London's Bike-Share Crisis

Something is going badly wrong with London's bike-share scheme. Launched in summer 2010 to great enthusiasm, London's 4,000 "Boris Bikes" (so called after Mayor Boris Johnson) were supposed to usher a new age of car-free, cycle friendly streets to the city. This year, however, their popularity has fallen by almost a third. While the system recorded 726,893 journeys in November 2012, last month there were only 514,146. To cap these poor user figures, today Transport for London announced that the scheme's major sponsor, Barclays Bank, will pull out of its sponsorship deal in 2015. Given the bad publicity the system has received recently, it may be hard to find a replacement sponsor without some major changes.

So why has London's bike-share scheme gone awry?