On a warm Saturday afternoon in west London, Theo thought he had found the perfect shortcut home to avoid waiting for the bus from Paddington station.
Minutes later, he was lying on the pavement in agony – not a victim of a traffic accident but of the electric bike he’d hired for £1.
‘I was hurtling down what I thought was an empty and quiet residential road,’ he told the Mail. ‘I could hardly see the scooter when it pulled out from the corner of my eye just ahead and I panicked.’
Theo, 27, grabbed the brakes and tried to swerve. He remembers skidding along the road then toppling to the ground, followed by a searing pain as the neon-green Lime bike – all 86lb of it – landed on his legs.
Residents heard the crash and called for help, after which Theo was ‘hauled into an ambulance and taken to St Mary’s Hospital. After many painful hours and scans, it emerged I had fractured my tibia’.
This particular injury – now popularly referred to as ‘Lime bike leg’ – is among dozens of serious traumas being linked to a surge in e-bike use across the capital and beyond, as the green revolution sweeps towns and cities from Cambridge, Manchester and Milton Keynes to Nottingham, Slough, Liverpool and Derby.
What initially began as an initiative for clean, convenient transport has become, for a growing number of users, a one-way trip to A&E.
In orthopaedic wards across London, surgeons are seeing an increase in otherwise healthy young people arriving in emergency units with tibia and femur fractures, mangled knees and crushed wrists.
Olivia, who was riding a lime bike when she was knocked over by a truck
It has become such an epidemic that Jaison Patel, a trauma and orthopaedic knee consultant at one of London’s biggest trauma centres, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, is analysing the sharp rise of injuries linked to e-bikes.
‘E-bike injuries are in general very common now – we are seeing them on a daily basis,’ he says.
‘I see broken bones, wrist fractures, collarbones, femur and a few tibia fractures as well as open fractures (when the bone has come through the skin). It definitely feels like an upward trend – a lot of my colleagues have mentioned that they too have seen an increase.’
‘It’s partially because of the weight of the bike and the speed that you go at.’
Due to a weighty motor and battery, an e-bike is four times heavier than a standard bicycle – and with a top speed of around 15mph, this can be a lethal combination in a crash. ‘We have treated young people with bones that shouldn’t ordinarily be breaking… It’s the stuff that you see in high-energy injuries, like motorcyclists going at a fast speed,’ Mr Patel says.
It is often the limbs that bear the brunt of injuries, as instinct prioritises protection of the spine and head when experiencing physical trauma.
Mr Patel added: ‘The femur is one of the largest and strongest bones in the body, so they take a lot of force to break in a young patient.
‘And yet we are seeing cases caused by e-bikes… and it takes months to recover. I always say to patients that you can’t ever say that you’ll be completely back to normal again.’
Between 2019 and 2023, 12 million trips were taken on Lime bikes in England – but that has rocketed to more than 16 million journeys taken by Londoners alone in 2024
Theo’s recovery after surgery on his right leg took six weeks of walking with crutches. ‘I wore a knee brace for months,’ he said, adding: ‘I am absolutely never going on one of those [e-bikes] ever again.’
There an estimated 50,000 of these vehicles in London, belonging to different providers. Between 2019 and 2023, 12 million trips were taken on Lime bikes in England – but that has rocketed to more than 16 million journeys taken by Londoners alone in 2024.
Between April 27 and May 3 this year, the company saw 96 per cent more trips in the capital compared with the same time in 2024.
The first large-scale rollout of ‘ride-per-minute’ cycles was the ‘Boris bike’ or Santander scheme introduced to the capital in 2010 – although these weren’t electric. Over the next few years, e-bikes started appearing on London streets.
The idea was that users could hire a bike from a docking station using an app – and then park it at another. Since then, other ‘dockless’ hiring schemes – meaning you can park on the pavement – have popped up in the capital. Among them are the Swedish firm Voi, London-based Forest and Lime – which operates in 30 countries.
This year, an investigation by news publication London Centric proposed that ‘Lime bike leg’ is caused by the construction of the bikes, where the frames curve to a single point.
Alex, who ‘shattered’ his femur on a Lime bike, told the outlet: ‘The only way that I can understand it having happened is that the central strut acted as a fulcrum over which the bone was snapped on the road. I don’t think for a minute that the injury would have happened on a normal bicycle.’
The investigation cited three instances where Lime users were left with ‘severe leg breaks’ after being pinned under the bike.
