My longest Lime ride was the 23 minutes it took me to get home from a protest at the Russian embassy, zipping through Mayfair and St James’s on a Sunday afternoon. My weirdest ride was on an e-scooter, carrying a 5ft Christmas tree through the backstreets near my home, singing carols to bemused pedestrians. The most exhilarating ride is the one I do most days over Waterloo Bridge at sunrise, which at 24km per hour, with the sun rising over the City, often makes me feel like I am flying.
I first rode a Lime bike on June 22, 2024, and in the year since then have covered 843km in 429 journeys. I’d always associated e-bikes with drug dealers, and Lime bikes in particular with the obnoxious schoolboys who hack them to ride along the pavement, emitting a telltale distress beep which everyone ignores.
But one day I was surprised to hear that a right wing journalist who had just interviewed me was going to hop on one. I gave it a try and I am hooked.
I’ll come to the “why” in a moment. But first I want to spell out the hard-edged economic “what”.
Lime bike journeys are not cheap: a 12-minute ride from Charing Cross to SE11 just cost me £3.77 – after a discount for buying a pass. Getting the bus or Tube would be cheaper. But they – together with their rival Forest and Santander e-bikes – are palpably changing the way the metropolis works.
In the City of London – the square mile of the financial district – 56% of all journeys during rush hour are made on bikes, including personal push-bikes, docked Santander bikes and e-bikes like Lime and Forest. That is a 57% increase since 2022, and is being driven both by the uptake of pedal cycles and by a staggering 340% surge in e-bike use.
With car traffic in steep decline, we’re approaching the point where bikes overtake cars as the dominant mode of private transport. Meanwhile, thanks in addition to the ULEZ scheme, and the conversion of some cars, buses and taxis to EVs, air quality is improving rapidly.
But what thrills me the most is the prospect of turning the capital into a 15-minute city “from below”.
The far right protesters who denounce 15-minute cities as Soros-inspired attacks on cars and freedom miss the point entirely. What Lime bikes do for me is bring a whole bunch of amenities well within 15 minutes of my home.
The Strand, which can take me 25 minutes during rush hour, can be reached in 10 if all the traffic lights are with me. A hospital visit in Chelsea, which because of London’s obstinately undiagonal Tube routes, can take up to 40 minutes, took me exactly 15 this week.
E-bikes, in short, bring Tube stations, parks, shops and meeting venues that I would never dream of going to well within my reach – in the process changing my perception of a city I’ve lived in since 1988.
It occurred to me once, as I pedalled from London Bridge to Vauxhall, that experiencing the byways of London on an e-bike might replicate the experience of seeing the city on horseback in the Middle Ages. But the trotting speed of a horse is only 13km per hour: you would have to be cantering to match an e-bike – and I am not sure anyone but royals and highwaymen would have got away with that after the 16th century.
No, what we’re living through is unique. It is a mass behavioural change, triggered by a mixture of technology and regulation. The separate bike lanes that give me confidence to ride alongside HGVs and buses; the enhanced batteries that allow e-bikes to achieve these speeds; the apps that make the booking, paying and parking experience seamless – plus the strength in numbers that arises from the cavalry charge on two wheels that begins when the traffic lights turn green.
I cycled on and off for years in London, but was never fanatical about it. To achieve speed you have to sweat; on an e-bike you don’t. I’ve had more bikes stolen than I dare to think about – and carrying a Brompton did my back in.
I know some push-bike riders despise us, and understand why: too many e-bike users don’t wear helmets; too many jump red lights; and yes the kids mounting the pavement on their stolen machines are a disgrace. But with solidarity and some regulatory change I think we could soon push the transport system of London to a tipping point well in advance of anything Sadiq Khan has planned.
The most detailed changes needed are obvious: make it physically impossible to park an e-bike outside their designated zones; make it technologically impossible to hack one; and since the vehicle is powered I would happily see each one given a licence plate, as the e-scooters do, to make riders accountable for breaches of the law. On top of that, I’d like to see a state subsidy to bring the price down in poorer areas.
But if we said today that in five years’ time we want petrol and diesel cars off London’s roads, and designate some major routes as bike, bus and taxi only, this would not be as radical as it sounds. We are technically capable of delivering small consumer goods via drone: yet regulations limit drone use to simple, experimental schemes like the one that ferries drugs between two south London hospitals.
If we achieved a behavioural breakthrough, the major challenge would be preventing firms like Uber, which owns Lime, keeping the prices artificially high in order to rent-seek. One of the most immediate challenges is who owns the data: if the detailed digital footprint left by thousands of rented e-bike journeys were declared a public good, then everyone from retail firms to public service providers could start to make investment decisions based on this socialised knowledge.
So the next time you see one of those hi-vis protests against the 15-minute city, give them a wave and a wry smile. They don’t know it yet, but they’ve lost already.
