Bad weather and soaring costs blamed as ‘Boris Bike’ hires fall to lowest level for 10 years

And paint them all red obviously.

Because ideas are the difficult part.

By contrast, planning, funding and implementation are an absolute doddle.

It wasn't even Livingstone's idea, he copied it from the Lib Dems who copied it from Paris IIRC.

Well, then Red Ken deserves some credit also for what became the "cycling superhypeways" too then.  Plans were modified under Boris, initially not going ahead with some central routes and with a quality / design which was criticised.  Though in the end Boris did come good on this.

I think putting your head above the parapet by proposing and actually initiating a plan for mass cycling level anything in the UK does deserve more credit than the usual "they had a big idea, whoopee" talk. Certainly orders of magnitude more than most of the chat about "we'd like to see much more active travel" / "encouraging cycling" empty words we normally hear.

Witness quarter-century anniversaries of previous initiatives coming and going, as we discover than money is promised and then doesn't materialise as normal.

Khan thankfully hasn't reversed matters although despite recent controversy it seems he's been fairly tepid on the active travel.  All London mayors are constrained by the Boroughs of course - good luck if Ken and Chelsey is in the way of your cycle route!

My point was that funding and implementation are the hard bits.

Boris, for all his flaws, got the bike hire scheme from idea to reality, same with the 'cycling superhighways'.

If it had been left to Livingstone they might have ended up as another lamentable anniversary.

The Lib Dems stuck their heads over the parapet, Livingstone just copied them.

Rich_cb wrote:

Because ideas are the difficult part. By contrast, planning, funding and implementation are an absolute doddle. It wasn't even Livingstone's idea, he copied it from the Lib Dems who copied it from Paris IIRC.

1. All the plans for the scheme were unveiled by Livingstone when still in office in February 2008, and Johnson used them almost verbatim. No blame or criticism there, it would have been foolish and wasteful to start from scratch when the work had already been done.

2. Of course Livingstone copied the Paris Velib scheme and made no secret of the fact that he did. I expect the LibDems did also suggest it, after the success of the Velibs everyone in London was saying why can't we have the same. Unless he was the first person in the world ever to think of having a bike hire scheme clearly he would draw on the expertise and experience created by previous schemes.

3. Johnson can take credit for arranging the sponsorship, it's true. With whom did he arrange it? Barclays, with whose Chief Executive, Bob Diamond (later to be forced to resign over the Libor scandal), Johnson had a close personal relationship. At the time Barclays' £50M sponsorship was questioned as being far too cheap a price to pay for such a spectacular advertising opportunity. A later inquiry by the London Assembly budget committee found the tendering process had been questionable and that Johnson had not secured the best possible funding for the scheme that he could have done had there been an open bidding process. Barclays announced in 2013 that they were pulling out of sponsorship, despite the fact that Johnson had announced in 2011 that it would run to 2018. They only paid half of the £50M they had agreed with Johnson for sponsorship.

4. Johnson promised when he launched the scheme that it would not cost London's taxpayers a penny: at the point at which Barclays pulled out the sponsorship revenue and user fees were only covering half the cost, with the rest being made up from tax revenue. In the first eight years of the scheme (2010-2018) it cost the taxpayers £200M.

In precis, it was Livingstone's idea, of course drawing on inspiration from similar schemes elsewhere, and the planning and logistics were completed under his administration. Johnson secured the funding, unsurprisingly given what we have seen subsequently, in a less-than-transparent (aka shady/corrupt) manner, giving a cutprice deal to his mates who only paid half their obligations, leaving the scheme in serious deficit. He then claimed all the credit for the whole scheme and declared it a great success even though he failed to deliver what he had promised and forced taxpayers to make up the shortfall.

Livingstone copied a scheme in use elsewhere, secured precisely no money to pay for it and delivered precisely zero bikes.

Sounds like he should definitely get the credit.

Rich_cb wrote:

Livingstone copied a scheme in use elsewhere, secured precisely no money to pay for it and delivered precisely zero bikes. Sounds like he should definitely get the credit.

He delivered precisely zero bikes because he was voted out of office before he could implement his plans which he revealed not long before the election. Johnson took his plans, gave the sponsorship at a ridiculously reduced rate to a corrupt friend of his (who only ever paid half the money promised) and implemented a scheme that ran up £200 million in debt for the taxpayer in its first eight years, having promised it wouldn't cost them a penny. Yay, kudos Bozza!

Who to give credit to is the question.

The man who delivered 0 bikes and 0 funding or the man who delivered both funding and bikes?

It's a tricky one.

Rich_cb wrote:

Who to give credit to is the question. The man who delivered 0 bikes and 0 funding or the man who delivered both funding and bikes? It's a tricky one.

Come now, even for you this is somewhat absurd. Politician A creates a plan, gets voted out shortly after presenting it. Politician B is elected, takes over plan wholesale, implements it by selling sponsorship at a ridiculously low rate to his cronies (who later pull out having delivered only half of even the ridiculously low amount promised) and having promised it wouldn't cost the taxpayer a penny, runs the scheme so badly that after eight years it's £200M in debt, and you think this is a matter of credit for Politician B?

Rich_cb wrote:

Who to give credit to is the question. The man who delivered 0 bikes and 0 funding or the man who delivered both funding and bikes? It's a tricky one.

I think both - assuming you can draw a line between Ken setting the thing in motion* and Boris overseeing this get done.  Which seems to be the case.

In a way this is sad because merely saying "I think we should have a hire scheme for bikes in a place well-suited for it and there should be more cycling infra to encourage people to cycle" shouldn't be seen as revolutionary ideas nor as something particularly bold.  But in the UK it was both.  Indeed still is to some extent over a decade later.

* Which it seems he did - as opposed to "gee wouldn't it be nice if there were bikes you could rent and places to cycle on".

The Gilligan quote elsewhere in the thread would seem to indicate that Ken didn't do very much at all.

A manifesto promise isn't usually worth the paper it's printed on. I'm not sure why, in this particular case, people are so keen to give credit where it's clearly not due.

Dicklexic wrote:

What sort of numbers are the cycle lane counters recording this year? Are they showing a similar reduciton in usage, or is it perhaps that there are still lots of people cycling, just that they are using other hire bike companies or have purchased their own bike?

Not sure of the counter numbers but, anecdotally, riding in central London most weekdays I'd say there are more commuters this year than ever; definitely people are using Lime and HumanForest much more this year. A couple of years back I reckon I'd see five Santanders to every one of another company's, that ratio seems pretty much reversed now.

ETA just looked up the figures for the Embankment counter, 1,730,202 journeys as of yesterday, can't find an exact match but at the end of July last year it had recorded a shade under 1.8M, so a small dropoff from last year which could possibly be down to the weather but nothing like the 33% drop TfL has experienced in hires.