How Lime squeezed out the Santander bike

It was a Tuesday morning in late May, and transport secretary Heidi Alexander was going to miss cabinet. Her train hadn’t arrived, and the clock was ticking ever closer to the meeting’s 9.30am starting time. “I could either call an Uber — but I wasn’t entirely sure that I would get through London traffic — or I could jump on a Lime bike. And so that’s what I did,” she recalled at a parliamentary reception a couple of weeks ago.

A cabinet minister essentially endorsing their product was the ultimate PR coup for Lime; one that has come amid months of similar victories for the increasingly ascendant firm. From Timothée Chalamet riding one onto the red carpet at a recent premiere to the England cricket team disembarking their traffic-laden bus and using them to breeze to the Oval cricket ground (with time to spare), Lime has become a behemoth in the capital. In London alone, over 16mn people used a Lime bike during commuter hours in 2024, and 4.3mn different people have used one since they first launched here.

But amidst all the Lime hysteria, it’s easy to forget that until recently, the biggest cycling rental service in London wasn’t green but crimson. 15 years ago, TfL and City Hall launched their own scheme — the Santander Cycle Hire. For over a decade, the bikes were the king of London cycling, the go-to choice for those wanting to nip about the capital on two wheels. But over the past few years, Santander Cycles have been thoroughly deposed by Lime, with its rider numbers stagnating. So where did things go so wrong? The story of how that happened is one of policy failures and technology, infighting and lobbying, and has seen London councils pocketing millions.