Jaison Patel, a trauma and orthopaedic knee consultant at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, is analysing the sharp rise of injuries linked to e-bikes
This month, Normal People star Sebastian de Souza, 32, praised doctors for their treatment of his ‘mangled knee’ after a similar incident. ‘I had a tibial plateau fracture (more commonly known as Lime bike leg) and needed an operation,’ the actor said on Instagram, posting photos from a fortnight spent in hospital.
Online forums such as Reddit and community website NextDoor are filled with anecdotes of similar injuries. Critics say the e-bike expansion will lead to an even greater decline in the quality of vehicles – and therefore their safety – across all the companies.
Mr Patel explains: ‘There have been patients that have had issues with brakes not working on the bikes – so I think maintenance is an issue.’
Lime employs 250 people to patrol the streets, repair its bikes and retrieve them. Forest has a team of 12 ‘guardians’ who are also paid to look after its fleet. Despite this, many e-bikes in London have missing pedals, broken or stolen seats and faulty brakes.
Olivia, 22, was riding a Lime bike in London when she collided with another Lime user after they struggled to stop due to dodgy brakes. ‘I was thrown over the handlebars because of the impact and ended up on the floor with what felt like a truck on top of me. The speed at which I was bashed into was so intense and it would not have been possible on a normal bike,’ she said. ‘The inability to quickly respond and brake easily is a major problem with Lime bikes.’
The bike trapped her leg and caused painful bruising, and she also broke a wrist – ‘thank God there was a medic nearby’, she told the Mail.
Grace, 22, described setting off on an e-bike down a busy high street with a jammed seat that was too high, only to look down and realise there was only one pedal. ‘The realisation set in, not only that I couldn’t reach the floor because I was too high up and stuck – but I had no means to pedal properly and had to veer into a nearby curb to stop.’
‘It was dreadful,’ she added. ‘I ended up in A&E for fracturing my wrist as I put it out to brace myself when I fell.’
It is no wonder that critics of e-bikes echo London mayor Sadiq Khan when he described the situation as a ‘Wild West’.
With charges based on time (£1 to unlock the vehicle and 29p per minute for a Lime bike), there’s every incentive to cut corners: it pays to run red lights, skip traffic by riding on pavements and weave through cars – sometimes even after a pint or two, since there are minimal restrictions on using an e-bike when drunk.
For pedestrians, this means navigating increasingly hazardous streets. The hum of an e-bike can be drowned out by noisy roads, making it easy to step unknowingly into a rider’s path.
Pavements, meanwhile, are littered with abandoned bikes.
Dame Joan Collins, 92, last week posted a photo of dozens of Lime bikes blocking a walkway. The actress wrote: ‘Shocked about the loutish behaviour of Lime bicycle users, pavements are for pedestrians.’
Meanwhile, e-bike regulations remain fragmented across the city. All 32 boroughs, and the City of London, each set different policies surrounding the vehicles.
Some allow ‘free float’ parking anywhere, while others designate specific bays. Westminster, home to the highest number of e-bike hires globally (with 630,000 trips every month), has installed 360 parking zones. TfL has started fining dockless bike companies for improper parking. Lime and Forest have paid £30,000 in penalties since January.
For its part, Lime has pledged a £20 million London Action Plan to focus on safer streets in the capital. A spokesman said: ‘Our thoughts are with those impacted by these incidents and we wish them a full recovery. Safety is our number one priority and informs everything we do at Lime – from how we design and maintain our vehicles, to our rider education, and how we work with cities.
‘Lime’s strong safety record in London shows 99.99 per cent of trips taken last year ended without a reported incident. Lime has not identified any trend relating to leg injuries among Lime riders in the UK.’
Voi UK general manager James Bolton said: ‘Safety is our number one priority. We’ve significantly invested in vehicle design, which has led to just 0.0002 per cent of e-bike rides ending in injury, a rate similar to pedal bikes.
‘We conduct thorough maintenance checks on our e-bikes and implement a wide range of measures to keep our riders safe, including our free Ride Safe Academy to educate our users.’
Another operator is gearing up to launch in the capital this summer, set to add thousands more bikes to London’s roads.
Bolt – familiar to Londoners for its taxi hire service and which operates Europe’s largest scooter and e-bike fleet – will be joining the hordes.
So, for all the close shaves, hospital admissions and warnings, it seems that the e-bike ‘revolution’ isn’t slowing down any time soon.
Which leaves us with the troubling question: what will it take for e-bike fanatics to wake up to the danger?
