Forwards! To the Lime-bike critical mass singularity

In defence of the most annoying cyclists in London

One of nature’s most majestic sights

I rode 450km around London in April, for no particular reason except the weather was nice, the blossom was stunning, and I like riding my bike. ‘Active travel’ — urbanist jargon for ‘walking and cycling’ — has been completely transformed here in the last decade, thanks to the many demands of Covid, the birth of LTNs, ULEZ, the bike-hire boom, and the long-overdue introduction of passable bike lane infrastructure. This amounts to a big leap forward, and the London that is being left behind is a city where cyclists were being killed by drivers on a monthly basis, where a 9-year-old girl’s death has been officially connected to air pollution, and where everyone else consistently gets a lungful, an earful, an eyesore, and stuck in traffic.

Whether you ride, walk, drive, glide, shimmy or skate, one thing you can’t help but notice about London in 2025 is the proliferation of weaving, bobbing, headphone-wearing, helmet-spurning, oblivious and sometimes drunk Lime bikers. They push precariously through pedestrian crossings, wind their heavy-bottomed steeds around box junctions, and flout red lights and green men with reckless abandon. I am generalising here, but the glut of new fair-weather cyclists are generally speaking a bit less careful, less interested in observing the rules of the road, and less likely to be wearing helmets. They’re all over the shop, and the road, and the place. And this winds people up a LOT.

I have seen this myself while around London and I have been alternately worried or annoyed by it too. I have winced and shrieked ‘watch out!’ through my fingers, as some post-pub student or careless city boy or teenage show-off narrowly avoids getting splatted by the giant armoured hunk of metal descending on them.

Since the first ‘Boris bike’ scheme launched in 2010, London’s hire bike scene has exploded in size. At the current count, the capital now has 12,500 Santander bikes, 10,000 Forest bikes, and (roughly — it’s commercially sensitive) 25-30,000 Lime bikes. You could add to that number the huge influx of private bikes bought during the pandemic, myriad e-scooters and souped-up delivery bikes of various degrees of horsepower — but I want to focus on this huge flotilla of 50,000 hire bicycles.

The surge in availability has seen take-up soaring (London saw 1.26m bike journeys per day in 2023), as Sadiq and TfL finally make the city more pleasant, breathable and safe for the 58% of inner London households that do not have access to a car. But the culture wars taking place around the traffic lights are only getting worse, if the revanchist swearing I hear from behind the dashboard is a guide. Drivers have always hated cyclists (ask a cyclist how often they are spat or sworn at, it is grim), but they really hate hire-bike cyclists.

It’s actually a metaphor

Why the Lime bike swarm is good for everybody’s health and safety

I have a simple argument about why this is all a good thing: it comes back to the basic principle of Critical Mass (on which, I wrote about the 30th anniversary ride here). The sheer weight of numbers of bikes on the road now restrains drivers’ freedom, and compels them to slow down, look more carefully, actually consult their mirrors properly, stop playing with their sodding phones, and give cyclists a properly safe berth as they overtake. Like they are legally obliged to by the Highway Code! I have seen this happen in real time — a driver begins to accelerate fast at the amber light, a Lime-rider zips across diagonally through the red light, the driver brakes, stalls, swears — and then sets off more carefully.

In short, Accidental Lime-Bike Critical Mass (ALBCM) is making our streets safer in general. Bad cyclist behaviour is conditioning bad driver behaviour, for the better. Bad cyclist behaviour is still bad, and undesirable — but only one of those two modes of transport is liable to mow down your gran and give everyone asthma.

As the overwhelmingly right-wing people decrying ‘the war on cars’ won’t be shutting up any time soon, I need everyone else to keep focused: stop worrying about some work-drinks buffoon who is cycling slightly haphazardly, let’s worry about the 2000-kilo jeep behind him. Eyes on the prize: the prize is getting all non-essential motorised vehicles off inner-city streets. We deserve better! We deserve our city streets back — public space that belongs to the whole urban crowd, not just a minority of weirdos in their Chelsea Tractors. (There is more on this in the Urban Crowds chapter of my latest book, Multitudes.)

As a post-script, on the day of the Oxford Vs Cambridge boat race last month, the Socks House Meeting parody-archetype of a Lime-loving, floppy-haired 20something rah descended on Putney en masse. ‘Boat race attendees’ vs ‘Putney residents’ is a Tory deathmatch I wouldn’t even waste my time officiating, but I did enjoy the fact that the “swarm” caused “fury” amongst a few locals, and gave us some very enjoyable photos:

All gambolling off together like spring lambs

Cursed Objects news! Free exhibition and live events

And now, just in case you’ve escaped our blanket advertising so far: a Cursed Objects update! My dear friend and podcast partner Kasia Tee and I launched our first ever exhibition last week, Cursed Objects in Museum Shops. It is an actual, full-room, fully funded, properly curated exhibition; six months in the making, most of that work by Kasia (it’s tied to her day-job as Co-Director of Birkbeck’s Centre for Museum Cultures), and I’m so proud of both her and the finished exhibition. It’s at the Peltz Gallery in Bloomsbury, Mon-Fri, 10am-8pm, until 26 June. We have assembled a truly primo collection of mad, funny, weird, upsetting and occasionally quite cool souvenirs from museum gift shops — with some hopefully thought-provoking analysis attached. Van Gogh bucket hat, anyone? Tank Museum ‘Tanks for being my Valentine’ chocolates? Full exhibition info here.

And following tonight’s Cursed Objects live episode with me and Kasia — which you can still grab a (free!) ticket to, we’ve just moved to a bigger room, the Birkbeck Cinema — there are two more free events you can sign up for. Details here:

Millennium Tat: New Labour and the Neoliberal Gift-Shop - Wed 28 May, 7-8.30pm

Join Dan and Kasia and two special guests - artist Darren Cullen and writer Imogen West-Knights – as they explore the spirit of the millennium via the museum gift shop. New Labour were great proponents of the culture industries, and made admission to the UK’s national museums free in 2001. Did this and grand projects like the Millennium Dome change our relationship with museums? Book your place here.

War, Memory and Tat - Wed 11 June, 7-8.30pm

Join Kasia, Dan and three special guests – historian Dr Charlotte Lydia Riley, author Luke Turner and curator Kate Clements – as they explore the presence of war in the museum shop. What can replica First World War trench whistles and Christmas tree decorations of Winston Churchill tell us about the changing relationship between the museum, its shop, and its visitors? Book your place here.

See you soon!