Lime bikes keep breaking Londoners' legs
They've become one of the fastest-growing ways of getting around the capital. But do the popular hire e-bikes have a design flaw? London Centric investigates.
If you want to see the benefit of investing in proper local journalism, just look at what happened to London Centric’s story last week. After talking to sources in London’s youth work community, we learned that London’s councils were preparing for the possibility that the Marcus Rashford-backed Holiday Food and Activities programme could be axed by ministers.
The Labour government would not confirm whether it would maintain funding for the scheme, which provides free food to tens of thousands of the poorest schoolchildren in London (and across the country) during the school holidays.
Journalists at national newspapers read the story and began digging into it further, with the Observer leading the pack. Just as they were about to publish, the government, potentially realising what a mess this could become, changed its tune and said the holiday food scheme would be exempt from the forthcoming spending review. One person involved in distributing the meals got in touch to say “I can’t tell you much this helps keeping people fed this year”.
All of this was only possible for two reasons: First, the financial support from readers that gives London Centric the freedom to spend time talking to sources and digging up original stories. And secondly, a commitment to only publishing news when it’s ready — rather than chasing clicks and filling up your inbox with unnecessary mail.
If you want to sign up as a member and support a new type of local journalism for the capital, please click here. You can join for 25% off here — meaning a year’s subscription is just £59 — or test the waters before you buy with a free trial.
Today, you can read another major investigation that’s taken months of reporting.
Got a story that needs looking into? Get in touch with London Centric over email or WhatsApp.
London Centric investigates: Lime bikes keep breaking Londoners’ legs.
The last thing Alex remembers before his leg shattered on the London street was trying to apply the brakes on his Lime bike. It was last July and the 30-year-old was cycling to work near Liverpool Street station in the City of London when a pedestrian stepped out into the road ahead of him.
Alex, a regular Lime bike user who commuted on the rental e-bikes every day, judged that he had plenty of distance to stop in time. He pulled hard on the brake levers but he says they did not respond and the Lime bike “just carried on”.
Lacking any other option, he swerved to try and avoid a collision with the pedestrian before falling sideways, with the Lime bike landing on top of him.
At first Alex thought he was simply dazed and bruised. Then the pain hit him. The Lime bike’s central strut, a single bar of curved metal which holds the e-bike’s chunky rechargeable battery in place, had smashed against his leg and crushed his bone with enormous force against the road.
Initially judged a non-urgent case by the ambulance service, Alex lay on the street for an hour in excruciating pain while waiting to be taken to hospital. Security guards from the nearby Crédit Agricole bank looked after him, putting up screens around him and providing him with water. When paramedics first arrived they thought Alex had a sprain. It was only when he was x-rayed in hospital it was revealed that the femur — the upper leg bone — on his right leg was “just shattered into pieces”.
Alex was asked by a doctor how he had achieved such a severe injury as a cyclist: “The doctor said this is the sort of accident that comes from motorbikes, this is not a bicycle accident. He couldn’t believe the logistics of how I got there.”
The following day he was operated on, with a metal bar pinned into his leg. Following months of recuperation, Alex is able to walk again. But he will spend the rest of his life with extensive metalwork inside his body. One large pin links his hip and his knee as a result of the Lime bike injury. He narrowly avoided severing the femoral artery: “My consultant said this is an injury that in other situations might kill people.”
The bigger question is whether Alex’s injury was a freak moment of bad luck or part of a wider safety issue with Lime’s rental e-bikes, which have become ubiquitous across the capital in recent years.
Alex has spent an extensive amount of time trying to understand how he broke his leg so badly on that day in the City of London. His suspicions have focussed on the design of the Lime bike, where the centre of the bike’s frame curves to a single point: “The only way that I can understand it having happened is that the central strut acted as a fulcrum over which the bone was snapped on the road. I don’t think for a minute that the injury would have happened on a normal bicycle.”
London Centric has spoken to three Londoners who, in recent months, have received severe leg breaks after falling off Lime bikes and having their bones shattered. All had similar stories they wanted to share as a warning to others. All of the incidents happened during the daytime. None of the individuals involved had been drinking. All three had concerns about the maintenance of the brakes on Lime bikes. They also all felt that the design, weight and speed of the e-bikes used by Lime can transform what should be relatively minor falls into life-changing injuries.
One individual who spoke to London centric said that during their extended stay at an inner London hospital with a broken leg, staff breezily asked “Lime bike?” after seeing so many riders were presenting themselves with similar injuries.
Another person who suffered a serious leg injury said that when they went into A&E at University College Hospital at midday the doctor said it was “fourth broken bone that he’d seen that morning from Lime bike accidents”.
A spokesperson for Lime said regularly maintain their bikes: “We are saddened to hear about these unfortunate incidents and we wish these riders a swift recovery. At Lime, safety is our highest priority. It guides how we design and maintain our vehicles, how we develop technology and educational materials to encourage safe riding, and how we work with cities to provide safe riding environments. Lime’s strong safety record in London has resulted in 99.99% of trips ending without a reported incident.”
Despite this, a leading London surgeon who specialises in knee reconstruction has told London Centric that he has seen a “big increase in Lime-bike related injuries” arriving on his operating table.
Mr Jaison Patel is a consultant trauma and orthopaedic surgeon at Barts NHS Trust and Align Orthopaedics. He was the doctor who helped put Alex’s leg back together — and he set out to London Centric his concerns about the safety of the rental vehicles which have become the go-to method of transport for hundreds of thousands of Londoners.
Special offer: If you want to keep reading, sign up as a member and support a new type of local journalism for the capital you can join for 25% off here — meaning a year’s subscription is just £59 — or test the waters before you buy with a free trial.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to London Centric to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.