Why Edinburgh has picked exactly the wrong moment to launch to bike hire scheme

From August 18, a new cycle-hire scheme will be launched when the city is at its absolute busiest. It’s just the latest chapter in a staggering saga of ineptitude, worthy of its own Fringe show.

The earliest bike-sharing scheme was launched in the Netherlands in 1965. Boris Johnson brought the concept to Britain when he was mayor of London in 2010 and the capital now has more than 12,000 bikes. Other cities followed London’s example but it took Edinburgh until 2018 to get the idea off the ground.

Publicity at the launch promised it would be a greener and healthier way to move around the city. Without a hint of irony or awareness, sponsorship of the bikes was then handed to the fast-food delivery company Just Eat who plastered their logos all over them.

Pedal forward just three years and the scheme hit a bigger bump when operators Serco warned vandalism and theft had pushed up costs, making it financially unviable. Despite spending £1 billion on the trams project, Edinburgh Council decreed the bike-hire scheme had to run without any public funding. So that was it – overnight the hire bikes disappeared from the streets and Edinburgh became one of very few places in the UK where a rental system had failed.

Does it really have more of a problem with theft and vandalism than Birmingham where more than 1,000 bikes are available or Manchester which had over a million registered rides last year? Or perhaps, yet again, poor decision-making in Edinburgh delivered the wrong scheme that just wasn’t fit for purpose from the very beginning?

Four years on and a new initiative is about to begin and this time, it will be different. Instead of the previous docking stations, the new system involves bikes being located, hired and unlocked using a smartphone app. Users are then expected to leave their bike at suitable locations marked out in the app.

Inevitably, not everyone will follow the rules. Bikes abandoned on pavements in the wrong place will have to be collected and removed, with the user then facing penalties.

Elsewhere that approach has minimised disruption where people are used to the system and understand how it works, but in Edinburgh it is going to be new and starting from scratch. So is the busiest week of the year in the city really the best time to be launching it?

Thoughts and prayers are with the staff in white vans who’ll be adding to congestion as they trundle around trying to rescue abandoned bikes in a city where half a million visitors are about to arrive.

It’s great to see the return of a bike-hire scheme to Scotland’s capital city. It should never have gone away in the first place. But launching it when the streets and pavements are already packed with people, unicycles, dogs, camper vans and those blokes who play the panpipes of the Andes... well, only in Edinburgh.