Bikes just eat up the miles in Edinburgh

Edinburgh Cycle Hire is celebrating achieving 100,000 hires so far this year - 80 per cent as many as the total hires in 2019.

Just Eat Cycles, which is run by Serco on behalf of Transport for Edinburgh, has also seen more than double the number of hires every month compared to last year. The Covid-19 lockdown and good weather are likely to have contributed to the boom, along with several capital streets being closed to other traffic.

The total of 100,000 hires was achieved in June but last year it took until September to reach that milestone. There were a total of 124,000 trips made in 2019.

The scheme also broke its daily hire record on Saturday 20 June with 2,428 trips. These covered a total of more than 8,500 miles - the equivalent of cycling from Edinburgh to Disney World in Florida and back in a day. Trips made so far this year total some 330,000 miles.

Alex Macdonald, General Manager of Just Eat Cycles, said: “Having established a new scheme record days earlier, moving past 100,000 trips marks a key milestone for the scheme in our journey towards getting more people on bikes. We are proud to provide a brilliant service to the city and it is a good moment to thank our fantastic customers for using the scheme. We are looking forward to a busy summer with more records broken.”