More than two million ‘Boris Bikes’ hired during lockdown in London
The coronavirus crisis has prompted a massive increase in cycle hire in London, with more than two million so-called 'Boris Bikes' being rented throughout May and June.
Transport for London said that membership of its cycle hire scheme had increased by 200% since March, with 85,000 new people signing up.
The scheme, which is sponsored by Santander, had never previously surpassed 50,000 hires on a normal workday.
But within the last seven weeks this record has been broken 13 times.
TfL said the scheme had seen its busiest week ever between May 25-31, in which 363,000 bikes were hired.
Free access codes were offered to NHS staff in March and since then over 60,000 journeys have been made, with the most popular location for code redemption close to St Thomas’s Hospital.
It comes as TfL celebrates a decade of cycle hire in the capital.
The bikes are popularly known as 'Boris Bikes' after Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who introduced the scheme during his time as mayor of London.
Initially, 350 docking stations were introduced across eight London boroughs on July 30 2010, a number which has now more than doubled to 781.
TfL estimates that more than 94 million cycle hires have been made since the flagship scheme was launched.
TfL announced it will be adding 1,700 new Santander Cycles to its fleet, bringing the total on London’s streets to more than 14,000, and will be rolling out eight new docking stations this summer
Three new docking stations will be built around Clapham Common, four will be built alongside the Cycleway 4 route, connecting Tower Bridge Road with Rotherhithe, and one will be built at nearby Canada Water
A further six docking stations are also expected to be built by the end of the year.