Coming out of Wembley Park tube station, it is hard not be dazzled by the flashy high-rises and looming stadium laden with colourful adverts. Were it not for the B&M in eyeshot, you could mistake the north-west London neighbourhood for a buzzy district in Tokyo or Seoul.
But as you descend down the station stairs, reality quickly sets in. Lime e-bikes, which can be rented through an app and have become ubiquitous in the capital in recent years, are littered everywhere. Some are parked upright but just as many are tossed on their side.
This may not be the case for long. On 31 October, Brent could become the first council in the UK to ban the green two-wheelers.
“Look! That’s what we’re talking about,” says Muhammed Butt, the leader of Brent council, pointing at a cluster of Lime e-bikes scattered by the station.
He has drafted a list of demands that the company must agree to before a potential Halloween ban. These include the introduction of dedicated parking bays, resources to remove incorrectly parked or abandoned bikes and larger fines for users who fail to leave their e-bikes in the correct location.
Butt is not alone in his frustration with the firm. The San Francisco-based company operates in more than 230 cities around the world. In London, there are an estimated 30,000 rental bikes on the city’s streets. Lime owns and operates the majority of them.
A number of councils have already mandated designated in-borough parking bays for e-bikes after mounting complaints that they are abandoned on pavements and roads. Disability and sight-loss charities have said the bikes are making London’s pavements less accessible.
Sour relations between Lime and local authorities have even led to the police getting involved. Last year, Met officers were called to a lock-up in Hammersmith and Fulham after contractors working for Lime snatched back bikes that the council had seized. Lime said the contractors collected the bikes without their permission and were later fired. The council’s leader, Stephen Cowan, later clarified that things had been “sorted”.
In the middle of rush hour in Willesden Green, a leafy high street lined with Middle Eastern restaurants and posh coffee shops, news that the lime-green bikes could soon disappear from the area was welcomed by some.
“I want them rounded up and crushed,” said Pat, who did not want to provide her last name. The 86-year-old, who uses a walking stick, often finds herself dodging e-bikes strewn across the pavement. “Life’s bad enough when you’re getting older and you’re not very steady on your feet without these bikes in your way. Good riddance.”
Heidi, 52, the manager of Daisy Chain florist, which is situated just outside the tube station, said she lugged about 15 of the 32kg bikes – about the same weight as a budget tumble dryer – away from her shopfront each month. “People just dump them with no consideration. People don’t think of other people,” she said.
Even those who use the bikes want to see less of them cluttering up pavements. Jude Umolu, 43, rides a Lime e-bike to and from his home to the tube station in the morning. He supports designated parking stations for the bikes. “It’s convenient having them on the pavement but it’s a health and safety thing. In the morning they’re pretty much everywhere.”
While he does not want them banned, Umolu said he would revert back to walking to the station if they were banished from the borough. “I have coped without them in the past,” he said.
For some, the bikes have become more than just a nuisance. Robert Goodsell, 74, says he often sees children whizzing dangerously up and down pavements and roads on hacked e-bikes. Tutorials on how to break into them are easily available online. Once hacked, the bikes emit a Dalek-like alarm sound, which keeps residents up in the early hours. To stop them from locking down, they must be ridden at speed.
In July, Goodsell’s 77-year-old wife was hit by one while leaving her home. In a video seen by the Guardian, she is struck and knocked back into a hedge by a teenager speeding down a pavement on a Lime e-bike.
Luckily, her injuries were minor. “If she had been as little as two inches further into the road when she was struck, there could have been far more severe consequences,” he said. “The hacked bikes are a danger to those riding them, pedestrians and other road users. Somebody’s going to get killed.”Lime said that hacked bikes accounted for 5% of trips but 40% of complaints at the start of 2023 but since then the fleet has been retrofitted to stop hacking and now it accounts for less than 1% of trips.
Goodsell said his neighbours, some of whom are elderly or disabled, had been unable to leave their homes after the bikes were parked directly outside.
While he wants to see firm action taken over the hacked e-bikes, he is generally in favour of the bikes if regulated. “I do believe that these micro-mobility schemes are the future. If Lime and Brent can get their joint act together, it would be fantastic,” he said.
Other councils have managed to get a handle on Lime, including through the implementation of designated parking areas. Butt says Lime treats outer London boroughs such as Brent as “second-class citizens”. Lime said it is willing to provide data and funding to help get parking locations in place.
Butt is also demanding that the fines Lime charges to users who abandon bikes in unsafe locations are paid to the council. He wants to see the current £10 in-app fine rise to rival the £130 penalty that motorists are charged for parking in the wrong place, to act as a greater deterrent.
Currently, councils cannot fine ride-share e-bikers. Rachel Blake, the MP for Cities of London and Westminster, is lobbying the government to change this. She said: “We need to find powers for local authorities to fine people parking badly and to fine companies.”
Brent council has had £210m cut from its budget over the past 14 years. “We do not have the resources, funding and staff. The amount of dumping that goes on in our parks, streams and rivers. Our staff have to go in and pick them out,” Butt said. “We’re not here to do Lime’s job.”
Butt said Lime wanted to double the number of bikes in the borough from 750 to 1,500, but he said the neighbourhood had had enough. “People have gone sour on Lime.”
A Lime spokesperson said: “We are proud to have worked with our partner councils over the last six years to build a safe and reliable shared e-bike service across London. Local people in Brent and across the capital use our bikes for essential journeys every day, with 11.5m commuting trips already taken this year.
“We recognise that a small proportion of e-bikes are obstructing pavements and busy junctions, creating difficulties for those with access needs, and we understand the importance of keeping our pavements safe for all. We regularly gather feedback from sight loss and disability charities to improve our operations.
“To enforce mandatory parking rules in Brent, we first need the council to build a functional network of parking locations. We can provide data and funding to support this process and regularly gather feedback from Sight Loss Councils and other charities on our disability advisory board to continuously improve our operations.
“We want to work with the council to address these concerns. Banning bikes doesn’t help anyone as we work towards our ambitious active travel and climate goals.”
• This article was amended on 16 September 2024. An earlier version said that Lime said hacked bikes accounted for 5% of trips; this was in 2023 and now, after a retrofit, they account for 1% of trips. Also it said that Met officers were called to a lock-up in Hammersmith and Fulham after Lime hired contractors to snatch back bikes that the council had seized; to clarify, contractors working for Lime snatched back bikes that the council had seized. Lime said the contractors collected the bikes without their permission and were later fired.
