Now, when are they going to get separate cycle lanes (with kerbs) like in Paris and Amsterdam? That would be a better. Secondly, when are they going to roll this out in the provinces (dibs on Manchester first!)?

I don’t think it’s the end of the world and I’m sure we’ll all learn subliminally to blank out the branding.

In some ways you could argue that sponsorship from a big, well-known ‘respectable’ company (note the inverted commas) is a way of bringing cycling ever further into the mainstream of our society. In this country we do seem still to be stuck with a common perception of people who ride bikes as poor, mad or otherwise ‘other’. Or am I looking too hard for a silver lining?

Actually, Paris didn’t give the space away for free, they *sold* the ad concession for 1500+ sites (plus discreet branding on the bikes) to JCDecaux in return for funding the startup costs.

The JCDecaux deal is qualitatively different since they are in the business of selling advertising space (and can more easily value such a deal in terms of their core revenue-generating activities), while the Barclays deal is a simply a marketing expense.

My question is, did we Londoners sell ourselves cheap? Without knowing the contractual details, it’s impossible to be sure. But, let’s look at the publicly available numbers, shall we?

According to reports [http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23839406-boris-bike-hire-scheme-gets-a-pound-25m-bonus-from-barclays.do], Barclays will pay £25m over 5 years.

That’s a £5m-per-year ad deal for the privilege of having 6000 bikes and 400 central London docking stations at 300m intervals, branded with their logo (six per bike, actually, in case you missed it the first five times).

TfL estimates the scheme will generate 40,000 extra trips (over the current 0.5m) a day x 365 = 14.6m trips a year. In other words, Barclays pays circa 35p per trip for blanket mobile advertising across central London. And that includes trips made during Olympic Summer 2012.

By paying 35p per trip, even if the average journey time were only 10 mins, that would equate to paying £2.10 an hour to recruit the twenty-first century equivalent of a sandwich-board man. Sounds like a great deal… for Barclays.

And yes, in my previous reply, I did suggest that providing Barclays with equivalent value on existing ad sites, would have been preferable to the garish branding we’ll have to endure (as onlookers), and parade (as cyclists) for the next half decade.

PS. Great show – keep up the good work!

Perhaps you haven’t quite grasped the fact that in the Paris sponsorship deal the city *gave* JC Decaux the use of thousands of city poster sites for free – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A9lib%27#Financing

So it was a different kind of a deal. Perhaps you’d prefer that more indirect form of corporate subsidy, for instance if TfL had given Barclays all the tube advertising space for free.

I’m not against the idea of sponsorship; JC Decaux’s low-key branding of their bikes (you can also add the excellent Seville cycle scheme to that list) is unobstrusive and dignified. It wouldn’t have been difficult to have struck a similar contra deal with Barclays (eg. in exchange for advertising on the tube, where they could quite rightly cross-promote their support of the scheme with acres of warm, fuzzy copy).

We don’t have sponsored traffic lights (just imagine all that undivided attention!) or sponsored pedestrian crossings (all that lovely white space!) even though it would save money, because it would signal the wrong message about public commitment to road safety. This ‘free’ cycle hire scheme sends the message that it considers its prospective users to be no better than cheap human pedal power for valuable mobile advertising space.

I’ll bet that BP is next on Boris’ waiting list of eager sponsors.