HIRE, BUT JUST AS LOW What do hire bikes, hipster beards, arm-sleeve tattoos and vaping all have in common, asks

LIFE CYCLE Rob Ainsley

magine a future TV series set back in the 2010s. What images will define the decade – fashions of today that will appear archaic and silly in hindsight? Perhaps a guy with a hipster beard and arm-sleeve tattoos, vaping? And riding a city hire bike?

I don’t have a beard (though I once grew stubble waiting for a hire bike to become available at Kings Cross). But I’ve tried a million hire bike schemes around the world.

Such as those ‘Boris Bikes’, of course. Cumbersome, impossible to control, but lots of fun for the naive, the mayor of London gave his name to them when they launched in 2009. They were blue, sponsored by Barclays. Now they’re red, and it’s Santander. Well, switching banks is all the rage these days.

Of course, they’re great: fun for tourists, and a fine way to explore obscure parts of London, as you try in vain to find a free docking station.

IBut as serious commuter transport, they’re simply too unreliable. Like affordable housing in Britain, there’s plenty available, just all in the wrong place. They cost the taxpayer, too: each journey is subsidised by about £3. I’d rather use my own bike and have a free coffee instead.

London compares badly to Barcelona’s scheme, which is subsidised by less than €1 per trip – while Paris and New York don’t even need a subsidy. Perhaps relevantly, Barcelona’s scheme is only available to locals. And perhaps, it’s not cold and rainy, and their beachfront is a better place for volleyball than the mud under Waterloo Bridge. But even Dublin’s scheme is doing better, and is credited with having raised the profile of everyday cycling there.

Sadly, the actual difference that London’s scheme has made in taking cars off the road, or passengers off public transport, is negligible – certainly compared to the tsunami of regular cyclists at many rushhour junctions in the city. (Over a third of people crossing Blackfriars Bridge north in the morning are on bikes. It’s like being in Copenhagen. Especially when you see how much a coffee and pastry costs.)

Now, following London, other similar schemes have started around Britain: over a dozen, supplied by organisations such as Nextbike and Hourbike in places such as Bath, Nottingham and Belfast. Not all thrive: Dumfries’s scheme was closed last autumn because of low take-up, after taking in £150k of investment.

Perhaps the problem was that, as with most bike hire schemes, the first 30 minutes of each hire period is free. What if you want to ride around all Dumfries’s must-sees? What do you do with the other 25 minutes? (Only joking. I’ve always had good cycling experiences in beautiful Dumfries and Galloway.)

Indeed, outside of London, I’ve never actually seen anyone riding a hire bike in Britain. I have in Europe and beyond, though: such schemes are fashionable everywhere these days. Nextbike’s website lists well over 100 cities, from Al Sharjah to Zagreb. So why do provincial Britain’s hire bikes struggle?

It’s not hard to guess why. There’s nowhere pleasant to ride them. Our towns are generally awful for cycling. But having a bike scheme makes a council look like it’s doing something to get people on bikes. Why spend half a million on a cycle path network that some, thick, shouty voters will complain about, when you can spend £150k on something that doesn’t encroach on car parking or road space?

There’s another initiative gracing town centres, called ‘Bike and Go’. At many rail stations you can continue your train journey with a hire bike – costing less than £4 for a day – thanks to a group of train companies. A noble idea, and I’m all for it... but I’d rather have more, better and more reliable peak-hour bike spaces on the trains in the first place.

Hire bike schemes are great fun. But I can’t help thinking that, like a cigarette smoker who vapes instead of giving up, they’re a modish way of avoiding a problem rather than tackling it. I hope they won’t look comically naive in 30 years – that instead they’ll be taken for granted everywhere. But without proper infrastructure, they’ll get the chop as surely as those hipster beards will.

Hire schemes are great fun but I can’t help thinking they’re a way of avoiding a problem rather than

tackling it