Categories
Leisure London

Reopening of the Painted Hall in Maritime Greenwich

This Saturday, the 300-year-old Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, reopens to the public, after a two-year, £8.5 million restoration.

To help preserve the painted walls and ceiling, the old entrance has been permanently closed, and visitors now enter through the undercroft, which was previously a private dining hall for the Royal Navy, but now has a large cafe on one side and shop on the other, with admission desk at the end. At the far end is a small gallery detailing some of the history and relics of the hall.

In this gallery, intriguingly, is an oval-shaped hole. Peering down through this space, you can see parts of the old Greenwich Palace that were discovered during the restoration work. Some tiles from the palace’s hall floor, and alcoves, thought to be for the storage of honey, can be glimpsed.

A glimpse of the old Greenwich Palace.

There is also a dead-end passage ahead which looks rather intriguing – this is the “Ripley Tunnel” which runs underneath the outside path that forms the main “axis” of Maritime Greenwich. The tunnel runs between the Painted Hall and the Chapel.

The Ripley Tunnel.

Visitors then proceed upstairs to the first “wow” moment which is the vestible. Look up, as you are directly underneath one of the two cupolas which define the buildings of Maritime Greenwich (the right-hand one, in that famous view from Island Gardens).

Looking up at the cupola from the Vestible.

Up more stairs and you are in the Painted Gallery itself, with its breathtaking ceiling – the “Sistine Chapel” of the UK. Red cushioned seating, in the middle of the hall and at the sides, allow visitors to lie down and look straight up. The windows have net screen in front of them, to further preserve the paintings, but these also dim the whole hall, giving it a slightly spooky feel. Discrete lighting ensure that the ceiling and other ornamental parts of the hall are lit. At the far end, the Upper Hall contains a plaque on the floor commemorating Lord Nelson (who lay in state at that spot) and his deputy, and another large mural on the wall.

One of the lighting fixtures…

It’s undoubtably an impressive site. The hall is a big, mainly empty space – all the more to appreciate the walls and ceilings, and presumably also very useful as a flexible space for evening events.

The trust have introduced an admission fee – £12 to get in for adults, which is somewhat controversial, as it was free before. However, the first Wednesday of the month is pay-as-you-like (presumably including £0?), and definitely free on this day with a lottery ticket (the Heritage Lottery fund having funded around 40% of the work). The entrance fee includes an audio guide or group guided tour, which undoubtably is useful for interpreting what you see in the hall – as otherwise you do end up just vaguely gazing at the ceiling and its epic battle scene, and thinking it is impressive, without gaining a deeper understanding of what is being depicted and how it was created…

There’s a few other nice bits and pieces to spot – including a modern obelix at the entrance to the cafe, created by students at a college in Stratford. Beside this, there is also an attractive, back-lit drawing of the Maritime Greenwich site. In the main hall, there are also a number of cabinets containing recreations of period objects, such as an ornate crown, to try on. Or just lie down on the red cushions…

The backlit frieze at the entrance to the undercroft, showing Maritime Greenwich viewed from the north.

So, if in Greenwich, this is certainly worth visiting, along with its nearby attractions of the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory Greenwich, both of which are a few minutes walk away – particularly on the first Wednesday of the month when you can get in for nothing.

View from the south – the Painted Hall is in the building on the left.

Categories
Bike Share London

Dockless Bikeshare in London: Part 2

The Guardian newspaper has published an online article about the rise and fall of dockless bikeshare, focusing on the pure dockless systems in England (there aren’t any in the rest of the UK) that grew in 2017, and then shrank last autumn. The article extensively used some of the geospatial boundary data that I have – you can can see this on Bike Share Map. It also used some estimated counts and also looked ahead.

Meanwhile, there are various clues as to the next wave of dockless bikeshare, here in London. It looks like there are going to be at least five, possibly six players this year that will be complementing and/or competing with the incumbent Santander Cycles system that still has more bikes on the streets (10000) than all the pretenders put together:

  • Mobike, after their summer expansion and autumn radical contraction, appear to have got things under control and have started expanding again. They remain operating in two main areas – in west London (around Ealing, Acton & Chiswick) where they are not competing with Santander Cycles, and in central London (Camden Town, Bloomsbury, Angel, Bankside and the City of London) where they do. They are keeping their operating areas small, and their densities high, and are staying out of the inner city London areas where they will have had great numbers of their bikes stolen and vandalised. This is an eminently sensible business decision even if it restricts the usefulness of the system in a broader London context. Their fleet is largely upgraded to the Lite model which is much more comfortable to ride. No sign of any pedelec (electric assist) yet. They still have a very high out-of-zone charge, which coupled with their often changing operating boundaries means that users need to do some research before hiring, to avoid unexpected penalties. This lessens the scan-and-go readiness of the systems. There are around 1800 in the fleet currently.
  • Lime‘s pedelec system was looking good, with a carefully run system with no penalties for starting/finishing out-of-zone (as long as you don’t go out of London itself). Although I found the actual cycling experience not amazing, I am probably not the target market, and right now it is making a positive contribution to London’s Mobility as a Service (MaaS) options. However… Lime in the US have had a change of policy recently, switching all their pedelecs to escootershare. This doesn’t bode well for London in the long term, as the large MaaS companies are all about economy of scale. Maybe London will be quickly and genuinely profitable for them, and they’ll keep running the system here. We shall see. They currently have around 1400 bikes in their fleet in London.
  • Beryl’s Secret Cycles pedelecs remain in active pre-launch development. They are being developed right here in London and the group are taking time to get it right. The odd Secret Cycle is occasionally seen on the streets of London, and a council test is taking place in Enfield. It looks like they will, after launching in Bournemouth, be bringing their system to Islington, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, and presumably also Enfield. There are currently around 10 in their fleet, none for public use.
  • Freebike pedelecs are currently being tested by Waltham Forest council employees, so it may be launching there at some point soon. However, a City of London decision suggests they may also be coming to the heart of the capital too. This is a small place so having all the various operators in here could be interesting. However, half a million people do commute into the so-called Square Mile every working day, so there is always going to be a big focus here. There are currently around 10 in their fleet, none for public use.
  • JUMP pedelecs are also likely coming. Their parent, Uber, had a job posting out for a London-based operations/field manager. With Lime’s US pedelec retreat, JUMP are the sole US-based pedelec system and are increasingly finding they are the only bidders for US city dockless systems. London’s competition will be harder, thanks in no small part to escootershare remaining illegal here. JUMP will likely go big when they launch. They will also be able to leverage their huge existing base of London Uber users – no separate app needed!
  • Finally, and this is pure speculation on my part, but YoBike runs some reasonably successful systems in Bristol and Southampton. The platform that YoBike is part of is SharingOS, and they are based in London. I am sure they would to have a physical system a little closer to their base.

