Over 10.5 million journeys were made using Santander Cycles during 2018 according to TfL, but growth rates have slowed over the past couple of years.
There has been an average of 29,500 hires each day this year, the highest daily average since the scheme started in 2010. Christmas Day saw more than 35,000 hires as Londoners took to cycling on a day when no other public transport exists.
There were five consecutive months this year where TfL’s scheme achieved more than one million hires. In total there have been more than 77m journeys since the scheme was launched in July 2010.
However, growth in use of the Santander Cycle hire scheme is slowing as just 100,000 additional journeys were made in 2018 vs 2017, and of those, 43,500 can be attributed to the expansion of the scheme to Brixton in February.
Cycling as a whole is on the rise though, up roughly a third since 2010, and the two dockless companies, Ofo and Mobile will have added to the competition for cycle hire schemes in London.
But still cycling in London is still a good way to cut down on emissions and to introduce more new cycle routes across London.
And to upgrade junctions to make it easier and safer for cyclists to avoid accidents from happening. As there has been lots of cycling related accidents on London roads in recent years.
Also why not have a new East-West (Ilford/Stratford-Shepard’s Bush/Ealing) and North-South (Brent/Camden-Croydon/Wimbledon) cycle express-highway.
Surely the slowness in growth is down to slowness in expansion. Brixton is pretty much the only place they’ve expanded to recently and there’s still huge areas of London, not that far from the centre, that aren’t served by it. I still think it’s mad that they haven’t expanded down the route of the south end of the Northern Line. It’s got a Cycle Superhighway going all the way along it and loads of commuters are left standing on the platform during rush hour. No doubt a lot of those would jump straight on a bike to get them up to Stockwell or Kennington.