London Cycle Hire

A van driver writes:
The cycle hire stations have been positioned where there was least resistance, presumably, so instead of taking out resident/business parking spaces, they have gone in the few clear stretches of road previously available for goods vehicles to load/unload while servicing the metropolis. An odd choice, I would have thought. One of my "if I ruled the world" policies would be the complete elimination of on-street parking in central London as a way to drive mode switching, road safety and improved flow for the remaining traffic, so stealing a few parking spaces for hire stations would seem to be an obvious thing to do which, as far as I can see, has been completely missed.

The problem with having to put the hire stations through the planning system is that there's basically no planning policy for them, so that local planning authorities can essentially do as they like (and letters of objection don't have to cite material planning considerations). I quite agree with reducing on-street car parking spaces, but once they're in somewhere, it can be unbelievably hard to get rid of them again.

We've had some success in Hackney in having general cycle parking installed in the carriageway, and there's still a lot of scope for doing that--unlike hire stations, that doesn't need planning permission.

Installing as many hire stations as has been achieved has been a huge undertaking, what with London's culture of having lots of things buried underground that nobody knows about, or at least of which nobody knows the precise whereabouts.

There's still a lot of work to be done on the scheme, of course, so let's hope that the scheme gets tweaked for the better over time. It's early days.