If there are going to be 5+ systems in central London, then the authorities are really going to have to get their act together re managing parking for these fleets. A mass expansion of cycle parking hoops, or taping rectangles on pavements for them, is going to be needed.

A Beryl Secret Cycle on test, spotted in the City of London.
Photo courtesy of Angus Hewlett.

Categories
Bike Share London

Lime-E Bikeshare: London Test

A puncture on my own bicycle on my way in to work this morning found me grinding to a halt outside Manor House station – not the worst place to have a flat tyre, as the tube from there will take me into work in around 20 minutes with just one change, for £2.40. (The other option was a single bus for £1.50, taking 30 minutes – although easily longer if it gets snarled up in traffic). But as I dropped my bike off in the bike stands beside the entrance, I noticed another bike – a chunky, green-and-yellow coloured beast. It was a Lime-E bike – London’s only (so far – others coming) electric bikeshare, also parked beside (but not chained to) a stand:

Surprise mobility option, sitting at a bike stand in North-East London.

It was well out of zone but Lime (currently) allows hires starting and finishing out of zone – a pragmatic decision presumably based on the lack of cross-borough policy, the bikes being relatively well managed by the operator, and there not being too many of them cluttering up and causing non-user complaints:

Plenty of out-of-zone Limes available…

I hadn’t tried Lime so far, although it launched last December – I was put off by the £1/hire+15p/minute cost – that adds up quickly. But, I needed to get to work and it was right there. Surely this bike could prove to be an effective alternative mode of transport, for my immediate commute requirement?

I already had the app installed on my Huawei smartphone, but had not put in payment details – only when trying to scan did it prompt for a payment card. Android Pay stepped in to automatically add my credit card details, however Lime didn’t like the two-digit year supplied by Android, requiring a reenter of that section.

The app confirmed that this was a hireable bike and that it had a decent amount of charge on it – 86km! I could almost get to Oxford with that:

My ride. Looks good on the app and in real life.

Then, a rescan and the bike unlocked with a click in a couple of seconds. (Interestingly, the wheel-lock was quite a small one, not the chunky ones that appear on Mobikes now to try and stop rampant theft of them.) Something (the bike, battery or the app – not sure!) played a jolly tune to indicated success, and I was off. Unfortunately I quickly noticed the bike loudly jolted with each wheel turn – possibly a buckled spoke or other problem with the wheel – it was not enough for me to abandon the journey, but was not something I would leave before fixing. Later on, something else made a plastic rattling noise at the back of the bike every time I pedalled. Maintenance (or lack of it) was a problem with the non-electric dockless bikeshares in London. I was hoping that the more expensive electric bikes would have a more rigorous repair regime. Maybe they do and I was just unlucky.

The initial acceleration boost given by the battery was great – straight across the lights and down to Finsbury Park. However, almost immediately it just felt like a regular bike – there was still a boost at faster speeds, but it felt like it was just countering the heavy battery, rather than genuinely making it easier than a regular bike. I didn’t feel slower than my regular bike – but it didn’t feel like it was any less effort either. There is only one gear, so the only thing you can do other than pedal, is to ring the handlebar bell. The gearing is OK – it’s certainly better than the Mobike/Ofo/Urbo ultra-cautious setting.

I was keen to measure the “configuration” for the electric-assist, so stopped after around 3km, at the bottom of the main remaining uphill on the route – up Camden Road past the old Holloway Prison – to attach my Beeline smart compass – not for its primary navigation purpose, but to get an idea of the speed I was travelling at. The speedometer function has rather nice analogue-style needle, and was a useful way to see my speed without looking at my phone, even if it is based on my phone’s GPS and therefore lags by a few seconds.

Beeline smart compass on a Lime bike – testing the electric assist at different speeds.

It was undoubtably nice to accelerate up the hill with the battery doing the initial work. It seems that, between 0km/h and around 12km/h, the battery does most of the work. From around 12km/h to 20km/h (my normal peddling speed) it gives a slight assist – not really noticeable but presumably useful for longer journeys. From 20km/h to the legal maximum 25km/h I’m not convinced the battery was helping at all – or if it was, it was just partly countering the weight. It was hard to pedal the bike above 25km/h even downhill on a clear road – but that’s presumably by design – bikeshare is generally meant for quieter roads and less experienced users, where a slower speed is safer, rather than me trying to match the vehicular traffic on a sometimes busy “red route” major road.

However, it would be nice to have a much bigger boost between 12km/h and 20km/h, so that you only have to be doing significant peddling work at the top of the range. I feel more tired out than I would have on my own normal pretty cheap road bike. It took me 22 minutes to get in – exactly the same amount of time as my own bike would have. Average speed 19km/h according to my smartwatch – pretty standard for me. Certainly my fastest journey on a bikeshare bike in London.

Journey’s end, at the Santander Cycles rack near UCL. Note also the Mobike.

