I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but rental electric bicycles are becoming a bit of a scourge in London. Unlike the old Boris bikes (can we still call them that?), they do not need to be docked, meaning that they are frequently abandoned on the pavement, to the annoyance of pedestrians.
Neither do they need to be left in designated parking zones, like e-scooters. More infuriatingly, their motors often cut out when you pass from one borough into the next, so they are often dumped on the border. Yes, seriously.
The current Wild West arrangement is damaging the experience for the consumer and hollowing out the market
The reason for this chaos is that while Transport for London (TfL) rules govern e-scooter hire, the e-bike market is so far unregulated. This has allowed a patchwork system to spring up under which different councils will award licences to their favoured companies, such as Dott, Lime or Human Forest.
Once a monopoly has been granted, the competition is killed off by way of ‘geofencing’, meaning that rival e-bikes will go dead as soon as they cross into a different council’s patch. As a result, graveyards of abandoned bikes build up along the boundary line.
For one of the leading e-bike companies, Dott, it has all got too much. Henri Moissinac, its chief executive, told the Evening Standard that he has decided to pull out of the London market altogether, shipping off his fleet of 2,500 e-bikes to Paris and Rome.
‘Almost every ride in central London would lead to a complaint [due to geofencing],’ he said. ‘The negative impact was so big for us we had to stop.’ He added: ‘London is the only place where you have two modes side by side – one regulated by TfL, the e-scooters, and the other that is totally out of control, that is the e-bike.’
Many people will agree that we live in an age, and in a country, that is prone to over-regulation. From officious health and safety red tape to the thicket of insurmountable rules governing farming, this can have a stifling effect on industry and suck the creativity out of entrepreneurship. Yet there are times when more regulations are needed.
In recent years, as electric technology has improved, officials have become increasingly concerned at the proliferation of battery-powered ‘micro-mobility’ devices in use across Britain’s cities, particularly in London.
Private e-scooters, e-skateboard, e-bikes and e-unicycles are becoming an increasingly common sight. Yet they exist in legal limbo land. None of them can legally be used on the pavement, and only rental e-scooters are legal to ride on the road. The enforcement of these laws, however, is patchy, and awareness of them patchier still.
As a result, these devices are not as safe as they should be. Between June 2021 and April this year, more than 2.25 million trips were made in London’s city-wide e-scooter rental trial. Twenty-five serious injuries were reported in that time, and no fatalities. (Rental e-scooters are limited to 12.5mph, unlike private e-scooters.)
When private e-scooters are included, however, the casualty rate is much higher. Between June 2021 and June 2022, there were 1,437 injuries nationwide, including 12 fatalities, 11 of which were e-scooter riders and one of which was a pedestrian.
As one of the most popular new methods of transport, e-bikes need regulation most urgently. In April, TfL chiefs called for them to be subjected to the same sort of rules that are currently applied to e-scooters.
Thomas Ableman, Director of Strategy and Innovation at TfL, said: ‘Where we would like to get to is a situation where the lessons we have learned from the e-scooter trial, to make it non-invasive and safe, can be applied to the e-bike market.’
As counter-intuitive as it may be to call for more red tape, Abelman is right. The current Wild West arrangement for e-bikes in London is damaging the experience for the consumer and hollowing out the market.
Yet any new regulations must be drawn up with great care. A balance must be struck between preserving liberty and innovation on the one hand, while maintaining safety standards and healthy competition on the other.
As challenging as this task is, it needs to be taken on as a priority. If it is neglected, or conducted badly, the flight of Dott to the Continent will be a harbinger of things to come.
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