer

Doesn’t bother trying to find a Boris Bike in Westminster if he leaves work after 5.30pm because docking stations are usually empty.

Michael Ross, 43, e-entrepreneur

Leaves half an hour for his eight-minute morning cycle because it often involves walking all the way when there are no bikes near home or docking places near Oxford Circus.

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