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.
