Recently in London, slogging out of the Underground with my backpack after a long flight onto a road busy with construction, I saw someone glide by on a city bike. I had to try it, even if just for the short distance from tube stop to hotel.
Fortunately, the Barclay’s city bike system is very tourist-friendly and doesn’t require preregistration or a chip-and-pin card. A swipe of a credit card, a few dollars, and I rented a bike, rode it the short distance to the hotel, and deposited it at another stand. No problem.
Though– riding on the left side of the road and having to be aware of large buses passing fast on my right and then taking left turns in front of me took a little mental adjustment, as did riding clockwise around a rotary…
I didn’t see any bike paths as a more major road (the A10) was the only sensible was from A to B, but I saw many more cyclists than I remember from a decade ago when I was there, including many on city bikes– I’d call it a success (especially compared to San Francisco’s anemic city bike deployment).