“I’ll bring a little lime bike, as a treat” – that’s how it started, and now, at the end of the calendar year, it ends with me broke and feeling like a man. Who spends a lot on candles. I’m addicted to lemons, and I’m not alone. If there’s one thing that’s become clear in 2024, it’s that London The bike is reaching the peak. from Hackney Half (Marathon) For the Gala Dance Music Festival on Peckham Rye and the Mighty Hoopla Pop One in Brixton, there’s nothing more common than a sea of dayglow green at the gates of any event.
There are, at some point, 2,800 e-bikes loose on the streets of the capital per hour. In March, the charity Collaborative Mobility UK reported that around 40,000 were already in use in London. 10,000 by 2023. Already a staple of tube stations and street corners in the city centre, e-bikes are making inroads into more suburban areas of London – Haringey Council recently A trial was announced This will see Limes hire schemes in Forrest (Lime bike’s newer, UK-based competitor) and New Southgate, Bowes and Edmonton, suburban boroughs on the very fringes of north London. lime Joined the government’s “Cycle to Work” scheme.which allowed startup owners to pay for their employees’ cycle passes to and from the office. This year Lyme teamed up with a bakery in Shoreditch (where else?) to grow the world. The first e-bike drive-thru. clever Sure, but it’s a testament to Lyme’s cultural cachet that people played with it, even in self-consciously ironic ways.
However, not surprisingly, the haters have arrived. As Lime Bike’s popularity skyrocketed, it became more and more inevitable that the inevitable backlash would follow. An article in City AM Explores Lyme’s dubious relationship with council funding across the city.and Resident groups are already complaining about them on neighborhood and community discussion forums like NextDoor.. A few months ago, when Mayor Sadiq Khan proposed banning traffic from Oxford Street, fingers were inevitably raised to include Limebikes in the crackdown.
Just this week, council chiefs attacked e-bike retailers over the “unacceptable” numbers littering London’s streets. Lime, London’s most famous company, keeps its actual figures close to its chest – although it has denied the suggestions. Currently there are up to 40,000. of his units on the streets of the capital. Granted, during 2024, their Brett Greenhards (what’s the collective noun for a group of lime bikes, do you think? A bushel? A pint?) have become ubiquitous. But of course for most of us, they are familiar symbols of the hobby. I’m so used to the hundreds of them piled up outside Finsbury Park station that when I see the white van taking them away to be recharged and changed, I want to protect them and There is a kind of maternal yearning for a quick return.
But not everyone feels the same. A surge in e-bike use this year has led to frequent clashes with local councils. Transport for London (TfL) made the announcement last month. They will crack down on careless parking outside tube stations – to be fair, they also announced £1m of funding for 7,500 new allocated parking bays, with a further 800 by next summer, proving that It happens that despite the critics, the boom is not going anywhere. Soon Lime now operates in 230 cities worldwide. Since it began in 2017, launching in San Francisco with just 125 bicycles, it has raised nearly $2bn in funding. Jungle, which followed in 2019, has raised $17 million since its founding — where else? – London.
“If you ask Londoners, they see Lyme as the main transport infrastructure,” says Wen Ting, the company’s chief executive. It’s hard to disagree with that. But then, I would agree, wouldn’t I? I love illegal parking and going “the same” down big hills.
What divides us with those neon green lines in the sand? Over time it has become increasingly clear that this is the tipping point of the racial divide, a zeitgeist playing out in the bicycle lane. From where I see it, a kind of nimbleism implicit in the anti-ebike discourse is hard to ignore. It’s okay for them to be in London, it seems like the attitude is okay, but it’s not. our Well leafed streets.
The reality is that Limebikes are often used for the first or last leg of a journey, usually to and from tube stations in the London suburbs. But travelers, especially younger travelers, are being forced into areas once stereotypically associated with older people or young families, because they can’t afford to live anywhere else. Neither can they afford a car to get them there, nor can they rely on a labyrinthine system of trains and buses.
This argument is lost on some people. Last month, residents of a leafy Kingston-upon-Thames area used angle grinders to destroy the remaining e-bikes. Their private Car park. “We’re really done and we’ve had enough,” He sniffed, He added that the bikes were technically “fly-tipped” (there’s usually no more bleeding heart issues than fly-tipping).
If you’re young you’ll love Limes, especially if you don’t drive (and who has a car in London?). They’re durable and fast, a cheap alternative to Ubers, which are unreliable if you live anywhere outside zone 2 (and even marginal if you’re south of the river). If you’re older, though, or really just old coded (more sensible) you see them as a menace on city streets. In Brent, where hundreds of spent bikes are dumped outside Wembley Tube, the local council leader says he wants them banned if regulations are not made. Limes were present in the borough. For five years Already, as part of a sustainable travel scheme. But now they have had enough. “I want them to be caught and crushed,” said an 86-year-old local man told The Guardian. “Life is bad enough when you get old and you’re not very stable on your feet without these bikes. Good riddance.”
Admittedly, despite being in the pocket of Big Lime I can admit that there are problems with e-bike use, mainly safety issues – no one obeys the rules of the road on Lime, and despite the fact that That you have to get money. If you wear a helmet, literally no one does. A report from The Times Lime showed bike users skipping red lights 84 times in just one hour In a busy South London location. Research by dash cam company Nextbase analyzed 80 different London junctions and found that 41 per cent of e-scooter riders observed riding through red lights, compared to just 28 per cent of pedal cyclists.
No wonder, then, that critics say we’re entering a genre. E-Bike Wild West; A type of zone 1 yellowstone. Aptly named Westminster – which has the highest e-bike usage in the world, with 630,000 trips per month – New government powers were announced this week. In which fines will be imposed for parking or littering motorcycles on the streets of SW1.
Joe Powell, MP for Kensington and Bayswater, said of the decision: “This is the beginning of the end of the wild west model of dockless e-bikes in London.”
Of course there should be more regulations when it comes to safety, and perhaps more “can you see the trees” drunkenness than Lime Bike inspires you when you’re 11pm on a Saturday. Then try to pay for the ride. They go very fast (in London, the speed limit for lime bikes is 15.5mph, while for scooters it’s 12.5mph) and feel great fun when not required. But discussions about the ubiquity of Limebikes also often focus more on their status than the potential safety hazard they pose to users. If councils and residents’ groups spent half the time talking about how often the seats twist or the brakes squeal and fail, instead of how much they hate having their bikes left near their favorite coffee shop, So we will all be much better off. For that
And yet, there’s something strange and rewarding about riding a lime bike. Opinion on it i The Guardian Recently, author Miranda May spoke of inner peace and connection while walking through central London on Christmas Day, following the death of her parents. I also spent most of the last day of Christmas on the Limebike, and I can confirm that it’s great – the roads are empty, and you’re king of them, full of mince pies and adrenaline. is You have to admit, there’s something freeing about flying down the streets on an e-bike with ease, all your worldly goods in a lime-green front basket that someone almost certainly drank in the night. *** What will happen? First
What else do we share besides lime bikes? And what goods pass from hand to hand, bringing joy and passion day after day? Most of us would struggle to remember the last time we checked out a library book. The pandemic, even as an event now in distant memory, has kind of ruined the whole landscape around the biscuit tin. We do not share! From our childhood we are not indulged in things that make us happy, like books and biscuits and going “the same” with wild abandon! Except when it comes to lime bikes. For all its flaws, we need it. Long may he reign.