Cycling
Cycling in London has enjoyed a renaissance, particularly since the turn of the millennium. Cyclists find that they enjoy a much cheaper, and often quicker, way around town than those travelling by public transport or car.
Over one million Londoners own bicycles but as of 2008 only around 2 per cent of all journeys in London are made by bike: this compares poorly to other major European cities such as Berlin (5 per cent), Munich (12 per cent), and Amsterdam (55 per cent) and Copenhagen (36 per cent). Nevertheless this is an 83 per cent increase compared to that in 2000. There are currently an estimated 480,000 cycle journeys each day in the capital.
The Barclays Cycle Hire scheme, launched 30 July 2010, aims to provide 6,000 bicycles for rental. Bikes are available at a number of docking stations in central London.
Read more about this topic: Transport In London
Famous quotes containing the word cycling:
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“I shall not bring an automobile with me. These inventions infest France almost as much as Bloomer cycling costumes, but they make a horrid racket, and are particularly objectionable. So are the Bloomers. Nothing more abominable has ever been invented. Perhaps the automobile tricycles may succeed better, but I abjure all these works of the devil.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it.”
—Ouida [Marie Louise De La Ramée] (1839–1908)