London Cycle Hire

ok so i decided to register today so I could try one out.
registered my details, got to the payment page then before i could pay - bang laptop crashes!
go to re-register, but it says that my details are already in the system and wont let me go any further, so I decided to fill in one of the contact forms to try and get it sorted, spent 5 minutes filling all my details in, pressed submit
-Sorry the Barclays Website is unavailable at the moment please try later-

FAIL.

Luckily it seems I can log into my account, so all is not lost - i'm sensing that this may not be the only teething trouble I encounter though.
How long did it take for keys to come through in general?

ordered mine on thursday it arrived on saturday

crack cocaine being smoked on the back seat of a 24 from Camden to Warren Street at 1pm on a Friday remains the bar that shit bus journeys for me have to clear.

Had a junkie couple rooting for britain on the back of the 139 once. The bus cleared, i however was half cut and had headphones in. So stayed to take pictures. Naturally.

that would have been the famous RootMaster buses

//aussie joke //

badoom tish!

Had a junkie couple rooting for britain on the back of the 139 once. The bus cleared, i however was half cut and had headphones in. So stayed to take pictures. Naturally.

pics please

With a key - very easy to use.

As noted above, check to see if the back brake isn't too tight before removing but apart from that a lovely system.

There aren't enough spots near London Bridge and the only bike near Marylebone was super tight this morning - it was easier to walk to another spot - I'm sure that will change.

There is something quite satisfying about getting the little print out when you finish that says "7m 58s"

You get a print out every time you check in the bike back into a station? What a waste of paper.

pics please

The best i got over the shoulder, i'm surprised i didn't hear em sooner as she was screaming the bus down.

Non of faces, which is probably a good thing, it wasn't a pretty sight!

This thread suddenly got a lot more interesting

Haha, it's not even dark outside! You certain they weren't just mucking about?

Haha, it's not even dark outside! You certain they weren't just mucking about?

Thats dawn btw. Original Date/Time = 2010:06:20 04:00:02

hm...

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Trying to get back on topic, the Cycle Hire scheme in Melbourne is really rooted. It uses the same bikes and technology as here but there is a snag, with 600 bikes there are only 75 trips per day:
The Age and Big Nanny

That picture above should be a tfl ad!
Edit not boris, the gin related one.

Claire it looks a bit like you decided to join because of it?!

because of two junkies shagging on a bus?

you've found me out Louie.

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.

Fascist!

I prefer 'Benevolent Dictator', but it's possible to argue from a commonwealth/libertarian point of view that using public funds to build highways and then to sell them off for just a few pounds per hour as car parks is a poor use of resources.

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.

The TFL API is shit, so I rolled my own if anyone sees a use for it:
http://www.lfgss.com/api/tfl.php

Simple, light-weight, JSON.

I rolled a swiss-roll once without adult help, but that was when I was much younger in my obsessive baking days. It had cream and jam and everything....

p.s. I think rolled maybe a technical term on reflection, my ignorance....

The TFL API is shit, so I rolled my own if anyone sees a use for it:
http://www.lfgss.com/api/tfl.php

Simple, light-weight, JSON.

If anyone actually was using that, I've just refreshed it to make it much nicer and to have a distributed cache behind it.

i saw one moving today on the hipster trail.

indeed it was being ridden by a hipster type dude !

crack cocaine being smoked on the back seat of a 24 from Camden to Warren Street at 1pm on a Friday remains the bar that shit bus journeys for me have to clear.

A drunk lady puked on me on a night bus once. she was kind enough to mention that she would have ran off the bus in shame, had she not had to wait so long for it. that was pretty much the last night bus i ever took.