Author: Oliver O'Brien

Yes, we did it again. All the Docks 2 took place in London on 9 July. Five teams (up from three last time) each cycled between a fifth of the Santander Cycles docking stations in London. I again did the routes, splitting up the ~800 docking stations into 5 routes of 160 docking stations apiece. […]

On Monday I will be attempting to visit every Santander Cycles docking station in east London by bike, starting at 9am outside the velodrome in the Lea Valley VeloPark (the famous one from the London 2012 Olympics), cycling over 70 miles and hopefully finishing sometime that evening close to the London Transport Museum in the […]

There’s a new bikeshare in London – HumanForest launched yesterday (Wednesday 24 June 2020) with 63 pedelec bicycles. They are planning on rolling out up to 200 bicycles in their Islington trial operation, before hopefully expanding to central London later this summer with up to 1000 in their fleet. HumanForest’s technology platform and equipment provider […]

I earlier this week spoke at a Cycling@Tea-Time seminar, on the impact of lockdown on bikeshare, looking at London, the UK, and the world in general. The talk was based on some very preliminary crunching through some CDRC datasets to see how usage has changed, both in volume and time-of-day, for how people are using […]

A bylaw is being drafted between the 32 London borough councils (and the City of London) to introduce a coordinated approach to managing dockless micromobility sharing, such as bikeshare and (should future national legislation permit it) escootershare, across London. Currently, each council sets its own policy with regards to dockless cycle operators in their area, … Continue reading Consolidating Dockless Cycles in London →

Two bicycle sharing systems have launched in London in the last fortnight, joining four systems already on the streets of central London and two more on the edge of the capital: Freebike launched a system based in the City, Islington, Hackney, Camden, Kensington, Chelsea and parts of Lambeth and Wandsworth along the river. Essentially, central … Continue reading Then There Were Eight →

The Guardian newspaper has published an online article about the rise and fall of dockless bikeshare, focusing on the pure dockless systems in England (there aren’t any in the rest of the UK) that grew in 2017, and then shrank last autumn. The article extensively used some of the geospatial boundary data that I have … Continue reading Dockless Bikeshare in London: Part 2 →

A puncture on my own bicycle on my way in to work this morning found me grinding to a halt outside Manor House station – not the worst place to have a flat tyre, as the tube from there will take me into work in around 20 minutes with just one change, for £2.40. (The … Continue reading Lime-E Bikeshare: London Test →

I recently presented at the CoMoUK Good Mobility Conference in East London, looking at the story of bikeshare in London over the last 12 months ago, touching a little on other systems in the UK. Here are my slides, slightly updated from the conference itself: While the core of the presentation was a timeline, numbers … Continue reading Bikeshare in London – The Last 12 Months →

Dockless bikeshare has been out in London for around 10 months now (not withstanding the brief but spectacular oBike launch and burnout in mid 2016). It looks like the operators are getting serious and trying to get dockless bikeshare to pay for itself – starting a transition from a “growth” to “profit” focus: Mobike has … Continue reading Making Bikeshare Pay →