How Lime bikes tore apart a London borough

Stroll down almost any London street, and you’ll spot a Lime e-bike whizzing through traffic or propped up on the side of the road. The saying goes you’re only ever 6ft away from a rat in the capital – and now, according to the US tech firm, 97 per cent of Londoners are only ever two minutes from a Lime.

Since its UK launch in 2018, the company says its growth has been “astronomical.” By the end of last year, Britons had taken 12 million trips, cycling a collective 18.5m miles – enough to travel to the moon and back 40 times. Since January, the number of rides has already nearly been matched during peak commuting hours alone.

But as Lime has grown, so have its problems. While its users love the convenience factor, hopping on and dropping it off pretty much wherever they like, those navigating the streets by foot are having a more frustrating experience.

One quick search on social media reveals innumerable pedestrians and local residents railing at the heavy bikes – 32kg, around the same as a slimline dishwasher – parked across pavements, blocking their route, often knocked onto the ground. Others are furious to find them discarded in bushes or, on one occasion, even left up a tree.

And now, the chorus of complaints – particularly from parents with pushchairs, elderly pensioners, and those disabled in wheelchairs – has, for the first time, been taken seriously by a local authority. Brent Council in north-west London says it has had enough. This month, it issued Lime an ultimatum – improve or leave our streets.

The e-bikes are causing “havoc” for residents, council leader Muhammed Butt has said, and putting “unsustainable pressure” on council staff who are having to spend their time cleaning up the bikes. Change is needed, he warned, giving the company until October 31 to address the concerns before officials begin removing them.

So what do residents think? By the steps of Wembley Park station, the 133m-high arch above England’s national stadium glistening in the late summer sun just half a mile away, are a cluster of seven Lime bikes. This is hardly a surprise: the average age of a Lime rider is 34, with around half of all the journeys made by commuters.

But three of the bikes have been tossed over, and it doesn’t take long to hear a grumpy complaint.

“They’re making my life hell,” says 61-year-old Junior Lancaster, a former painter and decorator whose debilitating sciatica has left him unable to move his left leg properly. He’s walking slowly past with his Asda shopping balanced on his rollator walking aid, and often finds the bikes blocking his way home.

“I see it all the time – young boys, workers, tourists, they just dump the bike and walk away, no thought for anyone else.”

His frustrations are echoed by others in the borough. Last month young mum Natalie Fabello posted a picture on Facebook of three Lime bikes parked perpendicular to the pavement. “So tired of squeezing through with our pushchair of inconsiderate parking from lime bike users on a near daily basis,” she wrote in a community group for Harlesden. Others quickly chimed in. Pensioner Michael Pescott told how Lime bikes were regularly “dumped” outside his own house like “someone’s unwanted rubbish”.

Walking south towards Neasden, it’s not hard to see their point. London has an estimated 30,000 rental bikes – and Lime owns and operates the majority of them. There are 750 in total operating across Brent, with tens of thousands of riders in the borough taking hundreds of thousands of journeys every month, according to the firm. Turn a corner and yet another Lime bike appears, parked randomly across the pavement, often knocked over.

“Not only are they left blocking people’s houses, or across the pavement, we’ve even had to fish them out the rivers and canals,” council leader Butt says. He reveals he is constantly having to send out his own council officers and cleaning staff to pick them up – despite not receiving any money from Lime for letting it operate in the borough. Not easy for a council that has had £210m cut from its budget over the past 14 years. Lime, meanwhile, has announced a further £25m expansion into the UK – and is pushing to double the size of its fleet in Brent to 1,500.

One of Brent Council’s demands ahead of the Halloween deadline is stronger deterrents for bad parking – bringing it closer in line, Butt suggests, to the maximum of £130 penalty motorists are charged for parking tickets. To end a ride, the app requires users to take a picture of the bike to show it’s been parked in a sensible place (previously, a team of 20 Lime employees had to spend their day checking them – now it is done using AI). Currently, users receive an initial warning, before fines escalate from £2 for the second offence up to £20 for repeat offenders, and finally, after a sixth time, a ban.

Lime boasts it has a “parking compliance” rate of 95 per cent  – but this still means one in 20 are parked wrong, either left outside designated parking zones or obstructively. The company says it has a team of 250 people at any given time driving across London to pick up those left in the incorrect place, collecting broken bikes and moving them around to avoid large clusters. (It has a further 150 mechanics working in two warehouses north and south of the river to fix and maintain them.) “This is clearly not enough – there are almost nine million people in London,” Butt says. “Lime is a global multinational company and they need to take responsibility.”

To keep the streets neater, Brent Council also wants to change to a “mandatory” parking model, where riders must leave the e-bikes in designated zones. For the past six years it allowed a “flexible approach”, meaning users can leave the bike anywhere, within reason. Again, this has caused a sticking point in negotiations. Lime says that to be commercially sustainable, it needs at least 25 of these per square kilometre, so users are no more than a five-minute walk away from a bike. Brent Council has so far only offered to install 100, leaving around two per square kilometre.

Hal Stevenson, Lime’s Director of Policy for UK and Ireland, said: “We can enforce mandatory parking rules in Brent, but first we need the council to build a functional network of parking locations. We can provide data and funding to support this process. We want to work with them on this. Banning bikes doesn’t help anyone as we work towards our ambitious active travel and climate goals.”

But the clock is ticking. And currently, it’s not looking good for Lime. Butt says he has received huge support from locals since threatening the ban, and claims other councils have been in touch to thank him for putting his head above the parapet.

This is hardly surprising, as Brent Council is not the only local authority to voice its frustrations with Lime, which operates in half of the 32 London boroughs as well as Milton Keynes, Manchester, Nottingham, and soon Oxford. “Bikes are parked in the most amazingly stupid places,” Westminster City councillor Paul Dimoldenberg recently told The Financial Times, complaining the fines were pocketed by Lime rather than being passed onto the council.

Lambeth Council, meanwhile, has renewed its calls for tougher powers to tackle the scourge of “abandoned” e-bikes. Last year it installed 240 bays to deal with concerns riders’ parking was causing a “hazard” by blocking wheelchairs and pushchairs. Yet the problems have persisted, officials said, because it was only a “voluntary agreement” with operators. This week, Lambeth’s Deputy Leader for Sustainability, Rezina Chowdhury, called on the government to bring in e-bike regulation “to ensure people are safe on our streets.”

This regulation clearly can’t soon enough for the residents of Brent. Over at St Andrew’s church in Kingsbury, a mile and a half from Wembley stadium, Father Jason Rendell says he’s found them discarded in the church grounds. To his irritation, the pavement running outside the entrance to the magnificent 177-year-old gothic structure has become a hotspot for them.

The 56-year-old priest, whose house is next door, tells me he had a “little run in” with a Lime employee recently who was dropping off bikes outside. “I just tried to point out how close it was to the zebra crossing because most of them don’t stay upright for long. Somebody in annoyance will knock them over, clutter up the pavement. But he said it wasn’t my land – even though I wasn’t claiming it was – and he took offence. He told me they had permission to leave eight. And then he huffed off.”

The next day, Father Rendell says he found 14 Lime bikes purposefully lined up on his driveway, blocking him in. “He had come for retribution,” he says, wryly. He shows me the church WhatsApp group where he recently posted about the possible ban, with the caption “Lets pray!”. Several members replied with prayer emojis, he says.

Soon their prayers may be answered.