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The hideously named Barclays Cycle Hire scheme – also known as borisbikes, kencycles, bankerbikes and so on – has been running for a few weeks now, and after a slow start I've finally had time to try it a few times. So is it any good? Well sort of. Ish. Maybe. From the perspective of a pedestrian who'd like to cycle far more than he does – no room for a bike at home – here's how it works out at the moment.

Wheely good

There's a lot to like about the scheme. First of all, it's good that we finally have a cycle hire scheme in London – god knows it's taken long enough, and other cities in Europe have had one up and running for ages. Secondly, there are lots of bikes. Loads of them. Also, plenty of stands – as long as you're within the covered area, you shouldn't be too far from one or two docking stations.

The key system for members, which allows you to release a bike in about ten seconds, is convenient, and the pricing system – although ridiculously complicated – isn't ridiculously costly. The scheme provides an API that allows developers to create handy apps showing where docks are located, and how many slots are free: Cycle Hire Widget, for Android, is brilliant.

And when the scheme works, it's great: on Wednesday I had to get across town to a press conference in 15 minutes – not long enough to walk it. A month ago I would have jumped on the tube, but this time I got on a bike, scooted over there and docked it just around the corner. Perfect.

Crap cycling

But then there are the problems. Putting aside the hideous Barclays sponsorship – you're riding around on a billboard for a bank that operated in South Africa under apartheid, loans money to Robert Mugabe and invests in arms manufacturers – there are quite a few issues that need ironing out.

First, the bikes. I've ridden, so far, just one bike that worked properly. Every other one has had problems: one had dodgy brakes, but the most common issue is knackered, slipping gears. The bikes have three gears – reasonable, low, and so stupidly low you could probably cycle up K2 – and many have a tendency to slip out of the higher gear, so you can be cycling along when your foot will suddenly fly down without resistance as the bike drops into lor or crazy-low. This makes the bike wobble – eek – and there's often no way to shift back up without braking hard first. The bikes are currently almost new, and only accessible to members – I dread to think how they'll be in six months.

Next, the docks. These have a three-light system that's simple but unhelpful: fine when you get the green light, but no help when they randomly reject the bikes. Surely an LCD display wouldn't have cost too much to add – or even just a few labelled error lights? The pricing has the opposite problem: it's pointlessly overcomplicated, with two charges applicable to every journey. And it doesn't work with Oyster.

Then there's the distribution problem. If I could pick up a bike from near Charing Cross and cycle to work every day, that'd be great – but of course other people have the same idea. Bikes move in droves, leaving some docking stations almost permanently full, so often this journey is sometimes impossible. Serco does try to move bikes around by van, but what's needed – as people have suggested online – is an incentive for people to move the bikes themselves: cheap, free or paid journeys if you move the bike in an unpopular direction could help.

Finally, the computer system behind the scheme is clearly very flaky. Having made one perfect journey on Wednesday, I picked up a bike for the return trip, cycled back across town and docked it. Randomly, though, the dock rejected the bike. I tried again, and it locked in place. According to the Serco systems, this journey never took place – it's not listed, shown on their computers or billed. It appears that you can, if you're (un)lucky, move bikes around without the computer's knowledge. Other people have reported the opposite issue: their accounts show journeys they've never made. I've spoken to at least one keen cyclist whose account was hit by several phantom journeys and eventually suspended. That's one customer gone.

Fix the wheels?

I'm still hopeful that the system can be made to work. The bikes could – should – be fixed, and hopefully they can upgrade the gear system to something less prone to uselessness. A change to the pricing could help keep the distribution of bikes more even as well as simplifying the costs (ditch the access fees for casual users and it's instantly easier to understand). Oh, and Serco should be able to fix the sodding billing computer. As for Barclays, they've signed up for five years. Hopefully when the time comes to renew the deal we'll have a Mayor of London who's more inclined to find alternative funding. As it stands, will I fork out for the annual membership? No, but I'll hang onto the key for occasional use.

Photo by Sweens308, used under Creative Commons license.

About a week ago I wrote to SouthEastern Railway's Public Affairs Manager, asking him two questions that could be answered with a simple yes or no. I didn't get a yes or no answer to either, and when I pushed for a straight answer to one of them the gentleman in question simply stopped replying to my emails. I'll publish the whole lot, names redacted, after the jump – but in summary:

A) SouthEastern Railway receives a huge subsidy from the Government in order to provide a rail service to the public. In January it failed to provide a proper service, slashing trains for three days, but it will not return an appropriate proportion of said subsidy. Nor will it donate the equivalent amount to charity, which is a shame – the DEC could undoubtedly use a few extra hundred thousand pounds right about now.

B) By cutting its service to an emergency timetable before a flake of snow had fallen, it seems* that SouthEastern ensured that its reliability would be measured against this reduced timetable. As this reliability statistic is used to calculate refunds, this gives it a fighting chance of avoiding the need to refund season ticket holders.

The downside, of course, is that many of its customers get left out in the snow, unable to use the train tickets they paid for. Fans of the absurd will note that the company has since published figures claiming 97.5% (Mainline) and 97.3% (Metro) reliability for the December to January period.

Or, to put it another way:

• The taxpayer pays SouthEastern via a £136m subsidy
• We, the customers, pay SouthEastern for our tickets
• SouthEastern decides not to run a service
• Most customers are left stranded
• Neither the taxpayer or the customer gets a refund

And it's important to note here that, under the National Rail Conditions of Carriage and the Passengers' Charter, this is all perfectly legal.

