The London Bike Share Marches North

It’s not just Wandsworth and Fulham that will be getting Barclays Cycle Hire in the next year or so when Phase 3 goes live – Hackney and Islington will be getting a few too. The iconic “Boris Bikes” will be heading up Mare Street towards central Hackney – although not quite getting there – plus there’ll be various new docking stations in Haggerston, just north of the Regent’s Canal. There will also be a docking station on Islington Green, and a few around the Canal Museum on Calendonian Road. In all, if planning permission is forthcoming, there will be up to 15 new docking stations, all north of the Regent’s Canal. It’s a modest increase – 3% – but the communities affected will doubtless enjoy the new facility. It’s still a long way south from myself though!

I’ve adapted my Bike Share Map to show the proposed locations, above. The potential docking stations appear in green.

It’s great to see that the system is continuing to expand in all directions – but now the central London demand is being sated, it would be nice if Transport for London relaxed their requirement for docking stations to be within 300m of each other. The most successful bike share systems generally have a dense core and a well spaced out periphery, which accommodates commuters, tourists and locals equally well. I would much rather have the system properly penetrating Zone 2 and 3, even if there’s a 1km gap between each docking station. Then it becomes more useful for the utility users who unlike the commuters (going from stations to skyscrapers) and tourists (concentrating on the bigs parks and markets) act as useful re-distributors in their own right by the nature of their diverse journey directions.

Thanks to Loving Dalston for spotting a planning application for the docking station by London Fields. I had a quick trawl through the Hackney and Islington council planning websites to spot the others.