As the Santander cycle hire scheme celebrates its eight birthday, Transport for London has announced that July 2018 was the most successful month for the project in its history.
Thanks to weeks of hot and dry weather in London, there have been over 1.2 million hires in the month of July, surpassing the previous record of 1.18 million uses in July of 2016, a 50,000 hire record.
TfL also stated that last weekend's Prudential RideLondon festival also helped see a spike in usage, despite the inclement weather, with thousands taking advantage of the closed city roads on Saturday in particular.
To help the scheme reach this new record, TfL introduced 'pop up hubs' around the areas of Westminster and the City of London to help alleviate the pressures of commuter demand.
In this record month, some users pushed the scheme to the limit. One user even completed a 21km journey from the Lee Valley VeloPark in Stratford to Oxford Road in Putney.
Eight years and still riding
Now eight years old, the Santander cycle hire scheme has become an entirely different beast from when originally launched with Barclays Bank in the summer of 2010.
Originally with 6,000 bikes across 400 docking stations, the scheme has doubled and there are now over 11,000 bikes across 800 stations in the city, with the project also expanding to new parts of London, most recently to Brixton.
With the scheme running for almost a decade, some impressive stats have been cultivated in this time. One customer has hired a bike 14,458 times while another user has visited 573 individual docking stations.
The most used docking station, Waterloo Station, has facilitated 2 million trips while Hyde Park Corner has seen 144,000 round trips.
London walking and cycling commissioner Will Norman used this record as an opportunity to praise the scheme and new Pashley bikes introduced last October.
'Santander Cycles are such a fun and easy way to get around London, and I’m delighted that July has seen us break the record for the most ever journeys.
'Our new bike brought in last year seems to have encouraged even more people to use Santander Cycles, and I hope we can keep breaking records in the future.'