The ACT government has been urged to shake up the new Lime bike system three months after the electric bikes were allowed into Canberra.
E-scooter users said the arrival of the bikes for hire had worsened the city: they were just dumped at the end of a ride and often driven dangerously, according to David Hine, president of the Canberra E-scooter Club which is made up of private scooter owners.
An inner-city council in Melbourne has just banned Lime e-bikes. The ACT government said it was "aware of the City of Yarra's decision regarding Lime's shared e-bike scheme in Melbourne."
"The circumstances in Yarra are specific to that council and its contractual arrangements with the operator," the government said.
It said that Lime's permit in Canberra required the company "to address devices left in dangerous or sensitive locations within two hours, and other improperly parked, tipped-over or faulty devices within 24 to 48 hours, depending on the circumstances".
But Mr Hine thought the ACT government should have been tougher.
"I think the ACT government should have carefully monitored and restricted the bikes," he said.
"Lime bikes are a lot heavier than scooters and if a pedestrian has a collision with one, then you're in trouble. Their acceleration is amazing over the first five metres. We are going to have fatalities here."
Mr Hine said he had met with ACT government officials to offer advice "but nothing has happened". He felt that the government had let Lime "do whatever they like".
He was speaking after the City of Yarra ended its six-year Lime bike trial.
"There are two issues here," the Yarra deputy mayor was quoted as saying: "Shared e-bike users who refuse to follow the rules and show no consideration for others, and an operator which has demonstrated it cannot or will not manage its operations so that the community members are safe on Yarra streets."
Mr Hine said he had witnessed how Lime bike riders rode in Melbourne. "It was just out of control. Everywhere you looked, there were bikes, strewn across footpaths, in alleys. It was a total mess."
He said a similar situation was developing in Canberra.
Part of the problem in the ACT, he feels, are 18-to-25-year-olds who "cannot ride sensibly". He recommended that "rangers" be appointed to police Canberra streets. There should be hefty fines.
He also suggested a curfew so bikes couldn't be hired between midnight and 6am.
Mr Hine said that in Vancouver in Canada, shared bikes had to be parked in docking stations, so people who just dumped them anywhere would be charged hefty sums.
It got the contract to run both e-scooters and electric bikes in Canberra in March with a start-date in April. From 2020 until then, only e-scooters were for hire, under two contracts, one with Neuron and the other with Beam.
Beam was kicked out after it emerged that it had been running more scooters than it had registered with the ACT government, so depriving the public purse of revenue.
E-scooters have not always been popular in Canberra.
In 2023, The Canberra Times reported that a study of injuries taken to Canberra Hospital found there were 623 hospital presentations from the mobility devices over 15 months, in which some 17 per cent of riders required surgical procedures.
It's too early to say whether the introduction of e-bikes has changed the calculation.
