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The new red Boris bike livery (©Steve Bardens:Getty Images for Santander)New Boris Bike app introduces cardless payments
Hiring one of London's Boris Bikes - now painted red and officially known as Santander Cycles - is set to get quicker with the announcement today of a new iPhone and Android app for the service.
The new app can get a release code for a bike without the user having to faff about with the docking station terminal.
Like the previous app, it also shows the nearest station, and the availability of bikes, though it's not able to reserve a bike.
To use the app, customers will register a bank card, then will be able to 'hire now' from a nearby docking station, and tap the code into a docking point to release a bike for use.
Other features of the new app include:
- Up-to-the minute information about which docking stations have bikes and spaces available
- Users can buy 24 hour and annual subscriptions
- Notifications showing the cost at the end of a hire period
- View recent journeys and charges
- Notification of exactly when a hire period has started, and confirmation the bike has been securely docked at the end
- Map-based TfL cycling journey planner, which shows users where they can hire a bike and how many are available at any one of the 750 docking stations
Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said: "The new Santander Cycles App will make finding and hiring a bike in our great Capital city even more of a doddle. The App is packed full of handy new features and is part and parcel of our plans to take the cycle hire scheme to the next level and encourage more people on to two wheels."
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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5 comments
An hours hire cost me £79 I wont be using them again.
How did it cost that?! Also, why didn't you just ring them - on the one occasion I had a problem with the system, one phone call to customer services and it was sorted within minutes.
I love the hire bikes, they're the best way of getting round town although it does help a lot if you have a basic knowledge of the city and things like quiet areas, parks, towpaths and also where the docking stations are. The Barclays Cycle Hire app was always pretty good at helping with that too.
£79? Explain how you managed that?
How on earth did you manage that? Did we not 'dock' it properly?
Interesting, I have to go to London from time to time for work and had always written off a hire bike as too much hassle for a couple of times a year, this might change my mind.