Building cycling foundations with the 'Boris Bricks'

Welcome to my continuing bike hire adventures this week (part five). Part four: here. Earlier parts: here.

Yesterday was glitch free. And I used the bikes four or five times during the day.

There was one lonely bike left at King's Cross. And Londoners seem to getting the hang of the bikes very quickly.

If you see a bike on its own you know it will probably be broken.

Also, speaking to cyclists there is a whole vocabulary evolving around the bikes.

They've been nicknamed "boris bikes" and have a community site (borisbikes.co.uk) of the same name.

But yesterday someone talked about hiring his first "boris brick" - that's a bike where the brakes have been tightened too much. Basically it's an absolute shocker to pedal.

Are there any other phrases for the hire bikes? Please let me know.

I also had a look round the nerve centre in Islington. Along with the Evening Standard, I was given the guided tour.

The operator Serco are extremely open about the problems they've had and it seemed to me they were genuinely trying to figure them out.

The big issue as I've mentioned is the rail stations which seem to be like Paris' Montmatre or Barcelona's beaches - where the bike racks there are always empty or full.

Serco admit they may need more trucks to keep moving the bikes and they are now getting a picture of how the bikes are being used.

Not surprisingly it's from just outside central London into the West End at rush hour and vice versa at home time.

There are also a thousand or so bikes more ready to go and quite a few docking stations that have been installed and haven't yet been turned on.

They have 100 staff on the ground mending and moving bikes so it's quite an operation. So this is just the beginning.

Also no date yet on the full roll out. In hindsight the idea of a fully open roll-out seems crazy and would have probably been a disaster.

Serco and TfL took some flak on that decision (yes, myself included) but it seems this soft roll-out at least gives them a degree of control.

Of course, as TfL's press office kept emphatically telling me, 100,000 journeys have now been made on the bikes. And that's with the teething problems.

UPDATE: Saturday, 1pm

One of our cameramen was passing King's Cross last night at 7pm and he told me there was a huge pile of discarded hire bikes on Crestfield Street near King's Cross.

He thought there were probably 20 or so discarded hire bikes.

No doubt they were from people who dumped them because they couldn't find a docking station and had to get a train.

It's unlikely those people who dumped the bikes will get a £300 fine yet - although you never know - but it again highlights the issue about distribution in this system.

This is the issue around the mainline stations. The cameraman, who is a big fan of the scheme, said "There were two bemused TfL wallahs looking at the pile."

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