London cycle rental at Bricklayers Arms

i use the free cycle route maps - from tourist office in Regents st - no 10 covers central london inc SE1 ----------------------------------------------------------------- bridges included on routes - vauxhall - lambeth - westminster - waterloo - southwark ---------bridges excluded - blackfriars - london - tower -------------------------------------------------------------------- by using the maps i usually only cross main roads rater than going down them and having to share with heavy traffic - i find an empty side road is cycling bliss

That sounds sensible mick4recycle.

The cycle lane on Black friars used to be between the bus land and the rest of the traffic.
Take a look at this:
http://ralphsmyth.me.uk/citycyclists/blackfriars.html

It would have been as well to have a guy pushing cyclists under a bus every now and then.

I'd scratch Waterloo from that list for the moment.
I've been getting the bus south over Waterloo late at night recently - chasing the terrified cyclists across the brige now it's down to one lane.

hang on - this is crazy!
They're not putting bike hire racks in stations (the obvious place for people to pick them up and use them) because they'll be overused, and people will complain that there aren't any available, so instead they put them in places like Bricklayers Arms Roundabout! A huge roundabout, main roads on all sides, bad pedestrian access routes (higher percieved crime rate around underpasses?), generally not a destination (ie somewhere you go 'through' rather than 'to'), and so likely to fail when it comes to being a good place for bike hire stands.
For this to work, you need to get commuters using them, rather than (as well as!) locals.
A better place (imo of course), would be outside of smaller tube and train stations that only serve one route (Southwark, Bermondsey, Borough, Lambeth North, etc), or in bus stations (already covered by CCTV, generally safer environments).

I've just come back from visiting friends in Dublin. OK it's smaller than London, but anyone that knows it, knows that the cities roads are rammed. I wanted to take advantage of the newly installed dublin bikes (http://www.dublinbikes.ie/). It would have been a great way to re-explore the city. I use my bike every day in London and so was fairly confident about cycling there. However as I was staying on the Northside, pretty much all the bike stands were empty after the morning rush hour. Every one seemed to pick up a bike and rode it into town, then nobody brought them out again until the end of the day. What was great was that you could check if stands had bikes online. I hope that Boris has thought about a fleet of lorries/vans to move bikes from where they are, to where they are needed. Without that it could be difficult to get bikes on the outer fringes of zone 2. One positive, apparently only a very small number of the bikes have gone missing.

a fleet of lorries?! are you serious, or being sarcastic?

as Kenhaynes points out there will have to be a few vans to move bikes around and take bikes back to a central service unit for maintenance.I notice the Bricklayers arm site looks like it will have bays for 28 bikes.My experience of the Paris system was that the bikes weren't particularly nice to ride being slow and heavy.I hope the scheme works but I see a general pilfering of bike parts over time.