I parked my bike alongside a Santander Cycles rack. There was also a Mobike there. I really like the idea of dockless cycling bikes being available at the “empty” ends of Santander Cycles docking stations – it seems an “obvious” place to leave them, it’s also a good place to “advertise” to people who are in need of a bikeshare of some sorts. (Incidentally, the poster in the Lime basket refers parking in the “sidewalk” twice – needs some UK localisation here, we call them pavements!)

My fare. This is expensive for a Zone 2-1 journey in London.

A bit of bill shock though – £4.30, as it was a 22 minute journey (£1 hire + 15p/minute for 22 minutes.) The £1 was, at least, waived as this was my first ride and I was on a referral (btw use my referral code RVDG4MS if you want your own). The pricing structure means that the temptation to (safely) jump red lights was strong – much more so than on my own bike. There are a lot of traffic lights on the route and everytime I hit red on one of the bigger junctions, it will have cost me 15 pence. That’s, unfortunately, a pretty powerful financial incentive to break the law. I didn’t (obvs) – but I can sympathise somewhat with the Uber Eats and Deliveroo cyclists who are numerous in London but aren’t the greatest at obeying the rules… for them, like the many delivery vans in central London getting tickets for illegal parking, the speed/penalty balance is tilted towards bad behaviour.

Also, my suspicion is that Lime are making the same cost-saving/risky approach that Mobike/Urbo/Ofo et al have done so – they don’t use have GPS on the bike itself, but are primarily using the GPS on your smartphone. In Lime’s case they may have a SIM card or emergency GPS for retrieving a missing bike – but not in regular operation. When I stopped at the bottom of the hill on Camden Road, I switched away from the Lime app (but had it open in the background) to the Beeline app, to activate my device’s functionality and start sending it GPS information. Unfortunately, it looks like this stopped the Lime app from recording my location – although the clock kept ticking. So, it looks like I only did a 2.5km journey, not the full 7km:

Journey of 2.5km according to Lime app – the “finish point” being where I paused to put on my speedometer and switched to another app in the foreground.
Actual journey on the Lime bike – 7km.

This issue may be a Huawei/Android 6.0 thing – it could be because the Lime app doesn’t have permissions to access the GPS in the background – or Huawei’s battery “optimisation” cuts off its connection in the background anyway – this has already caused me problems – but it should have been clear to the app that if it wasn’t getting GPS information from my phone, it should be using the bike’s – so I don’t think the bike has any, or it’s not used.

I also didn’t switch back to my Lime app immediately on finishing the ride – I just drew the lock catch back and felt a buzz from the phone that was confirming the ride was finished – a couple of Lime notifications on my lockscreen also indicated that it had detected the journey finish. But – I only unlocked my phone and switched to the app once I had walked ~200m further into the UCL courtyard. The app has then marked the bike as being in the UCL courtyard, not where it actually is (which I am showing here as the green pin to the north):

Wrong location…

This might be quite tricky to someone trying to find the bike – they’d need to head out of UCL, along Gower Street, and then up Gower Place to find it. It looks like Lime again used my phone GPS as soon as it could – well after the ride finish – so has recorded the wrong location.

It may be that it will later use any SIM card on the bike to triangulate its location correctly (or even its GPS if it has it – I suspect not) and snap back to Gower Place. But, this kind of asset tracking trouble is a nightmare both for users (they can’t find the bike) and the operators (they can’t find it either!). This is one of the reasons Ofo essentially failed – they couldn’t find their own bikes but with the higher costs of electric bikes, I’m really suprised to see it again. In mitigation – there are very tall buildings here and the street is narrow – so it could be a simple GPS error too. Indeed, as well as the “lime symbol” (bike location) being wrong, the blue dot (my location) is also wrong – I’m standing at the “crosshairs” symbol on the map above when I took this screenshot.

(Update: As I suspected, the bike does have communication capabilities of its own – it has “phoned home” after an hour or so, and the location has updated to be much closer to its actual location)

So, to conclude, getting a Lime-E to work didn’t work out for me – it cost more than the tube, and took longer, and still required a lot of pedalling. However, I’m not the target user I suspect – it’s people who wouldn’t be cycling anyway, and just want an easy way to get around, not in a great rush, and maybe with a little bit of exercise but nothing too strenuous. I don’t think most parts of London have enough hills, to make the relatively high cost of Lime worth it here – although I would love to try it out on Swains Lane. Maybe a user-configurable app option could change the profile on the bike, to allow a decent boost between 20-25km/h.

I think electric bikeshare has a place in London. We aren’t quite there with Lime. They are doing a lot of things right – not overwhelming the streets, looking after their fleet fairly well (I never see them knocked over) and allowing sensible usage anywhere – but they are also making some of the mistakes which the older dockless companies (Ofo/Urbo/Mobike) also made in London. They are also, like almost all the other companies in the space here, not sharing their bike locations publicly/openly. You either have to open the specific app for the operator, or happen to see a bike when you weren’t expecting it (like me today). If Google Maps, Transit or CityMapper had told me of these, then surely they would be used more and more effectively. Get your GBFS feeds out there, bikeshare companies, regardless of if you are mandated to (big American cities) or not, and let people find your fleet in new and better ways!

I’m not quite convinced we have arrived at the future of smart Mobility as a Service (MAAS) just yet, at least in London, but at least there are various companies working on it. It’s going to be an interesting summer.

Categories
London

London’s 9 Million Day – Delayed

I’ve been keeping an eye on London’s population projections, and indeed have featured them in a couple of presentations recently – at a TedX event and also a CRUK data visualisation conference at The Crick. By taking the most recent mid-year population estimates for London, and the annual population change, I can simply linearly extrapolate forward to see where it hits 9 million.

When I first put my presentations together, I was working off 2016 mid-year population and population change estimates. Since then, the 2017 estimates are out and have dramatically changed London’s “9 million day”.

