It’s amusing to see how Barclay’s Cycle Hire is rapidly becoming known in London as Boris’s Bikes. This was inevitable. Barclay’s Cycle Hire is too long and too generic to ‘stick’ with Londoners. For similar reasons they rechristened the Swiss Re building the Gherkin. By contrast the London Eye and the TfL Oyster Card have been adopted under their original, professionally devised names. Naming anything for mass consumption needs care, as the public (often with media help) is quite capable of finding its own preference to replace names which fail to resonate. This caution seems to have been lacking in the case of Barclay’s Cycle Hire.
In fact it sounds like something rammed through at committee, rather as London’s Mayor tells us the bikes themselves must be rammed into their docking stations for the system to register their return. The moral is clear: if you label too generically, the people will name it, and it may not be something you like.