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The Barclays Cycle Hire scheme has had little impact on the cycle parking use at most London Termini, as it fails to deliver the required level of service for regular users - just look at the queuing hire users waiting to get bikes off-hire at 17.00 at Waterloo. The big impacts which I studied have been the Thameslink Blockade and the 6 month closure of the Waterloo & City. I suspect that the revised 'Circle Line' at Paddington might have had some impact as well. For Marylebone, travelling in on morning commuter services suggests that around 10% of these travellers are using a bicycle for part of their commute, by the way they are dressed, or cycle related kit carried, or the folding bike with them. The poor connectivity of Marylebone with Tube & Bus services, drives up the level of cycling and it shows in the fact that around 5% of the total onward trips are by bike and 6% of trips to destinations in the 1-5Km range. The impact of the blockades was significant pre 2004 5-6 bikes were parked overnight at St Pancras, by 2011 over 100 bikes were parked, and at Waterloo, when the cycle lane opened c.2002 there were racks for around 30 bikes at the top in 2012 there are 320 spaces there, and these are beginning to be over-subscribed. Well over 1000 bikes per hour leave Waterloo (from spot counts carried out by CTC staff and members waiting for trains) and roughly 40% of the peak hour counts are Bromptons, 20% other folders, and 40% bikes presumably from the racks on the platforms. The 2003 survey was an outcome from consultation then being carried out by the SRA to formulate a Cycle-Rail Policy (2004) including provision for cycle carriage, which then became the DfT Policy - with an amusing rebranding of the preface and cover, but leaving SRA oriented references through the document. CTC was awarded funding to manage the project and used a date collation service to analyse the results. It was in an era of change and involved a combination of direct online entry and paper which Graham Keen worked tirelessly to enter at CTC offices, as well as reviewing the returns to highlight missing locations. In the end we covered 2000 of the 2500 UK rail stations within a month with a relatively high level of success. Every station graded above C by passenger footfall was surveyed and most of the stations down to Category D, leaving mainly the unstaffed Category F stations in locations so remote and obscure that you could probably park a bike when you go home from your summer holiday and collect it next summer - without locking it. A great job from all who participated in a pre-crowd-source bit of crowd-sourcing - it is coming up for 10 years since we did this so 2013 might well be a year to bid for some funding to deliver it, with perhaps one of the new members of the Rail Research UK Association, where Universities are working with the Rail Safety & Standards Board to restore the resources lost when the old BR Technical Centre was thrown to the wolves after privatisation. I would actually hope that a 2013 survey, set-up as an on-line operation might seek funding from the maturing cycle parking supply industry, as well as support from RSSB, who have funded some of the RRUKA work. It could, based on the 2003 version have 2 sweeps - say May and November, and encouragement made to have surveys at more than one time per day. The 2003 survey did have a couple of analyses to determine where funding might go to best effect - and identified stations where the number of bikes parked, exceeded the formal cycle parking capacity - the record being over 1000% for Meols on the Wirral part of the Merseyrail network, it also identified stations where more than 100 bikes were parked. I'd actually propose these analyses for a prospective 2013 survey, with a follow-through, of selecting a smaller sample of high volume locations (or places with an inexplicably high ratio between daily footfall and cycles parked) to have a deeper/interview survey to get a plot of user postcodes and other factors shaping the use of cycles to reach the station. Reply off-list for a more detailed discussion, on this topic. Dave Holladay. 07 710 535 404 On 10/11/12 17:51, Jim Bush wrote: > Way back in the Autumn of 2003, the CTC were conducting a survey of cycle parking at railway stations (for DfT ?). I was between jobs at the time and visited ~125 stations in London and SE England. Perhaps this survey should be updated now......CTC HQ should be able to find out who funded the 2003 survey(?). > > Of course, cycle parking doesn't always have the same demand at the same time. In John M's example below, it sounds like Dorking station's peak demand for cycling parking is daytime on weekdays. Back in 2003, the cycle parking was almost empty at London Marylebone station during the day on weekdays, but was nearly full at night and at weekends. This was because the main cycling traffic at this station was for commuters to arrive on trains at Marylebone in the morning and then use bikes which they had left locked at the stn to complete their journeys to work, in order to avoid the ordeal of the London Underground ! Now that hire bikes (a.k.a. Boris Bikes) are available in Central London, there may be less demand on the cycle parking of private bikes at Marylebone(?), but the doubling of the daily charge for hire bikes (from Ł1 to Ł2 per day) in Jan 2013 may result in increased demand again ?! > > Jim Bush, RtR Croydon > > --- In [log in to unmask], John Meudell <JohnMCTC@...> wrote: >> John >> >> The total number of stands is not relevant, it’s the number of stands relative to demand that is important. An example: >> >> Absolutely priceless. Southern initially installed 60 stands at Dorking Mainline, which filled immediately (because they only matched existing demand). A couple of months later they doubled that to 120, which began filling up until reaching a peak (of 75) in mid 2008, since when…..growth initially fell back and then flattened at around 60 - 65. >> Since then parking usage has stayed more or less constant. Yet Southern recently installed another 40 stands, which aren’t used and with little prospect that they will be used (although around 20 of the 160 spaces are taken up by the 10 or so mopeds/motorscooters.) Most, if not all, cycle parking is commuter traffic, and in this area off-peak travel forms only a small part of the total passenger numbers.) >> >> All that is happening is standard market behaviour which determines that uptake will increase until demand saturates, at which point growth stops. Growth cannot resume until factors within the market change, or in the environment impacting on the market. >> In this area the principal determinants of cycle usage are economic (it’s cheap!) and health/fitness. The population in the area currently accessing the station is relatively fixed (and will stay that way) as are the number of commuters. So there only two sources of growth, one is change in economic status of existing travellers, and the second is improvements in infrastructure to connect three major settlements to the station. Even that is unlikely to bring cycle parking demand to level that uses up the existing provision (which stands at no more than 50% of the spaces provided.) >> What we have ended up with is that parking spaces are about double the current demand, with very little scope for growth in the short to medium term. The additional 40 stands are now what is called a “stranded asset”, or in other words, money has been wasted installing something for which there is no demand, either in the short or medium term. >> Southern employed a firm of consultants to determine the level of cycle parking provision needed. They used an overly simplistic analysis that only looked at socio-economic factors, with no actual cycle market data (basically they just used the same analysis supermarkets might use to estimate the demand for Daz). >> >> Despite the outpourings of members of Cycling England, along with the millions spent on research into cycling over the last five years or so, I have seen precious little quality market research done into cycling, and even less market understand develop from such research. And zero into cycling safety. >> So knowing how many stations have more than 100 parking spaces is no value at all. A better approach is to find out how many regular travellers (i.e. season ticket holders) own bikes, work out the proportion who live in easy cycling distance of the station and might use a bike, calculate a contingency margin on top and use that as a basis. >> >> Problem is, no-one is interested in working in reality…… >> >> Cheers >> John Meudell >> >> Sent: 10 November 2012 12:11 >> From: John D Edwards >> CTC RtR Rep., Winchester >> j.d.edwards@... >> >> Dave, what are the actual numbers (approximations will do) of stands at Cambridge and St Albans, please? >> And, if it won’t take excessive effort, it would be interesting to have a list of all rail stations in UK having more than (say) 100 stands. (Or would “more than 200” be more realistic?) >> >> John E > > > ------------------------------------ > > Yahoo! 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