The Curse of the Electric Bicycle

I was walking back from the park this morning with my wife – and one of our dogs – when we saw what is becoming an increasingly common sight on the streets of London: a grown adult man hurtling towards us on a scooter as fast as his little legs could propel him. I suppose I vaguely thought he would take some kind of evasive action but he didn’t, instead delivering my wife a substantial clip on the arm with his shoulder. This caused her to expostulate – she said ‘Ouch!’ or something quite similar – and I suppose I expected the man to apologise but instead he shouted something rude and continued on his merry way.

I’m normally mild mannered but this kind of behaviour sends my anger level from 0-60 in nanoseconds so I chased after him (we’d been running in the park and I was in my sporty gear) causing him to come to a halt. He was a small fellow, maybe 5’6″, and probably 5-10 years older than me, smartly dressed for his scootering excursion in polo shirt and shorts and with the deep tan of a leisured English retiree. I asked him what he thought he was doing and we had an angry exchange about whether he had a right to plough into women whilst riding his scooter on the pavement. He said yes; me no. My wife had become concerned that I might make him eat the scooter or insert it into another orifice so I left it at that and we continued home, with Scooterman continuing to tell us both to fuck off, etc etc etc.

No lasting damage was done to the lovely Mrs Weale and in retrospect it was quite funny but this incident is yet another example of what is becoming a real problem in London: inconsiderate, inappropriate and frankly dangerous use of bicycles and scooters, and even more so their electric powered equivalents.

I’ve been a committed cyclist in London since my teens in the 1980s. It’s easily the best way of getting around the centre of town, especially when the weather is good, and in 45 years of doing it I’ve only had one serious accident, which ironically took place on a cycle path in Hyde Park. Consequently, I’m all for other people doing the same. It’s better for the environment, and it helps keep people fit. Great.

Except that in the last couple of years it’s become a bit more complicated, and it’s all thanks to electric bikes and scooters.

There are several problems with them:

1. They go quite fast. The ‘street legal’ ones are supposedly limited to 15mph which doesn’t sound much but actually is. Some of the illegal bikes are going at least twice as fast. My Garmin tells me that my average speed around town on my bike is about 9mph.
2. They are often ridden by people with very little experience of cycling in a big busy city or of British roads. By the look of them, many riders – often tourists – are barely familiar with bicycle riding at all. In practice, I’ve been at busy junctions on my bike or in my car and watched Lime and Forest bike riders coming from all directions, ignoring red lights and pedestrian crossings or stopping in the middle of traffic. The most terrifying experience of my life, notwithstanding the various war zones I’ve been in, has been driving in Nairobi*. There are parts of Central London which now offer a very similar experience.
3. They get ridden on – and dumped on – any convenient pavement. It is now a common experience on busy London streets to have to jump out of the way because some selfish dickhead wants to cycle a Lime bike along the pavement rather than on the road. I suspect that a lot of the people who do this do it because they aren’t confident about riding in traffic which really should be telling them something. Bikes dumped on pavements aren’t just unsightly, they render the streets unsafe for the disabled: the blind, wheelchair users and others.
4. And finally, delivery riders. These fuckers chaps are ubiquitous, exhibiting all the worst attributes of the riders already described and more. The ones on hacked electric bikes are bad enough: all over the road as they race to meet delivery deadlines; the ones on petrol scooters riding on L plates are even worse. One such did £4K worth of damage to our car, tailgating my wife as she drove in a 20mph zone and failing to stop in time when someone stepped on a zebra crossing in front of of her. Not surprisingly, it didn’t stop him high-tailing it in the opposite direction. How many of these people actually have insurance? Using a scooter for business purposes on L plates? Really??

So that’s the rant. What’s to be done? How about:

1. Banning electric bicycles and scooters as hire vehicles. Letting the inexperienced just clamber on and go is going to lead to increasing carnage on London’s roads. Human powered rental bikes – what we used to call ‘Boris Bikes’ but are now Santander Cycles – are fine.
2. Enforce some of the rules around cycling. It never happened to me but, for example, I know people who’ve been fined quite chunky amounts for riding on the pavement etc. There were places the Met and City Police used to lurk to catch people doing it: let’s get back to that.
3. Local Authorities to confiscate and scrap hire bikes dumped on random pavements (some London LAs are already doing this).
4. Police to confiscate and scrap ‘illegal’ e-bikes and scooters (to be fair, some of this is also happening).
5. ‘Illegal’ e-bikes etc to be legalised by registration, and riders to pass a motorcycle test and have insurance.
6. Ban on delivery riders doing business deliveries on motorised (electric or petrol) bikes and scooters without a full licence and insurance.

And of course the big improvement would come from well-planned cycling infrastructure. Where I live, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, there isn’t any of any value. On the main roads they’ve painted some lines here and there but that is no substitute for physical segregation of cycles and motor vehicles and that’s what needs to happen to prevent more deaths and make the roads safer for everybody. But don’t hold your breath.

*I’m not joking!