Solving climate emergency – one bike at a time

GOT SOMETHING to move? A bit of shopping, some furniture – or even some children? And want to stay green at the same time?  You could be a suitable candidate for Tower Hamlets Council’s new Shared Cargo Bike scheme.

Let’s explain. Tower Hamlets Council, OurBike and the Zero Emissions Network are working together on the new scheme. They have acquired an e-cargo bike – which is essentially a bike with a large box on the front which can hold goods or children.  They have put it in Oxford House, which is looking after it and changing its batteries.

The Council explains that you (that’s residents and businesses) can “borrow” the bike at a cost of £5 an hour – an arrangement usually described as “hiring” rather than “borrowing”.  There will be introductory offers initially. Residents can have their first hour for free, and businesses can have three hours of free use to try the bike out to see if it is useful for their business.

Never mind.  Using the bike will be cheaper than hiring a van, and it is certainly greener. It should be fairly convenient, as you can book the bike via the OurBike app. Your first initiative test is finding the app. Riding an e-bike for the first time is not easy but the Zero Emissions Network is offering training sessions.

There seems to be just one bike. Presuming that it can be hired during office hours five days a week (that’s just a guess), that’s around 40 hours of operation a week. The Council suggests you can use the bike for the school run – but you will need to live close to Oxford House in Bethnal Green, otherwise you’ll have to fork out on travelling to Bethnal Green to collect it and take the kids to school.  At two hours each, that would be 20 residents or businesses using the bike each week – out of 330,000 residents and uncounted businesses.

We can only hope that this is a pilot scheme: if cargo e-bikes are to become a Thing in the borough, they will need to be easily available. The organisers should look back to the days when Ken Livingstone cut traffic by making buses reliable, frequent and cheap. Without effort, this single cargo e-bike will just be yet another gimmick that does little to contribute to tackling the climate emergency.

●Finally, we do have to comment on the headline in Tower Hamlets Council’s press release about the cargo bike scheme. “Tower Hamlets launches borough’s first shared cargo bike scheme”, it says. It isn’t. GLA funding allowed Tower Hamlets Council to launch a cargo bike scheme six years ago, at the start of 2020 – though admittedly that one was targeted at businesses, rather than residents.

Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan came down to Tower Hamlets to launch the scheme and posed with the then Deputy Mayor Cllr Rachel Blake, late of this parish. Cllr Blake from Bow, aka Rachel from Regen, has moved on, and she is now supporting Keir Starmer in the House of Commons, as the MP for the Cities of London and Westminster.

●Register for training:
Zero Emissions Network

●Read more about it:
Sadiq “Fish Island Vandal” Khan funds air quality projects
Was 2020 “the year of the bike”?