Are the tech giant’s bikes a convenient and sustainable form of transport or a menace clogging up pavements?
At about 7am each morning, Ed Wright arrives for his shift as one of Lime’s fleet of van drivers in Bermondsey, south London. At 64, he remains lithe and lively, cycling the seven miles from his Streatham home to Lime’s London warehouse on an ebike. This comes in handy when your job is to heave wounded and lost ebikes found across the capital into your van and replace them with their recently repaired comrades. Sometimes he just switches the batteries.
Lime is to ebike rental as Uber is to taxi service. Founded in San Francisco in 2017, it now operates in more than 230 cities around the world. Of the 30,000 or so rental bikes currently estimated to be on London’s streets, Lime has more than any other company – not just dwarfing fellow ebike companies Human Forest and Tier, but, according to estimates, recently overtaking Santander’s fleet of 12,000 (formerly known as Boris bikes), though Lime does not release figures.
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