Flawed but fun – Boris Bikes and a gradual green commute

I was an hour and a half late for work this morning.

The cause of my tardiness was London's Barclays Cycle Hire scheme, affectionately dubbed "Boris Bikes" as a tribute to the capital's Mayor Boris Johnson. Rather than taking my usual commute from Arsenal Tube station to Oxford Circus, followed by a leisurely stroll into Soho, I decided to spend the morning gliding through the back streets of London on a big blue Boris Bike.

The scheme is being touted as a fun and healthy way to reduce the carbon footprint of commuters and tourists alike. But nearly three weeks in, there are inevitable teething problems that still need to be ironed out by managing company Serco.

These teething problems, combined with a slight lack of preparation on my part, meant I barely made it to my desk at BusinessGreen.com's central London bunker much before lunchtime.

The main problem was that it took half an hour and a visit to four separate docking stations to find a bike. I eventually found a free bike at a station on a side road, put in my access key, undocked the bike and got under way – but by then I was already running badly late.

It's clear the scheme's bike redistribution team are struggling to get the bikes to the right places quickly enough. They are tasked with making sure there are enough bikes in all the docking stations while others don't overflow. But most users are commuters, riding bikes from the outskirts into the city centre in the morning and then cycling back home in the evening.

As a result North London was dotted with empty docking stations, while an abundance of bikes presumably built up elsewhere.

Spatial analysis PhD student James Cheshire has released a data visualisation video showing how the redistribution teams should work in a typical 24-hour period, but in reality they seem to be finding it difficult to manage the flow of bikes during peak hours.

Although all the docks were full when I finally arrived at my destination on Broadwick Street, I was lucky enough to see a redistributor arriving seconds later with his car and trailer to remove some bikes, freeing up space for me to park.

He explained that the traffic around London made it hard to keep up with demand. "The streets round here are too busy, he told me," he said. "We've barely even got time to get to the outskirts and I work from six in the morning to six at night."

To help people access bikes, a number of real-time blogs have already sprung up that let you know which docking stations are available. Unfortunately, I've just moved and don't yet have an internet connection at home, so I fell victim to the tidal-flow effect.

The bikes themselves are a bit more successful, even if they take some getting used to. Although stable to ride, they are quite large and the first gear is useless – causing my feet to spin round on the pedals while I barely travelled a few metres.