The county council is talking again about starting a public bicycle sharing scheme in the city. Am I ecstatic? No, but I do think Cycling in Oxford might get the boost it so badly needs if the council’s scheme does go ahead.

The council has successfully bid for Government funds to add 500 spaces to Thornhill Park & Ride and to improve bus services to and from the site to the eastern hospitals and university sites.

The idea is that hire bikes would allow park & ride users to cycle to work rather than bus it. It makes perfect sense: cars and buses cause and get caught in congestion – bikes don’t.

The bid is worth £5m, part Government funds and part developer contributions. Let’s hope they earmark enough of the budget to make the cycling element really work.

I’m not ecstatic about hire bikes because Oxford desperately needs investment in other areas.

We are a long way behind Cambridge, Bristol and even central London. People cycle in Oxford in spite of the problems. Routes stop and start willy nilly, trucks and buses – shoe-horned into our medieval streets – make the most hardened cyclist feel nervous, and in the city centre bike parking is an insult.

Providing a coherent ‘dual cycle network’ with mass-cycle parking is much more important than bike hire.

However, the city would certainly benefit from a public bicycle sharing scheme.

Paris’s more than 20,000 Vélib bikes and London’s 6,000 Barclays Cycle Hire bikes have both proved hugely popular. Would a public bicycle sharing scheme work in Oxford? Yes. With a couple of caveats and the right investment, a combination of factors work in our favour:

  • Oxford is compact.
  • Bike hire is the cheapest form of public transport.
  • Cycling is already part of Oxford’s culture. Park & ride commuters aside, resident cyclists would use hire bikes for one-off journeys and residents who aren’t regular cyclists could become occasional users.

University staff should be a big market and visiting academics would certainly use them. Many tourists would welcome seeing Oxford for an afternoon from the locals’ two-wheeled perspective.

So how do they work? The systems rely on unmanned docking stations located at key points around the city.

You release a bike using a pre-paid card, a credit card or a mobile phone, depending on the system. For example, after an initial (minimal) set-up fee, the ‘Boris Bikes’ cost nothing for the first 30 minutes of hire, then £1 for the next 30 minutes. After that the rates soar, the idea being to encourage users to keep the bikes for as little time as possible. In 30 minutes, you could traverse Oxford with ease, of course.

What are the caveats? Some systems have freestanding docking stations and others a docking station which attaches to existing cycle stands. In Oxford, there is not enough cycle parking as it is.

Attaching rental bikes to existing stands would cause considerable problems. Cyclists would be up in arms if bike hire led to reductions in parking spaces.

Another important factor is scale: Paris and London learnt that for a bike hire system to succeed, it needs to cover as large an area as possible, with hundreds of docking locations and thousands of bikes, otherwise a critical mass of users doesn’t develop.

Oxford should heed their experience.