jonesy
Guru
Fair enough.
Do you know when the next assessment is going to take place? I am sceptical that there will be a significant change, but like I said - we'll see.
I don't know what evaluations are planned, but would expect it to take at least a year of full operation for its users to extend significantly beyond the early adopters. The first main group of users will be existing cyclists, but this might save them from having to take a bike on a train, so that leads to wider transport benefits straight away. Bearing in mind Dellzeqq's point about there being limited car trips that start and end within the area currently covered by the hire scheme, the main opportunity for modal shift from car will be for bike + rail for longer distance trips from outside the central area. But that requires drivers to make two changes of behaviour: to start using public transport and to start cycling. That won't happen overnight, it will require people to become familiar with the hire bikes, for word to spread around workplaces, social circles etc, for their use to become accepted as normal. Of course, the scheme could expand to cover a much wider catchment area, so providing a more direct alternative to driving from or between the between the suburbs. And the hire scheme will also interact with other cycling initiatives, so people who start off trying rail + hire bike might get sufficiently into cycling that they'll start riding the whole distance on their own bikes, especially if CSH are successful in making such routes more cycle-able, but this would lead to some users moving away from the hire bikes. So there's a lot of complex travel behaviour to take account of here, and we can't judge the success until a lot more time has passed and we've got a lot more information.