TFL charging me £94 per day to rent a bike despite advertising £2 a DAY aibu

[jobbinggogger]

So TFL state you can hire a bike for £2 for 24 hours. I've read their T and C and seen nothing to state anything other than this. I took out a bike last week, returned it within hours and was shocked to see a completely unexpected £76 charge on my account. When I called, they explained that the £2 is for access and that cyclists are then charged £2 every half hour thereafter unless they return the bike to the docking area every half hour. So a cyclist would have to stay awake all night and travel back and forth to the docking area in order to get the bike for £2. The terms and conditions are extremely waffly and difficult to understand.

Soo AIBU that £96 for 24 hours of bike hire is A)daylight robbery
and that B) very different to the advertised rate of £2 per day!!!

TFL also do not care and are not sorry. The blame is solely on the customer for not understanding their contradictory and at time batshit rules. Am I the only person to be horrified and much poorer?

No need to patronise me Bluntness, I just meant that it’s primarily a scheme for short trips (e.g. commuting) rather than for tourists to go out for a jolly for the day, because then the constant need to redock becomes a pain. If people who live in London use the scheme regularly then it would soon become cheaper to buy your own bike, but they don’t - so why would that be?
I have read some of the Tripadvisor reviews & (apart from the people who can’t read instructions) it does seem that there is a fair amount of malfunctioning of docking stations - have people who use the system regularly found this to be a problem?

The test of whether the instructions are clear enough should be how many people get them wrong. It may well be that there's no way of communicating them clearly enough, in which case you need a procedure to let people off after a first offense.

It should be a basic principle that people who evidently had no intention of taking the piss should not be fined.

I seldom travel on public transport despite living in London. The first time I used a contactless card was on the DLR, where there are no turnstyles, unlike the tube. I didn't tap-out, resulting in charges several times what they should have been for my journey, because the computer assumes you make the longest and most expensive journey possible. TFL actually have a procedure to cover this, I phoned and explained and they reduced the charges. I've never done it again.

By contrast, congestion charging once charged me £200 in fines because the credit card I had set up to autopay had expired, and the two emails they had sent me regarding expiry had been auto-filed by software at my end, so I hadn't seen them. If they'd sent me a letter in the post (the way I found out about the fines) or spoken to me on the phone (they had my home and work numbers) it wouldn't have happened. I had a record of ten years of faultless paying, including about eight years when you had to remember manually every day to do it, so it should have been obvious I wasn't attempting to evade payment. (And no, I shouldn't have "known" the credit card expiring would be a problem, because in any other context all that happens when a registered card expires is that you're contacted and asked to pay by other means.)