The article “How Lime squeezed out the Santander bike” by Andrew Kersley details how Lime, a private e-bike rental company, has rapidly become the dominant bike-sharing service in London, eclipsing the long-standing Santander Cycles (formerly known as TfL’s cycle hire scheme).
Lime has achieved significant public relations successes, including a cabinet minister using one to get to a meeting and celebrities and sports teams opting for Lime bikes to avoid traffic. In 2024 alone, over 16 million trips were made on Lime bikes in London during commuter hours.
This success comes at the expense of Santander Cycles, which, for 15 years, was the premier bike rental option in the capital. The article suggests that Santander Cycles’ decline and Lime’s ascendancy are due to a combination of policy failures, technological differences, internal conflicts, and lobbying efforts, with London councils reportedly benefiting financially from the shift.
Presuming that’s an AI summary, but it only covers the bit that’s not blocked by the paywall. It’s one of those that has the first couple of paragraphs visible and then blocks the remainder, and that’s just summarised those first few paragraphs. The meat of it, where presumably it tells us about the shenanigans from the local councils and the details of the “policy failures and internal conflicts”, remains a mystery.
Paywalled, unfortunately…
The article “How Lime squeezed out the Santander bike” by Andrew Kersley details how Lime, a private e-bike rental company, has rapidly become the dominant bike-sharing service in London, eclipsing the long-standing Santander Cycles (formerly known as TfL’s cycle hire scheme).
Lime has achieved significant public relations successes, including a cabinet minister using one to get to a meeting and celebrities and sports teams opting for Lime bikes to avoid traffic. In 2024 alone, over 16 million trips were made on Lime bikes in London during commuter hours.
This success comes at the expense of Santander Cycles, which, for 15 years, was the premier bike rental option in the capital. The article suggests that Santander Cycles’ decline and Lime’s ascendancy are due to a combination of policy failures, technological differences, internal conflicts, and lobbying efforts, with London councils reportedly benefiting financially from the shift.
Presuming that’s an AI summary, but it only covers the bit that’s not blocked by the paywall. It’s one of those that has the first couple of paragraphs visible and then blocks the remainder, and that’s just summarised those first few paragraphs. The meat of it, where presumably it tells us about the shenanigans from the local councils and the details of the “policy failures and internal conflicts”, remains a mystery.