Interview conducted for LBC News, played on 18th March 2026 Breakfast Show with Simon Conway.
E-bike rental firm Lime has told LBC News that it’s trying to attract women and older riders to its service.
It’s rolling out a new design in London, Nottingham and Milton Keynes — intended to ensure more bikes are in a “usable condition”.
The firm’s also insisted it’s working on improving safety — following concerns about injuries and anti-social behaviour.
Lime’s chief technology officer is Jon Jenkins:
“The overall goal of Lime Bike is to gain more ridership throughout the United Kingdom, and this vehicle will enable a bigger audience to ride micromobility than ever before. Specifically, we focused on inclusivity, and so expanding the ridership to demographics that maybe weren’t using micromobility so much before— women, older riders, etc. And we’ve done that through a number of features that we can talk about.
“And then finally, there’s a bunch of just tech improvements on the bike. We’ve definitely focused on maintainability as a key aspect of this vehicle, uh, from minimizing the number of unique parts on the bike to making sure that, uh, we’ve instrumented the bike so that we know when it needs maintenance. This is our most instrumented vehicle ever, so we know generally when the vehicle needs to have something done to it to bring it back into a usable condition, so I think you’ll be pleased with it.”
Asked whether Lime were doing enough to prevent people from running red lights and riding irresponsibly:
“Rider behavior is really important to us. It’s one of the reasons that we’ve invested in campaigns like Respect the Red to try and get people to stop running red lights. But you’ll see red light running behavior kind of is independent of what type of bike they’re running. We want people to behave responsibly because responsible behavior encourages the use of micromobility overall.”
More of my work from LBC:
