E-Bike City

Many years ago the city of Leicester, situated in the East Midlands of the UK, proudly announced itself to the world as the first ‘Environment City’. It was a great aspiration but one it never actually lived up to. The only reminders of this aspiration the moss covered, barely readable signs by the roadside at the borders of this faded city.

A few years on, its world profile raised by a football team that won the English Premier League and which remains an unlikely force at the top of the English game, Leicester strikes out on the environmental front again.

Leicester plans to become ‘E-Bike City’ hosting the largest fleet of docked e-bikes in the UK. The plan is for 500 bikes with docking stations located at 50 sites across the city.

The scheme is called Santander Cycles and is a public private partnership with a major part of the funding coming from the UK arm of the huge international banking company Santander. Santander took over the locally based Alliance & Leicester Some years ago. The £600,000 scheme also includes investment from the scheme’s operators Ride On and their partner Enzen Global.

Officially opening on the 14th of April 2021 the scheme has been tested by a group of volunteer riders since January 2021. It will be some months before the scheme reaches it target of having 500 bikes up and running on the streets of Leicester.

In a clearly corporately drafted statement Leicester’s Deputy City Mayor, Counselor Adam Clarke, says that the city is determined “to keep Leicester on track as a cycling city in the wake of coronavirus. Whether you have tried cycling for the first time during lockdown, or you’re already a regular cyclist, these bikes are for you.”

The link between the ‘Santander Cycles Leicester’ scheme and the coronavirus pandemic seems at best weak and at worst exploitative and opportunistic.

A team of Bugbusters, Ride On workers with ‘Ghostbuster’ style backpacks, will patrol the streets and regularly clean down the bikes and docking stations with disinfectant cleaning materials. This job shouldn’t be so onerous as despite the big claims for this scheme only 15 of the heralded 500 bikes are currently available for use. The council say an additional 35 docking stations will be installed and operable in the near future. This is a grand total of 45 just 9% of the promised 500.

One can see the advantages to an international company like Santander having its name plastered all over this scheme, it boosts their environmental credentials and provides cheap publicity.

Riding an e-bike comes with its dangers as celebrity Simon Cowell found out to his cost when he was horrifically injured.

At the moment this scheme with its 15 e-bike docking stations feels more of a damp squib than a big step forward and one wonders at the audacity of Leicester City Council in announcing the scheme with what seems like a massive pat on its own back. A city that has some areas of worse deprivation in Europe might think twice about launching such a scheme. This said an aspiration to reduce levels of air pollution in the city is not a bad thing and one that other cities could do well to look at.

Of course you could buy an e-bike but they are very expensive and many of them are made by the same manufacturers in China and labeled up with different brand names by companies here. It’s a bit of a Wild West market at this time.

Some kits can be bought to transform your ordinary cycle into an e-bike but these are patchy in their effectiveness and unless properly fitted can fall off your bicycle miles away from home leaving you stranded.