OPINION
E-bike regulation can and should grow cycling
Stef Lehmann, Head of Government Relations, Lime UK and Ireland P
icking up a bike where and when you need it, cycling uphill without breaking into an unseemly sweat, and leaving the bike at your destination without worrying about it being stolen – all of this
was inconceivable until about 2017. Despite this, shared e-bikes continue to generate no shortage of opinions across the full spectrum of sentiment, to put it politely. Amid all this, the industry has quietly missed
several transformative developments. The genuinely unique uses for shared e-bikes are
significant. Take first- and last-mile journeys. More than four in ten London households have no access to a car or van. Meanwhile, private cars spend the vast majority of their lives parked – a terrible use of the very limited street space we have, but if you have a family, need to transport things or leave town regularly, there can be limited alternatives. Shared e-bikes won’t address all those use cases: you should not (I repeat, please don’t) transport an IKEA flatpack on a Lime bike. And only very hardcore Limers will cycle in a torrential downpour. But people can do some grocery runs, or do cross-neighbourhood and orbital trips that would take disproportionately long by public transport. And we are constantly looking to make our bikes accessible to more types of users, including by introducing child seats and rear cargo units in some markets. The new LimeBike was designed with women and older riders in mind, with a lower step-through frame and lower centre of gravity for easier handling. Now, when bus routes change frequency, or the last bus
has left, people can still get home another way – offering an alternative to walking alone late at night. One in four Londoners lives at least a 15-minute walk from their nearest tube or rail station, according to ONS research – so these first- and last-mile connections can make a big difference to people’s everyday lives. And that’s in London, where public transport is far more available than elsewhere.
50 | November 2026
Replacing car journeys with cycling can also benefit the wider community by helping to lower pollution and congestion. In London, despite the Mayor’s sustained work to clean up the capital’s air, the Government’s latest assessment still found localised breaches of the annual legal limit for nitrogen dioxide in 2025. The shift to cleaner
travel options still has some way to go. Fundamentally, in less than ten years, shared e-bike operators have added a new way to travel around many cities, funded almost exclusively by the private sector. This has contributed to record cycling
levels: London saw 1.5 million daily cycle journey stages in 2025, up 43% on 2019. Our data suggests many of Lime’s London e-bike users combine their trip with public transport. Research by Steer also found that 20% had not cycled before using Lime, while 60% reported cycling more often. All of these benefits sometimes risk being drowned out.
In fact, there are without doubt people who don’t agree with us that shared e-bikes are a net benefit – and that’s in part because of the absence, to date, of a coherent regulatory framework in the UK. It’s our job as operators to continue to improve our
operation to change the minds of all, but the most hardened critics, but what will help in this is clear, citywide regulation of shared services. Demand growth has been huge – but provision has grown in a patchwork, governed by agreements of different types and standards, which are not reflective of the way shared e-bikes are actually used. Riders, of course, do not plan their journeys around council boundaries, nor do they generally know where they are. Different parking requirements and service areas are regularly confusing to users, and in London, parking capacity is increasingly lagging behind demand. We really do believe that the vast majority of our users cycle
responsibly and want to park responsibly. But when there isn’t enough parking capacity in a mandatory parking zone,
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