
Robert Powell is right: we must resist the scourge of e-bikes
Sometimes, he says, 100 bikes have been stashed near his front door and, despite hundreds of messages to the council, nothing changes. Lifting the heavy machines out of the way might kill him off with a heart attack, he fears.
Londoners like me now share Powell's frustrations over the rental e-bike menace. Not all of them end up in parking bays; many are flung across the pavement, regardless of who else – the blind, the disabled – need to pass by. Plenty speed along as fast as a motorbike, yet many users think it's fine to ride them along the pavement at full pelt.
And if you're thinking of a quiet stroll along the Thames, or a canal path or in your local park, forget it. Yesterday, strolling past the riverbank in my local bit of green, I had to jump out of the way as two e-bikes and a scooter rider enjoyed a race. Ordinary cyclists can be no better: on Sunday, walking to catch a Thames ferry, a rider screamed at me: 'Get outta the way!' as he whizzed along the towpath. Bells are apparently so passé.
These scooter and e-riders and cyclists are encouraged as being in the vanguard of progress by both so-called green businesses and local authorities keen to rid cities of cars in the name of combatting climate change. A blind man tripping over a bike dumped in the street? An elderly woman knocked over and bones broken? Do they really matter when we're encouraged to head off by bike into a greener future?
Not, I suspect, to the London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan and his green activist chums running the boroughs. Their focus is on the car and its banishment.
The motorists they probably have in mind for extinction are boy racers and the wealthy owners of gas-guzzlers. But people who would be hit by the clean air ULEZ scheme – or local traffic neighbourhoods or their latest wheeze, School Streets, which rid roads containing schools of cars during pupil drop-off and pick-up time – are very different.
Expanding the ULEZ scheme, which means owners of cars that don't meet emission standards have to pay a charge, has been terrible the local plumbers, electricians and decorators depending on older vans. Now, with the School Street scheme – already in use in 700 neighbourhoods – residents can get a permit, but those same small businesses we rely on can't reach our door at their usual work start time.
And forget needing an early taxi – they won't get through either. As for local traffic neighbourhoods, supposedly designed to stop local rat runs by blocking roads, the people they hurt include women who use their car to keep the family going – taking children to their sports events and dance classes, collecting elderly parents from their shopping trips – and help the neighbourhood by taking a disabled neighbour to their hospital appointment. As to those boy racers: they have found a great solution to more bans on cars. It's the e-bike.
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