I recently visited London and Paris and all I can say is we should definately get one of these!
It would be fantastic for moving around the city and would (hopefully) reduce traffic. How European would Manchester feel if you saw everyone whizzing around on bikes!
So are there any plans for this or is it just a pipe dream of mine?

I think it would be great - if only GMCA can stitch together some decent cycle lanes instead of the start - stop -start again shared with bused variety!

the one thing I find with bikes is in London car drivers are used to them and expect them and can co-exist with them (there are still plenty of incidents), but in any other city car drivers aren't really used to them and don't expect them to be there and resent them in the main, it would be nice to have more bikes though

That would change in time TubBiscuit. As Iheartthenew said, with the appropriate infrastructure this would be great. It was strongly planned for with the congestion charge. I guess as things stand there just isn't the funds!

I don't think its a matter of funds. I don't think the congestion charge (or lack of) has made any difference. Its the complete lack of thought about them or interest in them. Just look at Chapel St/The Crescent. £££££££S must have been spent on it. There's acres of tarmac either side and down the middle, plenty of opportunity for a high quality cycle lane. What have we got? a disjointed and uncontinuous green strip barely wide enough for a single bike and pretty much shared with the buses. It seems as if its nothing more than a box ticking exercise so SCC can claim they've built X miles of cycle lane....
:ohno: :ohno: :ohno:

Sorry this has the potential for a good natter about our very own 'boris bikes' and I've ranted all over it about The crescent...

Where would be a good idea for the bike 'stations'? would you have them in town (Piccadilly, St Peter's Sq, by all the main stations and Met stops? Or would you spread them out to the suburbs? Would you only put them in 'nice' areas? ;)

There are plans for a bike hire scheme, however it would only operate in Manchester city centre and Salford.

There are plans for a bike hire scheme, however it would only operate in Manchester city centre and Salford.

It'd be good to cover Oxford Road too as this is likely to be the busiest stretch. A cycle lane along the 147 route from Piccadilly Station through Charles Street, to and down Oxford Road would be great.

You'd have thought the scale of the city centre lends itself very well to this type of scheme. You can live without the cycle lanes if these costs make it prohibitive.

Sponsorship to help with running costs. Maybe even buy some of Boris' old stock when they need replacing. If they were the same other than branding Manchester could get in on the bulk buying.

It'd be good to cover Oxford Road too as this is likely to be the busiest stretch. A cycle lane along the 147 route from Piccadilly Station through Charles Street, to and down Oxford Road would be great.

You'd have thought the scale of the city centre lends itself very well to this type of scheme. You can live without the cycle lanes if these costs make it prohibitive.

Sponsorship to help with running costs. Maybe even buy some of Boris' old stock when they need replacing. If they were the same other than branding Manchester could get in on the bulk buying.

This. Put an advert on one side of the bike, TFGM branding on the other. This would help the cost of the scheme a lot.
You could put stations and met stops which would help that problem with bikes not being allowed on the tram. Also, you could put them all around the city centre and maybe Salford quays?
Imagine that, BBC stars riding along the quay side in the *cough* sun*cough*

Another place that does cycle lanes really well is York. My brother lives there and where ever we go we bike.

Manchester's lanes, as has been said are really disjointed, don't really lead anywhere and car drivers are really ignorant of cyclists.

Some one I believe has mentioned on here that making decent bike paths along the water ways in Manchester would be a good start, but they would need to be wider and well lit, as for example, the one from Salford Quays to Manchester City centre looks narrow and is very dark under a few bridges. Plus I'd be worried i'd fall off and in to the water...

Bicycle hire schemes are attractive to TfGM and MCC because they give the appearance of promoting cycling, whilst actually doing nothing about motor vehicle dominance.

Witness how many people you see on Skyride events. There are millions of bicycles lying unused in garages, garden sheds, etc. throughout the nation. People don't cycle because it is considered an unsafe fringe activity, given the lack of (proper) infrastructure, weak liability law, sports/lyrca/oddball image.

Boris bikes haven't even broke even, and are unlikely too. Most users are well-off, middle-aged males. IMO, it would be a waste of taxpayers money.

However, I do support the (advanced) proposal for a bike hire scheme at Piccadilly Station, similar to the one already set up at Stoke-on-Trent by Virgin Trains. People arriving by train (or from the airport, by train), either tourist, business or otherwise, would consider their final leg, given the safe provision of infrastructure.

I'm not asking for the roads to be rebuilt, just some adequate remarking to give a sense of safety. It'd be a better use of funds.

