London mayor Boris Johnson has announced the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme will be expanded into east London in time for the 2012 Olympic Games. 

Docking stations will be built in Tower Hamlets, north Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Bow, Canary Wharf, Mile End, Poplar and the Olympic Park, with 2,000 bikes to be introduced.

“Londoners have taken to the hire of two wheels with alacrity and it would have been absolutely nonsensical not to expand our scheme,” said Johnson.

“Plans are now well advanced that will see the roll-out of thousands more of our gleaming bikes across the capital’s legendary East End.

“For as little as 12 pence a day users will soon be able to use our bikes to cross a huge swathe of our city and it will mean that by 2012 we’ll be able to invite the entire world to join London’s cycling revolution.”

The Cycle Hire launched in July and more than 1.5 million journeys have been made since. The expanded scheme will have approximately 8,000 bikes available from 14,400 docking stations. 

But, after Paris’ Velib scheme launched with 10,000 bikes in 2007 and now has 24,000 bikes,  London Assembly Green Party member Jenny Jones criticised Johnson’s ‘lack of ambition’. 

“This is great news for east London but a real disappointment for all the other people living and working in inner London who won’t have the scheme coming to their area,” said Jones.

“By 2012, the London scheme will still have far fewer bikes and docking stations than Paris, and it’s obvious that the expansion of this scheme lacks ambition.

“If the mayor is serious about his target of having a million extra journeys made by bike every day, then a bike hire scheme which only generates an extra 40,000 journeys a day is well short of what London needs.”