Lime bikes may annoy UK people, but youngsters love them

“I’ll get a little Lime bike over, as a treat” — that’s how it started out, and now, at the end of the calendar year, it’s ended up with me broke and feeling like the man who spends too much on candles. I am addicted to Limes, and I’m not alone. If one thing has become clear in 2024, it’s that London is reaching peak Lime bike. From the Hackney Half (marathon) to the Gala dance music festival on Peckham Rye and the Mighty Hoopla pop one in Brixton, nothing has become a more common sight than a sea of dayglo green at the gates of any event.

There are, at any one point, 2,800 e-bikes loose on the streets of the capital per hour. In March, it was reported by the charity Collaborative Mobility UK that there were already nearly 40,000 being used in London, up 10,000 from 2023. Already a staple of Tube stations and street corners in the central part of the city, e-bikes are moving further and further into London’s more suburban boroughs — Haringey council recently announced a trial that would see Forest (Lime bike’s newer, UK-based competitor) and Limes’ hire scheme introduced to New Southgate, Bowes and Edmonton, suburban boroughs on the absolute edges of north London. Lime joined the government’s “cycle to work” scheme, which allowed start-up bosses to pay for their employees’ cycle passes to and from the office. This year Lime even teamed up with a bakery in Shoreditch (where else?) to develop the world’s first e-bike drive-through. Gimmicky? Sure. But it’s testament to Lime’s cultural cachet that people played along with this, even in a self-consciously ironic way.

Unsurprisingly, though, the haters have cometh. As the popularity of the Lime bike skyrocketed, it became more and more inevitable that the inevitable backlash would follow. An article in City AM explored Lime’s dubious relationship with council funding across the city, and resident groups are already complaining about them on neighbourhood and community discussion forums like NextDoor. A few months ago, when mayor Sadiq Khan proposed banning traffic from Oxford Street, Lime bikes were inevitably, obviously, fingered for inclusion in the crackdown.

Just this week, council chiefs attacked e-bike retailers for “unacceptable” numbers littering the streets of London. Lime, the most popular company in London, keeps its actual figures close to its chest — although it has denied suggestions that there are currently up to 40,000 of its units on the capital’s streets. It’s true that over the course of 2024, their Brat-green hordes (what is the collective noun for a group of Lime bikes, do you think? A bushel? A punnet?) have become ubiquitous. But surely for most of us, they’re a symbol of fond familiarity. I’ve grown so used to them piled in their hundreds outside Finsbury Park station that when I watch the white vans take them away to be recharged and replaced, I feel a kind of maternal yearning for their safety and swift return.

But not everyone feels the same. This year’s boom in e-bike use has led to repeated clashes with local councils, and Transport for London (TfL) last month announced they would take action against reckless parking outside Tube stations — to be fair, they also announced funding of £1m for 7,500 new allocated parking bays, with a further 800 by next summer, which proves that the boom, despite the critics, is going nowhere soon. Lime now operates in 230 cities around the world. Since it began in 2017, launching in San Francisco with just 125 bicycles, it’s raised nearly $2bn in funding. Forest, which followed it in 2019, has raised $17m since its foundation in — where else? — London.

“If you ask Londoners, they see Lime as critical transportation infrastructure,” says Wayne Ting, the company’s chief executive. It’s hard to disagree with him. But then again, I would agree, wouldn’t I? I love illegal parking and going “whee” down big hills. What divides us along these neon-green lines in the sand? As time goes on it’s become more clear that it’s the end point of a generational split, a zeitgeist playing out in the bicycle lanes. From where I see it, it’s hard to ignore a kind of nimbyism implicit within anti-e-bike discourse. It’s fine to have them in London, the attitude seems to go, but just not on our nice leafy streets. The reality is that Lime bikes are often used for the first or last leg of journeys, usually to and from Tube stations, in increasingly suburban parts of London. But commuters, particularly younger commuters, are being forced into these areas, once stereotypically associated with older people or young families, because they can’t afford to live anywhere else. Nor can they afford a car to get them there or rely on a labyrinthine system of trains and buses either.

This argument is lost on some people. Last month, residents of one area in leafy Kingston upon Thames used angle grinders to destroy e-bikes left in their private car park. “We are really p***ed off and we’ve had enough,” they sniffed, adding that the bikes were technically “fly-tipped” (generally speaking there is no more bleeding-heart nimbyish issue than fly-tipping).