Bicycle hire schemes are attractive to TfGM and MCC because they give the appearance of promoting cycling, whilst actually doing nothing about motor vehicle dominance.

Witness how many people you see on Skyride events. There are millions of bicycles lying unused in garages, garden sheds, etc. throughout the nation. People don't cycle because it is considered an unsafe fringe activity, given the lack of (proper) infrastructure, weak liability law, sports/lyrca/oddball image.

Boris bikes haven't even broke even, and are unlikely too. Most users are well-off, middle-aged males. IMO, it would be a waste of taxpayers money.

However, I do support the (advanced) proposal for a bike hire scheme at Piccadilly Station, similar to the one already set up at Stoke-on-Trent by Virgin Trains. People arriving by train (or from the airport, by train), either tourist, business or otherwise, would consider their final leg, given the safe provision of infrastructure.

I'm not asking for the roads to be rebuilt, just some adequate remarking to give a sense of safety. It'd be a better use of funds.

A simple start would be to have all the cycle lanes the same colour! in some places the are green, others blue and some more bizarrely red, which just blend in to well. And not forgetting theones that are not even marked properly... You can so tell I use to bike to work every day!

A simple start would be to have all the cycle lanes the same colour! in some places the are green, others blue and some more bizarrely red, which just blend in to well. And not forgetting theones that are not even marked properly... You can so tell I use to bike to work every day!

Red was the 'default' colour for surfacing. Hard shoulders on motorways/HQDCs used to be tarmacced the same, but only locally.

Around the mid 1990s MCC began experimenting with bright green, although it has changed from kermit/bright to a darker shade. London's blue is a poor copy of Copenhagen.

IMO the red is most asthetically pleasing, as well as a psychological detterent to motorists, where as green is the opposite.

If bicycle hire schemes are the solution, why doesn't every Dutch city have one? Instead they have a nationwide railway bike/scooter hire scheme, further supplemented by independents.

IMO the red is most asthetically pleasing, as well as a psychological detterent to motorists, where as green is the opposite.


Ive noticed that

As an alternative to taxis in the centre we should bring back the Hansom cab and in order to ensure shit doesn't become a problem toe rags on community service could be put to use shovelling it up and loading it onto wagons for free delivery to allotment holders.

This would cut out short taxi journeys and would bring a gentile Victorian ambience back into town. :)

As a cyclist I feel very insecure amongst heavy traffic and as has been said this is partly because our streets are not segregated properly and drivers are too careless for my liking.

I have thought of taking up motorcycling again after a few years without one but again I simply don't trust drivers today.

I think we need to get the powers that be to recognise that there should be a hierarchy of bus infrastructure that reflects the road hierarchy. Rather than the faintly absurd situation where the Oxford Road cycle lane has intermittent painted on white lines while Grosvenor Street has a segregated concrete barrier, the level of segregation needs to reflect the busyness of the road and the perceived danger that casual cyclists would feel in that setting.

The other big deal for cyclists is junctions, where the policy of the highways department seems to be "this is too hard so let's not bother". Turning right across a busy highway is the most frightening thing for a cylist to do, and yet I can only think of one juntion where provision has been made for that.

Provision for cycling in the city is a mess at the moment. Take the Oxford/Wilmslow Road corridor, this should be an automatic win in terms of encouraging cycle use. However poor infrastructure, inconsistent or completely absent enforcement and high traffic levels mean that cycling is well down the pecking order in most people's travel choices.

A bit of jiggling could see a decent green route/on street path from Withington Library to the Whitworth Gallery, avoiding the worst bits of Fallowfield and Rusholme completely and tying into the University corridor improvements planned beyond Hathersage Road.

I'll get my bucket of red paint and a brush on a stick....

Best,
Slip

Provision for cycling in the city is a mess at the moment. Take the Oxford/Wilmslow Road corridor, this should be an automatic win in terms of encouraging cycle use. However poor infrastructure, inconsistent or completely absent enforcement and high traffic levels mean that cycling is well down the pecking order in most people's travel choices.

A bit of jiggling could see a decent green route/on street path from Withington Library to the Whitworth Gallery, avoiding the worst bits of Fallowfield and Rusholme completely and tying into the University corridor improvements planned beyond Hathersage Road.

I'll get my bucket of red paint and a brush on a stick....

Best,
Slip


Having lived down there and being a regular cyclist I agree with you, Slip. The cycling provision on what should be the gold-standard route in Manchester is woeful.
I slightly demur at the suggestion of avoiding Rusholme and Fallowfield though. The cycle lane should be as direct as possible and should take precedence over other forms of traffic and it should extend to St. Peter's Square.