Evidently some kind of political action is required to ensure that this kind of debacle isn't repeated every time the weather forecast looks unpleasant, so I wrote to a few politicians: my MP, my AM and the Transport Minister.

My AM, Len Duvall, didn't reply – I received a response from his assistant promising a "considered response", but none came. My MP, Bridget Prentice, did contact the company on my behalf and put up with a flurry of CC'd emails from me, for which I'm thankful. As for the Transport Minister, like several people I received a response that in parts bore an uncanny similarity to the documents issued by SouthEastern itself. Nonetheless, it also said:

".. we will be conducting a review of the experience of the service that was provided between the 6th and 8th January 2010. This review will cover all aspects of service provision. Where any areas for improvement are identified, we will ensure that proper action is taken to deliver the required improvement.

Your email has also highlighted the difference between services provided across Sussex and Wessex despite simiar forecasts. We will be seeking understand (sic) from all parties involved the reasons for this. Until this review is complete, I cannot comment on how appropriate Southeastern's response was when compared to the actions taken by other operators."

So there's some hope for the future, and I await the findings of that review with interest. In the meantime, I'm sure our beloved Mayor will sort it out at the Emergency Rail Summit he promised to hold within a few weeks of his election.

* I say "seems to" because when asked whether this is the case the Public Affairs Manager stopped answering my emails. I've waited a week and re-sent the email, but to no avail. If he'd care to get back to me and assure me that this is not the case, I'll be happy to correct this immediately. In the meantime, a parliamentary answer from the 25th of January confirms that, unless SouthEastern should choose otherwise, this is the case.

For the sake of completeness, my full email conversation with SouthEastern is copied after the jump.

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Too cold to run this weekend, so I took a walk up to Greenwich Park instead. The paths were treacherous, but the rose garden was pretty – a few flowers had survived, and a robin even popped in to complete the scene.

A few more here.

An incomplete assortment of things I like:

1. Ascending really tall buildings in cities to gawk from the top
2. Taking photographs from said tall buildings
3. Playing with expensive cameras and lenses
4. All of the above in one morning

Today I was lucky enough to achieve #4 on that list, as Nikon announced its new D5000 DSLR* in the Paramount private members' club on the top of Centre Point. It was a bit gloomy outside with lots of cloud, but the views were still great. A handful more are on Flickr; I'll dig through the rest at the weekend.

* In a nutshell: 720p video, D60-like body, swivelling LCD, no AF motor, 11-point AF, £720 or £800 for the kit. I'll reserve judgment until I give it a proper try.

There's something strange about sitting in an office all day, knowing that not far away there's much newsworthy action taking place. We were going to press today – by the time I escaped with a camera the West End was quiet and, save for a few discarded placards and dozens of police, much the same as ever.

I'm not generally a fan of snow. Too cold and, you know, wet. But when you get a pristine covering like this (spot the animal tracks):

Then you just have to go and stomp in it, even if it is 7am. So we did:

Also, there are snowmen everywhere. Here's the best I saw up on Blackheath:

Of course, the whole capital ground to a halt, all the trains broke, etc. But not such a bad day.

Thursday was one of the good London days: it started with the view above, was followed by a great bit of publicity for the magazine and ended with dutch beer and discovering soup-filled dumplings at a great Taiwanese restaurant. Fantastic.

On the minus side, karma dictates that Monday will be a bad London day:I will almost certainly be rained on, stressed at work and assaulted by a drunken tramp. Ho hum.

When I first moved to The Big Office In Soho I was taken for an induction meeting. After all the usual office stuff (lift with your knees, don't try to repair the copier with sellotape, don't sell your security pass to tramps) we inductees were given a warning about working in this part of town. It could be roughly paraphrased to "we have security staff for a reason, so be careful when you're outside". Those new to London might well have come away terrified.

By and large, though, this slightly porn-y end of Soho is a good place to be during the day. We're surrounded by excellent, cheap restaurants (whether Cali-Mexican, Japanese (especially Ramen) or just great sandwiches), and the only near death experience I've had so far involved a reversing courier van attempting to smear me across the road in front of the John Snow pub (it turns out my "fight or flight" response is rubbish: all I did was bang on the back of it as I was pushed along, shouting "fuckingshitfuck" – "stop" would probably have been more useful).

Walking south to Charing Cross means crossing through probably the single dodgiest part of Soho, surrounded by brothels and hugger-muggers, but between the hours of 7am and around 8pm there's really no cause for any great concern as long as you stay the hell away from the public toilets (side note: some of the tramps appear to even have keys to the toilets, although where they got these from we have no idea).

The area is changing, too. It's not exactly gentrification of the "Daily Mail readers eye property prices" variety, but over the past year a few of the dodgiest places, including the one really visible clipping bar, have finally been closed down. You have to wonder what'd happen to the place if the sex industry left, though – maybe the streets would be subsumed into the Carnaby Street Tourist Hellhole (TM), or maybe they'd just become empty backroads. For the moment, though, everything's becoming slightly festive, albeit in a slightly unusual way. Merry Chrimbo, Soho.

These are the Merchant Taylors' Almshouses. They are in Lewisham, and normally strictly closed to the public, but this weekend you can visit them as part of the London Open House initiative. Just off the A20 behind the (also open) Boone's Chapel.