More than 5,000 people used Santander free bike hire in London

More than 5,500 people hired bikes in London earlier this summer as part of an offer to boost cycling in the city.

A total of 13,166 bike hires were made by 5,586 people through Transport for London’s (TfL) Cycle Sundays, according to data released by mayor Sadiq Khan’s office.

The offer allowed riders an unlimited number of free 30-minute journeys using the Santander Cycles network on the five Sundays in June, and E-bikes £1 per ride.

TfL said it will be “using the success of this promotion to look at further ways of attracting more customers to the scheme later this year”.

The mayor’s office said: “TfL’s current focus for the scheme is expanding the e-bike offering within the current scheme footprint, tripling the number available to hire by the end of summer.

“There are 900 additional e-bikes now available to hire, bringing the current total number of e-bikes to 1,500. This will rise to 2,000 e-bikes by the end of the summer.”

It was revealed last year that between January and July of 2023, the number of Santander Cycles being hired was at the lowest it had been for a decade, and was down by roughly a third on the same period in 2022.

According to the latest statistics, Santander Cycle hiring levels appear to have now stabilised, with 4,151,794 hires between January and June this year – down only 0.4% on the 4,168,125 hires in the same period of 2023.