Here’s the daily population change in London, inflows and outflows based on natural factors (births/deaths), internal migration (from/to other parts of the UK) and international migration (to/from the rest of the world) –

Before:

Now:

Daily numbers are a simplification – through the year, the rates vary hugely, particularly at the start of the summer holidays and autumn term, where large numbers of interns and students, respectively, move into London. The numbers do however take care of short term migration, as they only reflect those who intend to stay (or leave) for at least a year.

The reasons for the change are not clear, I suspect it’s a combination of Brexit making London less attractive for international migrants, and increases in violent crime, house prices and home working, all three factors making it less attractive for internal migrants (i.e. from other parts of the UK). Or at least, after staying here for a while, people are more likely to move out than try and stick with London as a place to live and raise a family, even if it’s still a good place to commute in to work (or at least, the location of a head office to remotely dial into).

London’s 9 million day was to have been the 27 October 2018, i.e. this weekend, based on the 2016 numbers and a linear projection. Now, it’s moved right back to 25 September 2020. I am sure that a linear projection is an oversimplification, there is clearly a slowdown, and I am sure that the impact of Brexit (i.e. spring 2019 onwards) may further hasten the slowdown – so we will be well into 2021 I suspect before the number is finally hit.

ONS publish their mid-year estimates a year after the date of the estimate, so we can expect to see the mid-2018 estimates and changes, in the middle of next year, at which point I will recalculate the 9 million day again.

Categories
Bike Share London

Bikeshare in London – The Last 12 Months

I recently presented at the CoMoUK Good Mobility Conference in East London, looking at the story of bikeshare in London over the last 12 months ago, touching a little on other systems in the UK.

Here are my slides, slightly updated from the conference itself:

While the core of the presentation was a timeline, numbers and data from London’s bikeshare between last summer and this summer, I took the opportunity to also rate the various UK offerings on their open data provision, and offer some of my thoughts on round 2* of dockless bikeshare which took place this year.

It was great to hear a wide range of presentations at the conference. I particularly liked the Derby presentation. Thanks also to Tim, operator of Derby, for sorting out the GBFS feed. Thank you to CoMoUK for inviting me.

* Round 1 being oBike’s “forgiveness” model back in summer 2017, and round 3 being, I’m sure, American dockless providers “getting it right” next summer.

Categories
London

Crossrail Preview – Whitechapel

Crossrail, who are building the Elizabeth line railway across London that is due to open this December, held “sneak preview” open days recently at two of their stations – Whitechapel in east London, and Tottenham Court Road in the centre of the city. The previews were self-guided tours of part of the new sections of the stations, including the Crossrail platforms and ticket halls.

Here’s some photos from the visit to Whitechapel. This already has Underground and Overground platforms (the former famously underneath the latter) but the Crossrail ones are far deeper down both.

The surface-level station reconstruction looks quite far from finished in places, however on the outside of one of the new buildings there is some nice concrete detailing:

Whitechapel has an additional six months before it comes into use in May 2019 as an Elizabeth line station, when the Shenfield services start to be threaded with the Abbey Wood services, into central London.

Descent was via over a hundred steps – these huge escalators are not yet for public use:

We were then able to walk around a section of the platform. Notice how the main lighting source is a continuous light panel that sits above the platform screen doors, between the two are the next train indicators – these screens for these are tilted down and covered in this picture, with some cabling sticking out:

The glass platform screen doors were visible, along with the pristine looking running track:

A reminder that the project is close to completion:

Also, impressive in size was the huge connecting chamber – there is only one normal exit from each platform, unlike many other Crossrail stations which will have exits at either end. The connecting chambers don’t have regular corners onto the platforms and passages, instead they curve around rather sinuously. The effect is quite futuristic and rather fantastic:

It was great to get out of the oppressive heatwave, down into the cool (for now) platforms of the Crossrail project.

Categories
Bike Share London

Making Bikeshare Pay

Dockless bikeshare has been out in London for around 10 months now (not withstanding the brief but spectacular oBike launch and burnout in mid 2016). It looks like the operators are getting serious and trying to get dockless bikeshare to pay for itself – starting a transition from a “growth” to “profit” focus:

Mobike has introduced an out-of-operating-area fee of £10 for London (left). Interestingly, this is only £5 for Oxford (right), where arguably the competition is even more fierce:

It isn’t clear whether you can continue to start journeys from outwith the operating area, but you must finish within them to avoid the fee. However, you can also get the fee waived by taking any Mobike from outside the operating area, back inside it, within 12 hours. It could be the bike you took outside, or another one. This is interesting – let the user help the system work better. You either fix the problem (bikes outside areas the operator can manage effectively, or don’t have permission to be in) or pay the operator to do it for you.

Mobike is making a bigger deal of its hubs now, showing the numbers of bikes currently available at them. Bikes in a circular buffer around each hub are reported as at the point in some cities (Oxford – left) but individually in others (London – right). This makes them a little more like a hybrid system, with certain locations generally having a reliable pool of bikes available, but with out-of-hub parking still available to keep the system flexible. At this point, there is no user incentive for hub-based journey finishes or starts.

Mobike have also shrunk their operating areas – in Islington, it now doesn’t extend north of Holloway. Presumably Mobike are tired of moving their bikes back up the hill to Archway and Highgate, only to have everyone cycle them back down. However they have extended into a small part of Hackney – the De Beauvoir Town area. They have also shrunk their Southwark footprint, so that the bikes can only be used north of the South Circular, and their western footprint has also shrunk – no service in west Hounslow, Feltham, Southall or Greenford now. They has also completely pulled out of Newham. Looking at their app, it never looked like there were many bikes available for use there anyway. You can see the area of operation here (orange border).

In addition they have significantly increased their usage fee. Initially it was 50p for 30 minutes. Now, it is 50p for 20 minutes on the smaller-frame bikes with black baskets (show as orange on their map), or £1 for 20 minutes on the larger-frame bikes with orange baskets (shown as white on their map). [Updated 12 July – now £1 for 20 minutes for all their bikes.] [Updated 1 August – now 99p/20 minutes.]

