On Nov 28, 2:52*pm, (Roy Badami) wrote:

In article ,
Tim Watts wrote:

OK - thanks for that. I can Boris Bike but SWMBO works in Hammersmith so
a slightly tortuous route to Ken Olympia and she can do a 25 min walk...

I'm curious as to what the demand for Boris Bikes has been like on
strike days?

Oliver O'Brien is a UCL academic who also has a blog called
Suprageography - basically he's got this great excuse to play with
maps all day called research - I wrote about this all a bit beforehand
he
http://groups.google.com/group/uk.tr...6c8666063092fb

To the point - he's got a visualisation of the cycle hire scheme he
http://oobrien.com/vis/bikes/

It now includes an animation of the last 48 hours (see the links at
the top [1]) - though I did just play it and it was rather jumpy, with
some strange leaps between the different sample time points (with a
few small steps thrown in too) - but I just quickly ran it a second
time and also clicked on the 'faster' button which seemed to improve
things, but that's as much playing around as I've done.

Re the demand for 'Boris bikes' - observed this evening whilst milling
around for a few minutes near Waterloo, specifically at the docking
station on Concert Hall Approach, were some of the police on bikes -
though they weren't actually on their bikes at that time, and were in
fact quite possibly PCSOs - but anyhow they were guarding a great
stack of cycle hire bikes leant up against a wall, and were in fact
releasing (with a magic key) further bikes that were being deposited
in the docks and adding them to this stack. Then a LCHS electric
vehicle and empty trailer turned up, and the driver and PCSOs
proceeded to load it up completely from the stack, before it whirred
back off to wherever across the river - there were still bikes in the
stack, and the PCSOs continued to release bikes from the docks and add
them to the stack.

From a snatched moment of overheard conversation not all the faux
coppers seemed completely familiar with the workings of the scheme,
and I haven't seen the old bill get involved like this before so I can
really only assume this duty was a 'strike special' (maybe they've
done it during previous strikes, I dunno). There was what appeared to
be a single police type character next to the docking station round
the corner at the Jubilee Gardens docking station on Belvedere Road,
not quite sure if there was a bike or two stacked up there as well or
if it was just his - it was pretty cold out and I felt I'd done my
observational duty by this point so wasn't paying intense attention.


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[1] Which also include a link to this which I think is neat:
http://casa.ucl.ac.uk/bom/