See's got no Helmet on – she's going to die surely! 😉

Or, you could use it for 30 minutes for nowt, or an hour for £1. If you want to hire a bike in London for multiple hours, these are the wrong ones to be hiring. The idea of the pricing is to encourage them to be used for short hops. I've seen the bikes up close, and they're really good – in a solid, practical way. 😀

The title is perhaps a little misleading? other rates seem perfectly reasonable, especially cosidering the cost of public transport.

Users will pay an access fee to join the scheme — £1 a day, £5 a week or £45 a year — with all journeys of half an hour free and those up to an hour costing £1. The charges will rise sharply for longer periods — £4 for 90 minutes, £10 for up to 150 minutes and £50 for 24 hours.

do you get a maintenance or puncture repir kit with it?

Would you want to hire a bike that some random person has repaired? What if they forgot to secure the front wheel!

Also, £50 ain't far off what alot of bike shops would charge you to demo a bike for the day.

We've got these in cardiff £18 a year, first 30mins free and all day for a fiver .

http://www.oybike.com/oybike/cms.nsf/customFrmHome?OpenForm&ParentUNID=5E8F660D1D16E66B80257638007563B5

Yes, all good IMO. A fair price for short trips, which is sort of the point. As for the lack of a helmet, at least London doesn't have the problem of Melbourne's public bike scheme – Australia has compulsory helmet laws, meaning that someone hiring a bike has to bring their own helmet or buy one before they hire… clever eh!

I can't wait for all the moomins using these bikes to invade the capital's roads

What happened was someone (a politician most likely) said "we need to hire these bikes out to look as if we're doing our bit to offset carbon emissions".

Someone else – a politician said "If it's too cheap no-one will use the tube or bus. And in turn, no-one will by petrol at £1.08 a litre. Which is very bad indeed".

Another politician said "Better put a disincentive in place for people not to use these bikes then!"

Billhooks. £50 might be a reasonable amount to hire a £3k Yeti for a weekend, but for Joe Public it's a disgrace. I'm all in favour of more Londoners opting to cycle (I'd go so far as to say that cycling around a city centre should be a compulsory element of a driving test), but I cannot and will not abide a £50 surcharge. End of.

The bit I was confused about was the access fee, why bother?

'cos its not 'free' for the first 1/2 hour, but a £1.

is that pedestrian walking the wrong way up the middle of a one way street?