Ofo has also increased their usage fee, it is now 70p for 30 minutes. [Updated August – now £1 for 30 minutes.] So, in places where both systems operate, the small Mobikes are cheaper for journeys up to 20 minutes, the Ofos are cheaper for 20-30 minute journeys, the small Mobikes are cheaper for 30-40 minute journeys etc etc…

Single Journey

Ofo Mobike Small Mobike Big Santander Cycles
15 min 70p 50p £1 £2
25 min 70p £1 £2 £2
35 min £1.40 £1 £2 £4
45 min £1.40 £1.50 £3 £4
1h 15m £2.10 £2 £4 £6
1h 45m £2.80 £3 £6 £8

Subsequent Journeys in next 24h

Ofo Mobike Small Mobike Big Santander Cycles
15 min 70p 50p £1 Free
25 min 70p £1 £2 Free
35 min £1.40 £1 £2 £2
45 min £1.40 £1.50 £3 £2
1h 15m £2.10 £2 £4 £4
1h 45m £2.80 £3 £6 £6

Ofo and Mobike are also now showing specific forbidden areas on their app. This is interesting, because I assumed that all areas outside of their operating area were forbidden. Presumably these are extra-problematic areas for the operators. Ofo has marked various royal parks as forbidden areas, while Mobike has marked canal-sides, the London Bridge station complex, and large public parks, as forbidden. Mobike’s out-of-operating-area areas allow journeys to finish but the user (only) is then encouraged to move the bike back into an operating area within 12 hours, it is locked out of use for others.

This means that in effect there are five types of dockless system geofences, with four being shown on the maps in the Mobike and Ofo apps:

Ofo Mobike
Hub area Shown in app as points overlaid on green-bordered rectangles. Parking here encouraged, occasionally incentivised with free next ride coupons. Shown as points, but a blue circular buffer is shown on clicking it. Parking here encouraged but not incentivised.
Operating area Show as green-bordered areas Shown as blue shaded/bordered areas
Out of operating area Shown as regular map. Parking locks bike for user-only redistribution back. Shown as regular map. Parking results in fine, unless it (or another) is taken back in in 12 hours by the user, but still available for use.
Forbidden area Shown as red shaded/bordered areas. Parking may result in credit drop or penalty. Shown as grey shaded/bordered areas. Parking may result in credit drop or penalty.
Out of region Not shown by either. But I assume there is a distance, out of the operating area, beyond which the operator would not seek to recover the bike into the operating area, but might sanction the user instead. For London, the GLA boundary might act as such an area

Meanwhile, the third dockless player in London, Urbo, has announced it is quitting the three London boroughs it is operating in – Enfield, Waltham Forest and Redbridge. Enfield will announce a replacement “soon”, Waltham Forest is getting Ofo in instead, and Redbridge already has Ofo. The numbers don’t sound great – only 6000 journeys in Waltham Forest in 5 months, on a fleet of 250 – so 20 journeys a day, or 0.16 journeys/bike/day, and 3000 miles clocked up in Enfield, again in 5 months, on a fleet of 100 – so (assuming average journey of 1 mile) 0.2 journeys/bike/day. This means these bikes are spending 99.8% of their time not being used (assuming an average journey of 15 minutes).

Barnet had just announced that Urbo was coming there, and Barking & Dagenham was due to sign-off Urbo coming there in July – I would speculate that these launches may be off. Urbo, an Irish company from the start, has just been bought by the operator of several bikeshare systems in towns in Ireland, and it has just launched Dublin, where it has access to the whole of the city. Just like in London, Dubliners likely want to cycle throughout the urban area and not within arbitrary political boundaries. So that would likely be where the London Urbo bikes are going.

Numbers of bikes and journeys are generally hard to come by for dockless bikeshare – the companies themselves have good commercial reasons for being coy with the numbers. In some cases, the operator will have fewer bikes out on the streets than they say – as they just don’t have that many (working) bikes – Santander Cycles have consistently overstated the numbers of bikes out there . The opposite can also be true – where dockless operators have agreed maximum numbers of bikes with boroughs, and then see these numbers be exceeded as users cycle over from neighbouring boroughs, or operations necessitate. There is little data, so we generally have to go on press releases:

Number of Ofos, Mobikes and Urbos in London

I am adjusting the following table as I get better information:

Ofo Mobike Urbo Santander Cycles
September 2017 200 750 250 9514
November 2017 400 (a + b) 1150 250 10038
December 2017 1000 1150 250 10211
February 2018 1000 (38km2) 2000 (130km2) 350 10513
March 2018 1350 Ann: 2200
Obs: 2616
475 10651
April 2018 1400 (a + b) Ann: 2200
Obs: 3315
475 10441
May 2018 2800 Ann: 3000
Obs: 3072
475 10279
June 2018 3000 (253km2) Ann: 4000 (68km2)
Obs: 1980
475 (177km2) 9716 (112km2)
July 2018
(provisional –
will be updated)
Obs (I): 1783 Obs: 1069 (68km2)
Obs (I): 889
CLOSED 9151 (112km2)

In better news, both Ofo and Mobike are both continuing to expand in London this summer, in areas where they do think dockless bikeshare will work. Mobike should be coming to Haringey soon, while Ofo have today announced their forthcoming expansions – Camden launches this week, with Waltham Forest following shortly (this week, says the borough at least), followed by Wandsworth and Hammersmith & Fulham. This means yellow bikes will soon be appearing in Bloomsbury, Fizrovia, Camden Town, Kentish Town, Highgate, Belsize Park, West Hampstead, Walthamstow, Chingford, Leyton, White City, Hammersmith, Fulham, Putney, Wandsworth, Battersea, Balham, west Clapham and Earlsfield.

Categories
London

London Borough Challenge

[See also this update.]

Is it possible to visit all 32 London boroughs (& the City of London) in a day? How quickly can you do it?

The “London Borough Challenge” has been on my to-do list for a while, and I finally got around to tackling the challenge on Saturday.

