Looking for London cyclists to provide feedback

We are a small startup from London trying to make it easier to be more active outdoors. We are very early stage, still learning a lot and we would love to get your feedback on our initiatives.

The latest we created is a website to help find bike parking spaces in London called Aktivli, see https://aktivli.com .

(we started building a service to access showers-on-demand in London called RunFriendly, see https://www.runfriendly.com )

I thought it might be interesting for fellow cyclists. If any of you would like to help us with your feedback, please let me know via a reply or pm. Any feedback is very valuable: we can meet in person, do an online video interview or just shoot you some questions via email. Or just leave a reply here! :-)

Lovely stuff.

Some general questions.
As it happens I have just been trading emails with H&F councillors/staff about removing bikes outside one specific location.

That location is GQ3J+QH White City, London

So I happen to know, that about 6 abandoned bikes were removed yesterday. For Aktivili to be useful it might be useful to know actual use. I don't know if it is your aim, but in high traffic areas, that might help.

The pictures from the location above appear to be a) from the Summer and b) prior to the area being changed in the last month or so.

Hope the showers on demand thing works.

PM me if you require, and I'm sure you will find both helpful and non-helpful suggestions on the thread below

Thanks Arvy. Were those abandonded bikes at this location: https://aktivli.com/bike-parking/66490 ? We are looking for ways to get more info on utilisation of specific locations, for some it easier than for others.

Your comment got me thinking, would it be useful if we add the feature on a given bike parking location to report it to the authorities? For example for abandoned bikes, or vandalism or lack of capacity in general, or... ?

Hello Frankvanrest.

Location is Shep Bush central station, pavement between tube station and Londis. (Neither of our links seem to be sending us to where we want)

Local authorities have an obligation to monitor and remove dead bikes but I suspect this is low on their list. My conversations with H&F have indicated that it isn't a priority:

At present, we don’t have a dedicated Officer to cover this area. I am not the area-based Officer but cover this area depending on my other commitments.
We have only two vehicles covering the whole Council area. We remove abandoned bikes causing obstruction or nuisance but it all depends on the availability of Officers and vehicles plus the storage space for these bikes.
At present, we have four operational Officers covering all 16 wards. Our main enforcement work is around waste dumping, commercial waste contraventions, Duty of Care compliance, littering enforcement, builders waste, overhanging vegetation, builder’s skips, builder’s material, highway obstructions, waste presentation, etc.

Councils like Camden are awful.

Before you investigate features have a look at 'love clean streets', which some London councils use. You will see that integrations vary by council but H&F have their own version of the same app. H&F actually encourage residents to report stuff on it. (It doesn't work very well for me, but that might just be anecdote).

https://lovecleanstreets.com/reports

The thing that I found frustrating is that lots of councils are trying to do more (cycle lanes etc, green initiatives.,) [''hardware''], but really simple things like this [''software''] aren't connected to what those who might cycle and use the service.