NOOOOO. There we were, all excited about playing on this urban trampoline — sorry, we mean using the Bounceway as an integrated part of our daily commute — and it's gone and been dropped.
The concept was one of 10 projects in Transport for London's (TfL) Future Streets Incubator, a fund that aims to "encourage sustainable transport and create vibrant public spaces". The site currently lists only nine — things like simultaneous green signals at junctions for cyclists, and turning parking bays into mini parks (someone's been watching Parks and Recreation, surely) — which are all very laudable but none's a fucking trampoline.
We are, obviously, being facetious: given our general feelings about the garden bridge and the cable car we were unlikely to ever be hugely supportive of a strip of springy stuff (but, oh, it was only going to take £75,000 and was intended to encourage people to exercise, and would apparently have been sited in a deprived community in Vauxhall rather than being a London Eye tourist playground). Its untimely demise was discovered at a GLA budget meeting, with Boris Johnson acknowledging:
"I was very disappointed to see the fatwa issued by Sir Peter [Hendy, TfL Commissioner] against the trampoline who decided, who gave a statement, that it wasn’t a mode of transport... It doesn’t seem to me at first blush to serve any immediate transport purposes."
Which is fair enough. CityMetric quotes Architecture for Humanity, from whose brains the project sprang, explaining TfL never actually approved the Bounceway. We all got to know about it at the tyres-kicking stage because of a leak, which "led to public criticism from a humourless member of the opposition". It may still be revived at some point, so bouncing may still be in London's future.