For my first attempt, and so possibly the World Record (if no one else has done/beaten it) the time was: 9 hours, 25 minutes, 23 seconds. It was 92km of cycling in 10 stages + 103km on 9 train journeys.

My initial thoughts were to do a route involving tube/trains, stopping at a station in each borough. Kind of a borough version of Geoff Marshall’s famous Tube Challenge. However I thought that would be a bit underwhelming for a “tour of London” – just railway platforms rather than the public realm. Also, it was a lovely, warm day, and spending the whole day cooped up in various trains and tunnels didn’t appeal. So, I decided to do a bicycle + train combo. If you don’t have a bike, you can probably substitute the cycling sections with a combination of walking, jogging and buses/trams. I’d not recommend a bikeshare bike, as if you are cycling nearly 100km, you want something that is comfortable for you for those kinds of distances.

Challenge rules

  1. Visit all 32 boroughs + the City of London, take a photo in each one to prove the visit.
  2. Each photo must be taken from within the borough and must be of a street name sign with the borough name and/or borough crest/logo on it.
  3. Where a borough does not have street name signs with the borough on it, then a photo of a borough-owned street name sign with an immoveable object beside it (e.g. anchored waste bin, grit bin) with the borough name/logo on it is OK. (e.g. Bromley, Sutton)
  4. Truncated borough names (e.g. “Barking” for Barking & Dagenham) are OK.
  5. You can also have local neighbourhood welcome signs if they also contain the borough name/crest/logo (e.g. Corbets Tey in Havering, and Pinner in Harrow) as long as it’s not a “welcome to the borough” sign (as you are not standing in the borough when you see the sign!) and as long as it’s not on the edge of the borough (same reason).

Note that none of the 9 photos in this blogpost qualify – click on the blue pins in the map above to see the actual qualifying photos.

My route was constrained by the inevitable weekend railway engineering works. The main effect this had, on the day, was very limited services out of London Bridge station. The line through Forest Hill was closed, as were the lines through/near Lewisham. This would make the south-east London section difficult, with a long cycle needed from the Greenwich line down to Bromley, rather than a train dropping me near the Greenwich/Bexley/Bromley intersection; and then another long cycle down to Croydon rather than the London Overground dropping me there. I decided to cycle from Abbey Wood, on the Greenwich line, as I wanted to have a look at the brand new station there (it is a very nice new structure!) and thought this would avoid Shooters Hill – it did, but I forgot about Knee Hill – not quite as big, but very definitely a hill.

The main issue of the day was that I ran low on my GPS battery and phone battery. The former died completely about 20 minutes before the end of the challenge, so I missed tracing my final route into Barnet. The phone looked like it was on its way out before the end too, but by using airplane mode I was able to eek out the last bit of charge. This however meant I couldn’t risk using it for navigation in the latter part of the day. The location of the sun was useful as a rough compass indicator, but as I only started my challenge at around 2pm, it got dark during the latter part of the challenge and so I suffered some navigational problems thereon. In particular, my route out of Wimbledon station was very poor – I thought I was heading northwards alongside Wimbledon Park whereas I was heading southwestwards. You can see a dramatic and accidental curve in the map above. I similarly took a poor route from Richmond Park to Richmond proper, and wasn’t sure of the boundary lines around Turnham Green station, hence some double-backing around here while reading street signs for borough information! (it was nice to see this artwork there though.

So, I am sure 9 hours, 25 minutes and 23 seconds is easily beatable. Maybe it will be much faster if done by car, at night? A route much shorter than 195km should be possible, a squint at the map suggests the shortest route would not be much less than 138km. Maybe going via Crystal Palace (five boroughs within a few hundred metres), if you can make it up that hill? 33 stops works out at less than 20 minutes per borough though, and actually finding a “qualifying” sign took quite a while in places. I think I got lucky for some boroughs. Waltham Forest appeared to have no labelled signs, but literally as I was exiting the borough, having cycled right through it, I found a very old street sign with the borough name on it. I also think I was very lucky to find a Wandsworth labelled sign. For four boroughs (Bromley, Sutton, Havering and Harrow) I never did find a street name sign with the borough name on it.

Challenge miscellany

  • I only spent a couple of hours planning the route and checking to see what trains were running.
  • I did not do any research into which boroughs would typically have borough names on their street name signs. This proved to be a problem right at the start – which was going to be around the IKEA at Tottenham. A fruitless search for names in this pretty bleak part of London, until I headed westwards into more residential areas.
  • I scribbled down rough timings, planned route (town-to-town) and boroughs. The rough rule that any journey in London on public transport takes half an hour seemed to hold true. My timings suggested a start at 14:00 and finish at 23:45. I started a little earlier and quite quickly made up half an hour by doing the central London leg at speed. I spent the rest of the day consistently 20-30 minutes ahead. I was keen to maintain this so that I could get through Richmond Park before the gates were locked – I forgot that it’s actually open 24 hours for pedestrians/bikes.
  • I used a Google MyMaps map (not the one above) loaded with a KML of the boroughs, to check where I was and where a nearby borough boundary was.
  • I used OSMAnd loaded with an offline OpenStreetMap map of London for detailed navigation when I needed it.
  • Total cost was just £9.75 for the day – £8.30 on an Zone 1-6 paper travelcard with railcard, and £1.45 on a fizzy drink in Sutton (it was a hot day!)
  • Trains generally ran to time, except for (guess who) Southern from West Croydon to Sutton which was around 10 minutes late.
  • OMG the Thameslink loop around Sutton is really very slow – although quite scenic.
  • I don’t know what on earth is going on with the road layout around Barking but it is a complete mess.
  • The only place I suffered from impatient (but not rude) drivers was, quite reasonably, as I was going up Knee Hill. Very steep, busy, no pavement…
  • I probably wouldn’t recommend cycling around Crittal’s Corner on the Bexley/Bromley border – and especially stopping on the slip to take a photo of the sign (above).

