London boroughs seized 2,000 Lime bikes amid safety complaints
Lime Technologies, the UK arm of US-based rental e-bike and e-scooter operator Lime, reported 2025 profits of £4.7m, more than double the £1.7m posted a year earlier, according to accounts filed at Companies House and first reported by the Sunday Times.
Sales rose by a third to £148m as Lime added 4,500 e-bikes and e-scooters to its UK fleet, taking the total to almost 38,000 vehicles. Average monthly riders jumped 31% to approaching 700,000, Lime said, citing expansion into Nottingham in 2023 and Oxford in 2024 alongside its existing presence in London, Milton Keynes and Salford.
The growth follows Lime’s parent, Neutron Holdings, listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange last year at a valuation of $1.7bn (£1.3bn). Uber holds a stake in the company, which Lime chief executive Wayne Ting said at the time of the listing was holding “conversations with lots of other [UK] municipalities” about further expansion. Lime was founded in 2017 in San Francisco and now operates in about 230 cities across 29 countries, mostly in Europe.
Despite the surge in trade, Lime’s UK arm employed just 54 people in 2025, up from 39 the year before. The company relies on self-employed contractors to shift and service its vehicles, a labor arrangement that keeps direct payroll small even as the fleet expands.
London’s transport body estimated in 2024 that one in 10 of the 1.5m daily cycle journeys in the capital are made on dockless e-bikes operated by Lime, Forest and Voi. The Guardian reported that the rental schemes have fueled a surge in cycling in London, helped by the patronage of celebrities such as Timothée Chalamet and most recently Kim Kardashian.
The English devolution bill, passed in April, gives local authorities in England new powers to license rental e-bike operators and to set requirements around parking, safety and accessibility standards.
The expansion has also drawn criticism over safety. Rented bikes were reportedly responsible for almost a third of cyclist collisions with pedestrians that required police intervention. Riders have reported injuries from defective bikes and fractures caused by the weight of the bicycle falling on them, a phenomenon dubbed “Lime bike leg.” Lime said more than 99.99% of Lime trips in London last year ended without a reported incident.
In response to safety criticism, Lime recently began introducing in the UK a new, smaller version of its electric bikes, with batteries repositioned toward the rear wheel. More than 1,500 of the new models are now operating in England.
Charities representing blind residents and people with limited mobility have raised concerns about navigating parts of London amid chaotic pavement parking of rental bikes. London boroughs have seized at least 3,000 e-bikes this year, of which 2,000 were Lime bikes, according to a Guardian investigation.