I love Lime bikes because I live next to a secondary school, and I see those tearaways in every mood. Coming in, grumpy; going home, cranky; yelling at each other, kicking bins for no reason. Ah, the sweet hell of teenagehood. But when they get on the Limes, you can see in them both the playful, primary school kids of the past, and the adults, with agency and a place to be, of the future. Let’s not trouble ourselves over whether or not they’ve hacked them and that’s what the funny clacking noise is.
But the relationship overall, between the pedal cyclist, the ebiker and the pedestrian – well, it’s mixed. Some are happy to welcome rented ebikers as allies against the greater enemy (the car). Others say they have been actively put off cycling because of them. Pedestrians have other complaints still, and drivers – well, I left drivers out of this. Some other time for their nonsense (our nonsense – I also drive).
Lime has been operating in the UK for six years, joined in London by other ebike providers such as Human Forest. Lime has ebikes and scooters in some London boroughs and Milton Keynes, a bike scheme in Nottingham and a smaller one in Castlebar and Westport, Ireland, along with a presence in Derby and Salford. Plymouth, Leeds, Brighton and Cornwall, among other places, are served by Beryl, which has a wider range of vehicles (they also do regular bikes). If you’re a cyclist in the capital, you’ll doubtless have seen the signs of Lime’s market penetration – people who do not look like they expected to get on a bike when they got dressed that morning whizzing down busy roads: women in chiffon; men in top-end tailoring; women with fancy hair; men who smell nice.
Piles of Limes are strewn across the streets in busy areas, and Billy, a 40-year-old Londoner, gives a pretty typical view. “I’m in favour of cycling infrastructure. I’m in favour of cycling. But wheelchair users can’t get past those big knots of bikes; people with prams can’t either.” According to Lime, almost half of Londoners aged 18-32 use a rented ebike at least once a week. “There are a lot more people who want to use them than there are places to park,” says Hal Stevenson, Lime’s director of policy for the UK and Ireland.
What people hate about Limes and other rental ebikes is best summarised by Patricia, 44, who lives in Limehouse and has been cycling in London for 20 years. “Sometimes they’re quite aggressive. They’re very speedy, they cut you up. I’ve been overtaken on the left. I see people on their phones – they’re not paying attention. Sometimes it’s a group of tourists, and they’re just in your way. Sometimes it’s teenagers being wild. Sometimes they’re on the pavement. I feel as if I should have a sign on my back, like a bumper sticker, saying ‘disabled cyclist’ [Patricia has multiple sclerosis]. Just be a bit more gentle. Please don’t hit me.”
There is no question that ebikes are speedy – they have a motor. “You’ll definitely get away from a standing start faster, because you’ve got that boost,” Stevenson says. “But it’s capped at 15.5mph, and the bikes are quite heavy. So you tend to get overtaken by pedal cyclists, and then catch up with them at the lights.” If you’ve been terrorised by an ebike over a certain distance, it’s most likely a private bike whose speed limit has been disabled. I’ve found that you can get into a loop with a single ebiker, though – you on a pedal bike, overtaking them; them at the lights, overtaking you – which almost sets you up for an antagonistic relationship. But that might just be my personality.
If e-cyclists are more aggressive and less expert than pedal cyclists, it hasn’t shown up in accident data. Research published in the Journal of Transport & Health found that ebike users are no more likely than conventional riders to be involved in a crash or to sustain severe injuries. However, although it’s now pretty rare to see a bike owner who doesn’t also own a helmet, it’s much more common for riders of rented bikes to be helmet-less. I actually had this stupid conversation with my son: we were about to ebike and debating whether to wear helmets. The very next week, I came off a Lime bike, landed on my head, and man, that hurt. It was a terrible scene – and it changed me overnight. I used to gaily choose between lights or a helmet on a pushbike, and now, when I see anyone on any bike without a helmet, I want to run over and hug their head, to remind them of its infinite preciousness.
Nobody is running the numbers on who shoots through more red lights, but Billy, a commuter cyclist with an unpowered hybrid bike, thinks rental companies could make careless riding less appealing. “They incentivise you to jump the lights because the payment model is based on time. They have a responsibility to connect their policy with its safety implications. Pizza delivery firms used to have a gimmick where you get your order in 30 minutes or it’s free; they stopped doing that because it was too risky for riders.” Stevenson says that Lime did look at distance charging options: “The problem we have there is it can be gamified in a different way. So riders might stop at red lights, but they might also go the wrong way down a one-way street.”