The challenge was a nice way to see a cross-section of London. However I did only spend a few seconds in some boroughs (Camden, Ealing) so it perhaps wasn’t a representative tour of the whole metropolis. The most intense full-on London experience was at/around Barking station, particularly as the street market was on. The nicest bit was, for sure, cycling through Richmond Park at sunset, with its lovely views and herds of deer. Uxbridge Road in Harrow, less so (although it was dark and I was rushing at that point). It was good to find some new cycle infrastructure – the new tracks along Forest Road in Waltham Forest and from Aldersbrook to Manor Park, for example. 0 I only got to cycle right across a few boroughs – Waltham Forest, Bexley, Hammersmith & Fulham and Harrow. A few – Havering, Sutton and Brent, were just jump out of the train, cycle around a bit, jump back on the next train. I was happy not to have to spend too long in Harlesden. But London is a city of villages and several that I visited were pleasant – Wimbledon village, Wood Street, Sydenham, Alderbrook. Upminster seemed nice enough. Spitalfields was buzzy as ever. Even Abbey Wood appears to be having an embryonic rebrand as Abbey Wood Village – hello there Crossrail.

Route narrative/timings

TimeBoroughNotes
13:50:05EnfieldStart right by the Haringey border, having found a suitable sign.
13:54:20HaringeyFollowed by a nice cycle through Tottenham Marshes and then along Forest Road and Wood Street.
14:25:57Waltham ForestHaving cycled right through the borough, found a named sign a few metres pretty much on the boundary.
14:27:30RedbridgeA very old sign, for the same road as above, and didn’t find any more.
14:37:07NewhamBy Manor Park station, with the borough crest on the sign.
14:55:06Barking & DagenhamA sign for “Borough of Barking” which counts as it’s part of the borough name, even though the sign is for the pre-1965 Barking borough.
15:02c2c trainAir conditioned 🙂 from Barking fast to Upminster. 9 minutes for 12km.
15:19:30HaveringA borough without its name on its street name signs, but found a Welcome to Corbets Tay sign with the borough name/logo on it.
15:35c2c trainFrom Upminster to Liverpool Street, via Barking and Stratford. 27 minutes for 25km.
16:04:25City of LondonLike all inner London boroughs, the City of London name appears on all street name signs.
16:06:58Tower Hamlets 
16:10:15Hackney 
16:11:39Islington 
16:17:44CamdenOnly in borough for a few seconds.
16:22:17Westminster 
16:27:46LambethThe Welcome to Lambeth sign appears at the other end of Waterloo Bridge from the Thanks for Visiting Westminster sign.
16:29:16Southwark 
16:41Southeastern trainFrom London Bridge to Abbey Wood. 27 minutes for 16km. A slow train. It was the part of a special route to Orpington via Erith and Lee (!). I could have gone from Waterloo East and got off at Woolwich, but I fancied visiting the rebuilt London Bridge and Abbey Wood stations which are both impressive soaring lit-wooden-ceiling structures. Plus there was a train at Abbey Wood with the “Elizabeth Line” roundel (not “TfL Rail”) on it 🙂
17:13:35GreenwichA long way from Greenwich itself, but not too hard to find a sign.
17:20:57BexleyWeirdly, Bexley borough street name signs seem to have a “no dog mess” symbol as the “logo”, rather than a council symbol or crest.
17:49:49Bromley 
17:52Thameslink + Southeastern trainsSt Mary Cray to Bickley, and then Bickley to Penge East. 18 minutes for 12km + 6 minute change. In Bromley borough for the entirety of this leg.
18:26:21LewishamMost street name signs without the borough name, but found this one near a roundabout in Sydenham.
18:54:36CroydonAlmost no street signs with the borough name on them, so continued cycling past Selhurst, until finally found one outside West Croydon station.
18:59Southern trainWest Croydon to Sutton. A bit delayed. 12 minutes for 7km.
19:25:27SuttonAnother borough which hides its identity on its street name signs. So found a fixed bin. Had a nice looking shopping parade though with the borough logo on its gates, and a lovely clock outside the station.
19:37Thameslink trainSutton to Wimbledon. On the Thameslink loop – very slow. 21 minutes for 9km.
20:03:30MertonPretty every sign has the council name/logo on it.
20:22:11WandsworthWith phone battery running low and it getting dark, I didn’t realise I that I did a huge accidental 180-degree loop from Wimbledon Park into Wimbledon village instead of Southfields. Crossed into Wandsworth eventually and found this very old sign, almost entirely hidden by branches – so did some gardening.
20:36:26KingstonFollowed by a twilight cycle through Richmond Park.
20:51:39RichmondAll street name signs mention the borough.
21:04London Underground tubeRichmond to Turnham Green. 9 minutes for 5.5km.
21:17:57HounslowAll signs have the borough name on them.
21:19:00EalingAnother “easy” one. Only in Ealing borough for a few seconds.
21:23:16Hammersmith & FulhamThe borough finishes just beyond this sign.
21:31:21Kensington & ChelseaAs you might expect, this Royal borough loves to put its name on all the signs.
21:43London Overground trainShepherd’s Bush to Willesden Junction. 9 minutes for 4km. With a 10 minute wait for this one too, I probably should have cycled it.
21:59:02BrentBizarre spiral route out of Willesden Junction, walking at track level, with the platform (and train) beside/above you, along a very long walkway. Quick loop through, as all street signs have “Brent” on them, to find the other entrance to the station.
22:11London Overground trainWillesden Junction to Hatch End. 20 minutes for 13km.
22:39:20HarrowNo street name signs mention Harrow, but it does have neighbourhood welcome signs.
22:47:30HillingdonDidn’t realise this at the time (no map), but I’d followed the edge of the borough around.
23:15:28BarnetTedious and unpleasant cycle along a surprisingly busy Uxbridge Road. They don’t expect cyclists this far out.

