‘Taking the mickey’: Inner-city council tears up e-bike deal

An inner-city council has torn up a deal with Melbourne’s biggest e-bike operator, resolving to rip them from the streets as the company “takes the mickey” out of ratepayers.

Yarra City Council on Tuesday night voted to terminate an almost six-year trial with Lime e-bikes, blasting the operator’s refusal to punish riders who dump bikes, ride drunk or travel on footpaths.

Lime was the only company to apply for a permanent continuation of the scheme through a tender process, which the council shut down, preferring no scheme at all.

Since Lime’s e-bikes hit the streets in late 2020, the company has made roughly $2.5 million from local trips – while the council didn’t see a cent mayor Stephen Jolly said. There were e-bikes littered “all over the joint”, while the company relied on concerns about climate change as a smokescreen for its lax behaviour.

“We’re this progressive council, so they think they can get away with it,” Jolly told Tuesday’s council meeting.

“With all their money, they can go, ‘well, we’re just going to offer you a second-class product, we’re not going to police our customers’.

“They’re actually taking the mickey.”

Residents argued that environmental impacts and transport benefits – particularly for those aged under 35, the average age of a local Lime bike rider – outweighed the pitfalls of the scheme, which could be offset by more cycle-friendly streets.

Streets Alive Yarra president Jeremy Lawrence suggested that if bike parking on local footpaths was the issue, on-street bike corrals could be added to every street in Yarra, “just as there’s a car park in every street”. The council was already propping up multinational oil companies by encouraging people to drive and use fuel, he said.

“Right now, council offers three-quarters of its on-street car parks free,” Lawrence told the meeting.

“Instead, council should be charging people a reasonable fee to park all day, such as the same fee for a daily public transport ticket, and using a small fraction of that revenue to build an on-street parking corral on every street for bikes, either private bikes or shared bikes.”

Since the e-bike trial began in the area, Lime recorded more than 425,000 local trips, council officers reported. That equated to about 201 trips each day, with an average distance of 1.6km travelled.

Councillor Evangeline Aston said the figures suggested more than 99 per cent of the local 100,000-person population in Yarra didn’t use e-bikes, and the average ride was saving “733 quintillions of a per cent of our emissions”.

“Two hundred and one trips per day is not going to save the planet, and it never will,” Aston said.

Council officers argued against awarding the contract to Lime, claiming the company was plagued by existing issues alongside weak or non-compliance in “key operational, data security and financial areas”.

The council hasn’t ruled out a future shared e-bike scheme if another operator is interested. A spokesman for Lime said the company was disappointed by the decision, which was an “entirely unnecessary disruption to the e-bike network across Melbourne”.

“Shared, affordable and active transport is more important now than ever before and investments are being made every day to improve access in other cities across Australia,” the Lime spokesman told The Age.

Nearby councils are taking differing approaches to the technology. Darebin Council will evaluate its Lime e-bike trial in August, while Port Phillip Council in March decided to put its own scheme to market. The City of Melbourne is due to consider making shared e-bikes permanent this year.

Merri-bek put its plans for permanent shared e-bikes on hold in April, saying the lack of a coordinated, cross-council scheme exposed it to more risk.

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