From The Guardian:

The reviews of the first year of London's cycle hire scheme have begun. Writing in the Observer, Tim Lewis categorised the distinctive blue bikes as a "posh-boy toy": users are "overwhelmingly white men aged between 25 and 44, many of whom earn more than £50,000 a year".

One element of the scheme that Lewis omitted to mention is the money that Transport for London (TfL) made available for cycle training in the inner London boroughs that host docking stations. The theory was that providing rows of cheap-to-use bikes throughout the inner city would tempt people to try cycling, perhaps for the first time, and the money was provided for free training to improve cyclists' skills and confidence. The nine boroughs in which the cycle hire scheme operates were provided with 50 hire bikes that people could choose to be trained on. This was in addition to the existing training schemes already provided by these local councils.

From my perspective as a cycle trainer in inner London, it worked. There was a boom in demand during summer 2010, and I know that at least some of this was because of the publicity TfL gave to the training when it launched the cycle hire scheme in July 2010.

But what is interesting is that the typical user described by Lewis does not sign up for training. When I look back on the past 12 months, I trained just one middle-aged white man – he was a postman and I'd be very surprised if his salary was anywhere near £50,000.

In fact, I'd like to put forward a stereotype for cycling trainees: females aged between 25 and 50, many of who are from an ethnic minority. I've trained about 50 adults in the past year or so: four were male, which means more than 90% of my trainees were females. They were from a wide range of cultural backgrounds.

I make a point of asking each trainee why they want to do the training. Often they cycled a bit as a child, but never had their own bike. Sometimes they've never even been on a bike – it's quite common to hear something along the lines of "my brothers got bikes but I didn't", or "there wasn't any room to store one". A woman who grew up in Iran revealed that she would have been thrown into prison if she'd ever tried to cycle.

The prompt for taking the plunge and deciding to learn to ride has often been the lure of the cheap hire bikes that, if you are lucky, are now available at the end of your street. It gives people the chance to "try before they buy".

And most of the time it works. Even though adults tend to approach their training with a mixture of exam-level nervousness and apprehension, it is very rewarding to see how quickly most of them conquer their fears and begin to cycle competently and safely. TfL has monitored the extra funding it has been putting into this. The overall number of adults that have been trained is not yet available, but early results published in its latest cycling safety action plan review suggest that 79% of trainees feel safer.

No wonder the London Cycling Campaign calls cycle training "the quiet revolution". Look beyond the cyclist stereotype and it really may be that a new cohort is being attracted to cycling.

In the long term that will only become true if cycle training is part of a much wider push to get London to be truly a cycling city. Yes, there is a programme of cycling superhighways – signposted routes to the centre of the city – and Boris Johnson noisily proclaims that the capital is experiencing a "cycling revolution". But as the many London-based bicycle blogs point out – notably Cyclists in the City and I Bike London – too often when the needs of cyclists come up against what TfL calls the need to "smooth traffic flow", cyclists miss out. Johnson would do well to heed the advice of one of his peers, the former mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa, who said that "a city should be so constructed so that it is safely navigable by any seven-year-old on a bicycle".

Cycle trainers can help people to overcome their fear of cycling, but we need politicians to be much more courageous when it comes to creating a city where they feel safe enough to keep riding.

• Andrew Ross is a writer on planning, health and sustainability, and a cycle trainer

Agree with the comment about making it suitable for a 7 year old!

As for the colour, I get what you mean about red making it clearer that the drivers need to be aware of cyclists, however it would need to be a bright red not dull as in the rain with my colour blindness in the rain it blends in too much if dull.

Junctions really are bad in manc, especially turning right, when cars really don't seem to look closely for cars and have only not been knocked off because of my own awareness. It can get very hairy!

I slightly demur at the suggestion of avoiding Rusholme and Fallowfield though. The cycle lane should be as direct as possible and should take precedence over other forms of traffic and it should extend to St. Peter's Square.

Withington library - Wellington Road - new cut through to Platt Fields - Heald Place - Whitworth gallery would be at least as quick as via the main road I reckon (given adequate signalled crossing facilities at Wilbraham Road and Moss Lane).

Best,
Slip

Dont know about cycle project which is less advanced but its been announced the electric car charging point network and Eletric car rental centres will use GM Itso cards for the transactions.

Withington library - Wellington Road - new cut through to Platt Fields - Heald Place - Whitworth gallery would be at least as quick as via the main road I reckon (given adequate signalled crossing facilities at Wilbraham Road and Moss Lane).

Best,
Slip

Done. Let me know when you've got the paint. I'll bring my own brush.