Epilogue

To get back to the start, I took advantage of the travelcard and the limited carriage of bikes on the Northern Line to go two stops from Edgware to Colindale and then one stop from Finchley Central to East Finchley (a suprisingly long way) thus managing a rare single journey involving both branches of the northern line in the same direction. It only makes sense if you look at the line geographically. Which left for an exciting finish for a weary cyclist down Muswell Hill. 🙂

Categories
Bike Share London

Population Analysis of London Bikeshare Systems

Mobike, one of London’s four bikeshare operators (with Urbo, Ofo and Santander Cycles) as today expanded to Newham. The operators are being driven by different borough approaches and priorities, which is resulting in a patchwork quilt of operating areas, although the London Assembly is today pushing for a more London-wide approach to regulation of the field.

Over and above the map linked above, I’ve done some population analysis to look at how the four different operators compare in London. Demographic figures are from the 2011 Census so total population will have gone up a bit, and cycle-to-work population up a lot. Nonetheless, the figures still allow for a useful comparison. The populations here are working age (16-74) populations. The differences across the operators are dramatic:

Operator
 
# of
Boroughs
Area
/km2
# of
Bikes
Average
Day/Night
Pop
Bikeshare
Bikes per
Person
Pop
Density
pax/km2
Cycle
To Work
Pop %
Santander Cycles  5, + 6 (part) 112 10200 1,520,000 1:150 13500 4.8%
Mobike  6 196 1800 1,425,000 1:800 7300 3.5%
Ofo  5 123 1300 1,040,000 1:1000 8500 4.0%
Urbo  3 177 500 570,000 1:2800 3200 1.2%

I have calculated the populations by averaging the day-time workplace population and the night-time residential population, making a very rough assumption that people spend their waking hours split roughly between work and home. Santander Cycles, the dock-based system, has been around since 2010. The others are all dockless operators and launched in 2017.

The high population density where Santander Cycles works in its favour, as does its high bikes/population ratio, with one bike available for every 150 person who lives and/or works in the area. Urbo, on the other hand, is mainly targetting populations that both have a low population density, and a low cycle-to-work percentage – two factors that would work against it. Mobike and Ofo sit in the middle, with the former quite a bit larger than the latter at the moment, but the latter operating areas with a more established tradition of cycling (using here the Cycle to Work population as a proxy for cycling in general).

Categories
CDRC Conferences Data Graphics London OpenLayers

FOSS4G UK 2018 Meeting and OpenLayers 4

I attended and presented at the FOSS4G UK conference in central London, in early March. I was scheduled to present in the cartography track, near the end of the conference, and it ended up being an excellent session, the other speakers being Charley Glynn, digital cartographer extraordinaire from the Ordnance Survey, who talked on “The Importance of Design in Geo” and outlined the release of the GeoDataViz Toolkit, Tom Armitage on “Lightsaber Maps” who demonstrated lots of colour compositing variants and techniques (and who also took the photo at the top which I’ve stolen for this post):

…and finally Ross McDonald took visualising school catchment areas and flows to an impressive extreme, ending with Blender-rendered spider maps:

My talk was originally going to be titled “Advanced Digital Cartography with OpenLayers 4” but in the end I realised that my talk, while presenting what would be “advanced” techniques to most audiences, would be at a relatively simple level for the attendees at FOSS4G UK, after all it is a technology conference. So, I tweaked the tittle to “Better…”. The main focus was on a list of techniques that I had used with (mainly) OpenLayers 4, while building CDRC Maps, Bike Share Map, TubeCreature and other map-based websites. I’m not a code contributor to the OpenLayers project, but I have been consistently impressed recently with the level of development going on in the project, and the rate at which new features are being added, and was keen to highlight and demonstrate some of these to the audience. I also squeezed on a bonus section at the end about improving bike share operating area maps in London. Niche, yes, but I think the audience appreciated it.

My slides (converted to Google Slides):

Some notes:

  • My OpenLayers 2/Leaflet/OpenLayers 3+4 graphic near the beginning was to illustrate the direction of development – OpenLayers 2 being full-featured but hard to work with, Leaflet coming in as a more modern and clean replacement, and then OpenLayers 3 (and 4 – just a minor difference between the two) again being an almost complete rewrite of OpenLayers 2. Right now, there’s a huge amount of OpenLayers 4 development, it has momentum behind it, perhaps even exceeding that of Leaflet now.
  • Examples 1, 3, 4 and 5 are from CDRC Maps.
  • Example 2 is from SIMD – and there are other ways to achieve this in OpenLayers 4.
  • Examples 5, 6 and 9 are from TubeCreature, my web map mashup of various London tube (and GB rail) open datasets.
  • Regarding exmaple 6, someone commented shortly after my presentation that there is a better, more efficient way to apply OpenLayers styles to multiple elements, negating my technique of creating dedicated mini-maps to act as key elements.
  • Example 7 is from Bike Share Map, it’s a bit of a cheat as the clever bit is in JSTS (a JS port of the Java Topology Suite) which handily comes with an OpenLayers parser/formatter.
  • Example 8, which is my London’s New Political Colour, a map of the London local elections, is definitely a cheat as the code is not using the OpenLayers API, and in any case the map concerned is still on OpenLayers 2. However it would work fine on OpenLayers 4 too, particularly as colour values can be specified in OpenLayers as simply as rgba(0, 128, 255, 0.5).
  • Finally, I mention cleaning the “geofences” of the various London bikeshare operators. I chose Urbo, who run dockless bikeshare in North-East London, and demonstrated using Shapely (in Python) to tidy the geofence polygons, before showing the result on the (OpenLayers-powered) Bike Share Map. The all-system London map is also available.

FOSS4G UK was a good meeting of the “geostack” community in London and the UK/Europe, it had a nice balance of career technologists, geospatial professionals, a few academics, geo startups and people who just like hacking with spatial data, and it was a shame that it was over so quickly. Thanks to the organising team for putting together a great two days.