London on Monday night was mad and hilarious. At the Hyde Park Corner crossing, the number of people on Lime bikes must have been approaching 100. Invariably described as menaces, murderers and leg-breakers, these Lime bikes and their riders waited for the traffic light to turn green. When it did, battalions of these 35-kilo machines toppled and wobbled around each other, as the same number came in the other direction, green and white overwhelming the eyes. Yet no knees were crunched, no one fell off and those brave enough managed to render the tube strikes a minor inconvenience.
If you believe in the state as protector, nanny and moraliser, and the world as a perfectible place where hazard can be eliminated, they should be banned
It was good to see. I’d estimate there were about three times more Lime bikes than usual, some of them probably encouraged by Lime’s notification this morning. ‘Skip the crowds. Save up to 74% on rides with LimePass minute bundles for stress-free travel’. Clever.
Why won’t anyone stick up for the Lime bike? It is, unquestionably, the best thing that has happened to London in my lifetime. They started being commonly used in 2022, just as labour shortages and strikes made the tube horrendous and taxis unreliable and expensive. As Giles Coren wrote in the Times, anyone who rides them will find that London is their ‘oyster again’. Their arrival was another example that London, the world’s greatest city, just somehow spawns things when they’re most needed.
None of the criticisms made of them is that damning. ‘They’re an eyesore’. Sorry, I didn’t realise you were so sensitive about aesthetics. Have you noticed that every available bit of road in the city is parked up with hideous boxy cars? And most of London’s buildings are an eyesore. ‘They block up the pavement’. Come off it. Has anyone ever actually had to move into the road because so many Lime bikes are on the pavement? I concede that they may make pavements difficult for people in wheelchairs. And no, I’m not churlish enough to say lots of things are presumably difficult for people in wheelchairs. But I live in London and the idea that walking down the pavement involves swerving and hopping is simply untrue.
‘They’re dangerous’. So are the horrid polluting wagons that a lot of people get round central London in, and are rightly charged to the hilt for it. Everyone who drives a car in Zone 1 is far more of a risk to others than I am, whereas the worst that might happen is I break my own leg. ‘People steal them’. They do, but handily, they make a nasty clicking sound when someone’s done that, so the horrid criminal has to go through the indignity of broadcasting to the whole street, very loudly, that ‘CLICK CLICK CLICK I NICKED THIS CLICK CLICK CLICK’.
I’ve always thought that the Lime bike critics are really saying something else. Like ‘I’m unfit’, or ‘I’m a scaredy-cat’, or ‘I can’t ride a bike’, or ‘I don’t like teenagers’. You must be annoyed to know how easily I glide about the city, envious that I’m writing this just half an hour after leaving the office, the lunatic drivers under the Westway unable to slow my journey. You should feel inadequate when I brag that getting from Hammersmith to Westbourne Grove was a 15-minute breeze.
Hills are nothing. In lockdown, even when I was at my most fit, I heaved a Boris bike up Ladbroke Grove, having to stop several times. Now, on a Lime bike, I could hold a conversation with ease. Going back down Ladbroke Grove is good fun too: the aerodynamics give it a kind of drag reduction system, where you don’t need to pedal and you just drop. There’s a blind corner on Lansdowne Crescent you have to be wary of, but it’s poignant that if you crashed there, they’d have to hose you off the house that Jimi Hendrix died in.
There’s nothing compared to the adrenaline you feel when the motor first accelerates. It shouldn’t be legal. But if Limes are too carnal for you, there’s the more refined ‘Forest bikes’: the gentleman’s choice. They ride slightly more slowly and with less unpredictable jerking. Careful, though: the chassis doesn’t move with the basket, which on first travel, feels like a reversal of space-time.
The thing is: Lime bikes and their cousins are obviously unsafe. If you believe in the state as protector, nanny and moraliser, and the world as a perfectible place where hazard can be eliminated, they should be banned. I’ve known one friend go to A&E twice thanks to them, one friend mess up a knee that left him hobbling for a week, and one friend thudded into a bollard. I had my own crash. Cycling down my road, bored, I tried some weaving, and ended up falling off, my keys cutting a gash across my thigh, a disconcerting thump, the taste of bloody iron briefly in my throat. Yet all of us still ride Lime bikes.
You might think that mad. But Lime bikes set you free. They get you from point A to point B with no friction. Public transport leaves you at the behest of others. The one valid criticism of Lime bikes is that they make riders look unseemly, but what’s more unseemly than apologising for a bus delay?
Of course, I’m going to have to be very careful on Lime bikes now. I can’t be the journalist who wrote an article praising Lime bikes, and then wham, a day later, ‘Journalist, 24, dies in Lime bike crash’. But I plan on not dying on one. The fact that they haven’t been banned yet suggests that politicians are trying something they don’t usually with the public: trust. Hold onto that, should I find myself smattered on Hendrix’s front door.
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