| July 30th 2010 |
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New Cycle Hire Scheme
Transport For London have launched a new cycle hire scheme. They have got cycle bays all over town, where you can collect and drop off the bikes.
I was interested to see how vandal-proof they were. They are very strongly constructed, and there's covers over bolts and various bits that could be tampered with. I spoke to a TFL employee who was advising the public, with it being launch day. She said the bikes had a special paint on them that prevents people writing on them, and that pretty-much the only vandalism they could suffer was people putting stickers on them. The only negative feedback that she had had so far, was that they are a bit on the heavy side. The bikes (pictured in Hyde Park) she advised me, had indeed been vandalised the night before, with people putting stickers on them! I wondered if they would have special dust caps on the tyre valves, or even solid tyres. I imagine it would be a lot of fun for kids to go around letting the air out the tyres! They appear to have normal valves on them. The girl told me there was a maintenance guy who visited the bays and would inflate the tyres if need be. I thought this scheme might have been aimed at tourists, but far from it. You need to register to use them, and just now they are only allowing registrations from UK addresses. The new bays are receiving a lot of attention, it's not just tourists who have been looking curiously at them. To use a bike, registration aside, you need to have a special key, or get a code from the payment terminal. Related Links TFL Cycle Hire Posted in categories Transport Events Post URL http://londontownblog.com/posts.php?post=56 |