Robert, 43, rents ebikes occasionally, but tends to walk everywhere in London. “And that’s where I encounter someone going at 20mph, on the pavement. I don’t necessarily have a problem with people bending the rules. Running red lights, I don’t have a problem with that either. But when they’re doing it while people are crossing, that’s when I have a problem.”
A lot of people wonder aloud why geofencing (creating a virtual geographical boundary that triggers a brake on the bike) can’t be used to stop rental bikes going on pavements, or to set a lower speed limit in parks. As Stevenson points out, however, GPS still isn’t sensitive enough to distinguish between a pavement and a road – two things that are, by definition, right next to each other.
Maddie is a 26-year-old Londoner who can’t ride a bike and doesn’t have a car. “I call ebikes a disease,” she says. This is largely because of the parking issue. “Outside my front gate they’re heavy, scattered, piled up,” she says. “There’s nothing stopping you from leaving them where you want. If you own the bike, you’re a lot more protective about where you leave it.”
London is not the only city whose streets are cluttered with clunky ebikes. Stuart, 56, from Plymouth, is such a fan of the Beryl ebikes there that he thinks using them has restored his physical and mental health. Nevertheless, “the kids smash them up, rip chunks out of them”. It’s a problem that rarely comes up with Santander Cycles and others like them, because renters need to return their ebikes to a docking station. The convenience of a Lime or Beryl bike is that it can be picked up and dropped off (almost) anywhere, with no need to build expensive infrastructure. This flexibility has freed up the ebikes’ network to grow rapidly, which may be one reason why so many problems have arisen.
Basic standards of courteous behaviour take a while to build up, and rules evolve incrementally around them. But as cycling enthusiast Jake May, 35, says, “The whole of society is designed around convenience for cars. I think if people spent one day trying to look out for cars speeding, or cars going through red lights, they’d realise the confirmation bias, when you see cars as belonging and bikes as not belonging.” May lives in south-east London and took up cycling during Covid, and now has a road bike, a gravel bike and a hybrid; he runs a YouTube channel showcasing bike routes in and out of London. He has none of the classic cyclist’s animus towards ebike newcomers. “I’m quite happy to see normal people who aren’t in Lycra using a bike to do daily tasks. It gives me a bit of hope for the future, that they’re choosing a Lime bike rather than jumping in an Uber.”
For an object lesson in how small ebike journeys can transform one life, take Stuart: he moved back to Plymouth after two decades living abroad, suffering from depression and other health problems that were later diagnosed as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “I was very close to being dead,” he says. A charity gave him 300 free minutes on Beryl bikes, plus a cycling coach – and he started cycling for pleasure. “It just wipes your brain,” he says. “Like an Etch A Sketch, all the bad stuff goes away.”
This is what Stevenson describes as the biggest single proven success of hireable ebikes: that they get more people into cycling. “It’s difficult to make the decision to buy a bike before you’ve ridden a bike and incorporated it into your routine.” According to Lime’s own figures, 20% of its users hadn’t used a bike before in London and “60% cycle more often or much more often since they started using Limes”.
Many people point to cities where bikes, cars, pedestrians, mopeds and ebikes seem to get along better – Amsterdam, Paris and similar places with mature cycling cultures and policies aimed at promoting bike use. In Paris, mayor Anne Hidalgo has brought in so many pro-cycling measures after her two terms in power that cyclists now outnumber motorists on journeys into the town centre, and most cars have been banned in the central zone since 2022. In the UK, curtailing car use with low-traffic neighbourhoods, 20mph limits and low-emission zones seems pretty straightforward so long as you’re prepared to make a few enemies. May’s view – that most Londoners would prefer a cycling and walking city – seems borne out: one poll before the mayoral election last year found net approval for Ulez at +19 points.
There’s still the question of civility, or lack of it – baked-in enmities between pedestrians, cyclists and ebike users. Patricia wonders whether “internet behaviour is seeping through to real life”. If we all used all three modes of transport, these tribe identities might come together – and, at the very least, we’d be outdoors.
