Be an urban hero – report a Lime bike
Discarded Lime bikes are littering London’s public realm and menacing wheelchair users, pram-pushers and the blind. There is a simple solution, says Phoebe Arslanagic-Little
Can there be any Londoner yet to be inconvenienced by an abandoned Lime bike? We want to get to work. We need to go to the shops. But improperly parked Lime bikes turn ordinary activities into an urban obstacle course.
I say ‘parked’, but often these big-boned e-bikes lie discarded on their sides in the middle of the pavement, like wounded animals. They are an irritation to us all. They are a serious menace to wheelchair users, pram pushers and the blind. One friend, struggling to open his front door one morning, found that a Lime bike had actually been parked directly against it.
A typical road bike weighs about 8kg. A Lime bike weighs 35kg. And in addition to making the bikes devilishly difficult to shift, the weight is responsible for what the Londoncentric newsletter reports orthopaedic surgeons are calling ‘Lime bike-leg’. This term describes what can sometimes happen when a Lime bike falls onto its rider in a crash and shatters bones.
Social norms don’t maintain themselves
London’s Lime bike-strewn spaces remind me of a line written by my friend Ellen Pasternack in an article defending ‘Karens’. Describing her heroic battle to restore order by asking people playing music out loud on the tube to use headphones, she wrote “social norms don’t maintain themselves”. ‘Karen’ is a pejorative term usually levelled at middle-class women perceived as not minding their own business. But like many others, I am now convinced that it is incumbent upon all of us to uphold the norms that keep public spaces, from parks and buses to libraries and trains, agreeable and useable.
During pregnancy, imagining the London I want my daughter to grow up in, I was full of righteous zealotry and Karen-ed as I never had before. I particularly enjoyed telling off cyclists for going through red lights and prodding young men into helping women carry prams upstairs.
Male friends, perhaps sometimes a little embarrassed by my interventions, tell me that it is easier for a woman than a man to tell a stranger off in public without starting a fight. I am sympathetic to that. But badly parked Lime bikes present the perfect opportunities for all our would-be brother Karens to join the fight for a better public realm at absolutely no risk to their personal safety.
Using the Lime app, you can very easily report an improperly parked bike. Repeat offenders are fined by Lime, though you will be disappointed to learn that the charge maxes out at a mere £20.
You can make everyone’s experience of our city, be they guest or resident, a little bit better
In Postman’s Park in Canada, a short walk from St Paul’s, is the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice. Sparely but movingly, this late-Victorian monument commemorates ordinary people who died saving the lives of others. PC Robert Wright died in 1893 Croydon when he entered a burning house to save a woman. Elizabeth Boxall was killed in 1888 aged just 17 trying to save a child from a runaway horse. A young clergyman, known only to us as G Garnish, drowned in the Thames in his attempt to save the life of a stranger.
The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice is a reminder that some of us are capable of extraordinary acts of heroism. Perhaps uncomfortably, it moves each of us to wonder if we ourselves would be counted among their number if the circumstances arose. But for most of us, the moment to prove ourselves is unlikely to ever arrive.
What you can do, what all of us can do, is to be civic-minded. You can make everyone’s experience of our city, be they guest or resident, a little bit better. You can pick up a discarded coffee cup and put it in the bin. You can help a young mother carry her pram up the stairs. You can report a Lime bike.