Been doing some digging about the Bike n Ride scheme (or lack of progress on it!) at Manchester Piccadilly.

The proposal was for 100 hire bikes to be situated on Platform 10, further past the Northern Rail Information Centre, FTPE Offices and Left Luggage, to be operational in June 2010. Use of Brompton bicycles would be free for the first 30 minutes, and then £5.00 per 4 hour slot after that.

Now, apparently, due to TfGM/GMPTE, Manchester City Council, etc., sticking their oar in with their own proposals, West Coast Trains (Virgin) adopted a 'wait and see' policy. This, despite having done all the groundwork, obtained the funding, etc.

Cycling England (since abolished) was supposed to be mediating between the two, to bring about resolution. However, the Spending Review affected the remaining 9 bike hubs yet to open, with Leeds being the only one operational.

As Virgin/West Coast didn't move quickly enough, the original funding (through Adonis' 'Bike n Ride' scheme) was withdrawn. So they've had to reapply through the Local Sustainable Transport Fund, as part of a wider bid via TfGM, which is now going ahead!

Been doing some digging about the Bike n Ride scheme (or lack of progress on it!) at Manchester Piccadilly.

The proposal was for 100 hire bikes to be situated on Platform 10, further past the Northern Rail Information Centre, FTPE Offices and Left Luggage, to be operational in June 2010. Use of Brompton bicycles would be free for the first 30 minutes, and then £5.00 per 4 hour slot after that.

Now, apparently, due to TfGM/GMPTE, Manchester City Council, etc., sticking their oar in with their own proposals, West Coast Trains (Virgin) adopted a 'wait and see' policy. This, despite having done all the groundwork, obtained the funding, etc.

Cycling England (since abolished) was supposed to be mediating between the two, to bring about resolution. However, the Spending Review affected the remaining 9 bike hubs yet to open, with Leeds being the only one operational.

As Virgin/West Coast didn't move quickly enough, the original funding (through Adonis' 'Bike n Ride' scheme) was withdrawn. So they've had to reapply through the Local Sustainable Transport Fund, as part of a wider bid via TfGM, which is now going ahead!

Weird, that they were planning to use Bromptons, great bikes but expensive and compicated.
For any such scheme to work the infrastucture has to be much better. Cycling from Piccadilly Station to the Town Hall isn't the greatest advert for cycling in Manchester. Portland Street is rank on a bike in either direction, it can be avoided but you need to know the city to do that and someone fresh of the traiin is going struggle and end up fighting the buses.

I remember there was a short lived bike hire scheme with a station next to Urbis or did I dream that?

Weird, that they were planning to use Bromptons, great bikes but expensive and compicated.
For any such scheme to work the infrastucture has to be much better. Cycling from Piccadilly Station to the Town Hall isn't the greatest advert for cycling in Manchester. Portland Street is rank on a bike in either direction, it can be avoided but you need to know the city to do that and someone fresh of the traiin is going struggle and end up fighting the buses.

I remember there was a short lived bike hire scheme with a station next to Urbis or did I dream that?

I agree. A lot of people consider Bromptons in the same league as unicycles. Given that SWT also have them at Waterloo, I can only assume that Stagecoach Rail Division (who have control in marketing/retail at VWC) got some bulk contract. Screw the fact that people want something solid, comfortable, reliable and easy to use. Folding bikes are for taking ON the train, not hiring at the other end.

I didn't get the concept of the first 30 minutes being free either, as you'd have to return it back to where you got it!

Usual railway incomptency. :lol:

Regard the scheme at Urbis or nearby, I don't remember one myself. Unless it was the bright yellow OYBikes that cropped up in a few cities, but now only remain in Cardiff and Reading?

Agree with the comment about making it suitable for a 7 year old!

I think too often cycle infrastructure is focussed on making roads a bit better for cyclists now rather than making bike routes that all people can use. Where I think cycle paths have worked in Manchester is where they do divert cyclists away from main roads to less busy parallel routes (such as the route through Platt Fields and down Heald Place to the University). Obviously there will be some points where substantial infrastructure is needed for the hypothetical seven year old, but in much of the city they would similarly be comfortable using routes along quiet roads, or through routes made cul de sacs for cars but not bikes and pedestrians.

It's about taking a whole network approach rather than a incremental piecework one. Really that fits into a wider discussion about redesigning the city around its people though, which is probably too ambitious for the level of political innovation the city can muster at present.

It's about taking a whole network approach rather than a incremental piecework one. Really that fits into a wider discussion about redesigning the city around its people though, which is probably too ambitious for the level of political innovation the city can muster at present.

Amen to that brother!

Best,
Slip