OPINION
Merseyfail: why Cycling UK is fighting to get e-bike ban reversed
By Duncan Dollimore, Associate Director at Cycling UK. “
A sledgehammer to crack a nut.” That’s how Steve Foulkes, chair of Liverpool City Region’s Transport Committee, described Merseyrail’s decision to ban all non-folding e-bikes from
the entire Merseyrail network, including all 69 train stations, so you can’t even park an e-bike at the station. Mr Foulkes made those comments in a committee meeting, after speaking to some of the 300 people who attended a protest ride against the blanket ban, organised by Cycling UK. An angry-looking bunch of protesters might be easier to dismiss, but when it’s mainly pensioners and people with mobility issues talking about how e-bikes give them freedom and opportunities, it’s hard to ignore. Merseyrail, however, doesn’t seem to have given much thought to the optics. It announced the ban in July, without consulting anyone. No rail user groups, cycling organisations or disability groups. It didn’t bother to inform the City Region Mayor, Steve Rotheram, either, and councils, politicians and other rail operators were completely in the dark. And this affects other rail companies, because someone boarding a Northern Train in Manchester with the e-bike they’re allowed to take on the Northern train can then find themselves leaving the train at Southport, a Merseyrail station where, from January, they could be prosecuted for walking their bike through the station. Merseyrail had dug a hole by failing to engage with
anyone, and it decided to keep digging. For two months, it refused to meet with Cycling UK, and its response to anyone asking questions was that the decision was informed by a detailed safety review of the fire risks from
44 | November 2026
e-bike batteries. Of course, Merseyrail needs to consider fire risks from lithium-ion batteries, but those batteries are in mobile phones, laptops, mobility scooters, vapes and charging units, none of which are banned by Merseyrail. So, Cycling UK and others have repeatedly asked to see the safety review – the same one that the Mayor, politicians, local councils and other train operating companies also haven’t seen. But alas, to date,
it remains a secret. Back in January, the Department for Transport
published its Better Connected strategy. It’s essentially a strategy for integrating transport, in which linking up journeys by bike and journeys by train or bus feature heavily. Integration is also a theme in the transport strategies of the other UK nations, as well as the Liverpool City Region transport plan policy, which Merseyrail’s decision went “completely against,” as Steve Foulkes told the committee. That begs the question as to why Merseyrail set off on this
track, and seems so determined to plough on. Its answer has been that it’s following the lead of other rail operators, only it’s not. Cycling UK has made enquiries with our European colleagues, who couldn’t identify a single operator in mainland Europe that had either introduced or was considering such a ban. In the UK, the only other rail operator that has introduced an e-bike ban is Transport for London. But TfL, with a hugely congested, largely underground network in London, with 113 miles of often deep underground tunnels, and 130 underground stations, is the outlier, not a precedent for predominantly surface- level rail networks.
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