To use a bike you need to install the oBike app on a mobile device equipped with bluethooth (Android or iOS). This was pain free and the app itself is reasonably intuitive. It shows a scrollable map with the locations of currently available bikes.

Before renting a bike for the first time you also need to set up an account linked to a debit/credit card in order to make payments. This includes a one-off deposit (£29 during July, otherwise £49). Rides themselves are charged at a flat rate of 50 pence per half hour although during the launch month of July, rides are free. There are glimpses of an intriguing charging model where users can earn ‘credits’ for making journeys, reporting vandalized bikes and recommending friends. It opens up the possibility of future incentives for ‘redistribution’ rides to take bikes from areas of low demand to those of high demand. Interestingly, antisocial behavior such as leaving the bike in an inaccessible area can result in deducted credits and ultimately a higher cost of £5 per half hour for serial offenders.

Finding a bike from the map screen proved no problem as on launch day at least, most were concentrated in the Whitechapel / Bethnal Green area. Once you’ve located one of the distinctive yellow bikes it is simply a matter of ensuring your phone has Bluetooth enabled and scanning the QR code on the bike via the app to release the bike lock. For me this worked first time, although the time from scanning to the lock releasing was about 20 seconds so initially I wasn’t sure if I was meant to do anything in the meantime (apparently not).

Compared to the credit-card purchase of a Santander bike, this was more convenient, but its future success will depend on the numbers and distribution of bikes. On the day of the launch there were a few hundred bikes available concentrated in East central London but oBike claim that they will be adding around ‘50% more’ to the current London public bike hire numbers, which equates to around another 6000 bikes. How widely these will become distributed around London and even beyond will be interesting to watch.

The Bad