Joan Collins is right, e-bikes are wrecking our cities

Telegraph

5 days ago

I am to the e-biker what the black taxi driver is to the cyclist. Full of contempt, that is. As I bomb around the capital on my bicycle, I occasionally catch the eye of a cabbie. Invariably it's a look of 'Right, you and me outside. Now.' I scarper off down an alley before the situation develops. Except that now, surely, their objects of ire should be the same as mine and we should come together in union against the wretched e-bikes.
Because they are now everywhere and they travel like the clappers. And this week has to be a turning point for their fate because they've annoyed Joan Collins. 'I've recently been almost run over twice by Lime bikes,' she records in The Spectator. She also writes of 'the proliferation of rental bikes and powered scooters that litter our pavements'.
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She has London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan firmly in her sights, saying that the capital is being 'destroyed by [his] insidious antics' and he'd better be afraid. Collins, a national treasure, born in 1933 and carved into our national conscience as the title of her 1979 film The Bitch, won't let this lie.
Neither will I, and neither will her fellow actor Robert Powell, who famously played Christ in a 1970s TV mini-series. So incensed is he at rental e-bikes cluttering his doorstep that he has, so far, sent 570 images to Camden Council. He once counted 100 bikes scattered around and obstructing access to his front door.
This is by no means just a London problem. E-bike rentals are a disease spreading to towns and cities across the country. From Belfast to Liverpool, Cardiff to Stirling, Cheltenham to Leicester. And they are spread with the similarly deluded green and zealous mantra of wind turbines. The promise is of freedom, of earnest fuel-free travel and of convenience.
Needless to say, most of them are made in China and such is their mass production that they have a short life-span, of some two years. They are often cheaper to repurchase than repair, have toxic lithium batteries and pollute the landscape.
It astonished me when I first came across them in Paris a few years ago. It was bad enough seeing them lined up at their official stations, hogging pavements and destroying the line of the French capital's handsome boulevards and buildings. As technology improved, they were then – deliberately – left scattered across the city.
But rather than learn from this horrific pioneering catastrophe, London willed them in. And the joy of the Lime bike being that you find the closest-dumped one on your app and then discard it where it pleases you, our capital has similarly begun to fester with these ugly, hideously coloured eyesores.
Morning in our towns and cities is the worst time for these beasts. Before vans can arrive to pick them up from centralised locations to take them off to be recharged, a fleet of wretched souls gather them. They are then deposited en masse, for example outside Robert Powell's house, or clustering around traditional bicycle racks that I use.
And when they're not polluting the view, left on their sides like garbage, their users, often seemingly enslaved delivery folk forced to speed to meet the demands of their greedy gangmasters, clog up and pelt along cycle lanes.
Those are my lanes, my safe routes for my manual, old-school, fitness-inducing bike. E-bikes are motorbikes and should stay on the main roads with the rest of the motorised traffic. Every time one passes me, I swear under my breath at the rider, who's wearing no helmet and whizzing along looking at their phone.
Well, e-bikers had best be afraid, because there's a gruesome threesome on their case now. Me, The Bitch and Jesus.