Lime to launch e-bike hire in South London

BIKE HIRE

Dockless electric bike hire operator Lime is to launch a trial in the London Borough of Bromley, following on from  launches in the boroughs of Brent and Ealing, and Milton Keynes. 

The Bromley scheme will feature between 200 and 500 bikes and is billed as a 12-month trial.  

Users unlock and lock bikes using a smartphone app, which locates GPS-fitted bikes available for hire. Bikes can be parked at the user’s discretion, although Bromley says parking could be prohibited at some sensitive areas by geo-fencing.

Nigel Davies, Bromley’s executive director of environment and community services, told councillors that the bikes typically required their batteries to be swapped every few days, so the monitoring, collection and redistribution of bikes to hub sites by Lime staff was expected to happen regularly.

“Lime has confirmed that their bikes are attended to on average of one to three times per week,” he said. 

Lime has agreed for bikes causing an obstruction to be removed within two hours of reporting between 0700 and 2100 seven days a week. Any bikes reported outside of these hours will be collected in the morning within two hours.

Bromley will be able to access Lime’s usage data for the following purposes:

• to help analyse traffic and usage patterns 

• in conjunction with other data for planning and other public interest-related initiatives

The data cannot be shared with anyone outside the council except as agreed in advance with Lime. “In particular, this data may not be shared with any third party transit, competitors of Lime or other aggregators (e.g. Citymapper) that are not directly run by the council,” says the memorandum of understanding between Lime and Bromley.