Pro-cycling interventions, and cycle hire schemes in particular, are often assumed to primarily benefit the privileged. This framing has played-out in academic research, with many papers exploring the relationship between cycling and existing inequalities. A growing body of evidence suggests that cycle hire schemes tend to serve wealthy areas and young, high income groups, mirroring inequalities in other types of cycling uptake, yet there has been little research into the ‘direction of travel’ and whether such inequalities are growing or ‘levelling up’ over time. This paper explores the uptake of the London Cycle Hire Scheme (LCHS), a large, early and prominent scheme that had the explicit aim of ‘normalising’ cycling. The method involved reproducible analysis (with code documented in the GitHub repo Robinlovelace/cycle-hire-inclusive) of 73.4 million cycle high records spanning 8 years from January 2012 to December 2019, using the geographic location of docking stations alongside official statistics to assess social and spatial inequalities in uptake.

The method involved analysis of 73.4 million cycle high records spanning 8 years from January 2012 to December 2019, using the geographic location of docking stations alongside official statistics to assess social and spatial inequalities in uptake. We found that, contrary to the trend for increasing segregation and geographic inequalities, the usage of the LCHS have become increasingly geographically distributed across London over time, with AM peak usage in comparatively low-income areas seeing high levels of growth. Our study shows that cycle hire schemes can be designed and expanded in ways that benefit a wide range of people, including those from low income areas, and that new cycle hire docking stations in poorer areas can succeed.

通常认为亲自行车干预，尤其是自行车租赁计划主要使特权人群受益。这种框架已经在学术研究中发挥了作用，许多论文探讨了自行车运动与现有不平等之间的关系。越来越多的证据表明，单车租赁计划倾向于服务于富裕地区和年轻的高收入人群，反映了其他类型的单车使用中的不平等现象，但对“出行方向”以及此类不平等现象是否正在加剧的研究很少或随着时间的流逝“升级”。本文探讨了伦敦自行车租赁计划（LCHS）的采用，该计划是一项大型，早期且杰出的计划，其明确目标是“正常化”自行车。该方法涉及73的可重现分析（其代码在GitHub repo Robinlovelace / cycle-hire-inclusive中记录）。

该方法涉及分析从2012年1月到2019年12月的8年中7340万个周期的最高记录，使用对接站的地理位置以及官方统计数据来评估摄入量的社会和空间不平等。我们发现，与种族隔离和地理不平等现象加剧的趋势相反，LCHS的使用随着时间的推移在整个伦敦的地理分布越来越多，相对低收入地区的AM高峰使用量出现了高水平的增长。我们的研究表明，可以以使包括低收入地区人士在内的广泛人群受益的方式设计和扩展自行车租赁计划，在贫困地区的新自行车租赁停靠站可以成功。