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Official UK rain data for 2025
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If push comes to shove, isn't Crumpet an emotional support animal?
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Hi,
was meeting up with a mate to visit the Sir John Soames musem this morning.
For once, I was early, so suggested we meet up at Redemption Roasters,
(I needed to use the bathroom, so RR rather than NBC),
Thanks for the recommendation,
and,
I now know the basis of Redemption Roasters. -
From Jim watersons' London Centric Substack.
If someone knows how to better link to it than 'copy&paste' I'm all ears.Lime bikes keep breaking Londoners' legs
They've become one of the fastest-growing ways of getting around the capital. But do the popular hire e-bikes have a design flaw? London Centric investigates.
Jim Waterson
Jan 23
∙
PaidAlex’s leg following the operation when it was crushed by a rental Lime e-bike. X-Ray supplied to London Centric.
The last thing Alex remembers before his leg shattered on the London street was trying to apply the brakes on his Lime bike. It was last July and the 30-year-old was cycling to work near Liverpool Street station in the City of London when a pedestrian stepped out into the road ahead of him.Alex, a regular Lime bike user who commuted on the rental e-bikes every day, judged that he had plenty of distance to stop in time. He pulled hard on the brake levers but he says they did not respond and the Lime bike “just carried on”.
Lacking any other option, he swerved to try and avoid a collision with the pedestrian before falling sideways, with the Lime bike landing on top of him.
At first Alex thought he was simply dazed and bruised. Then the pain hit him. The Lime bike’s central strut, a single bar of curved metal which holds the e-bike’s chunky rechargeable battery in place, had smashed against his leg and crushed his bone with enormous force against the road.
Lime e-bikes feature a single metal bar across the middle of the vehicle which can cause serious damage when it falls on an individual’s leg.
Initially judged a non-urgent case by the ambulance service, Alex lay on the street for an hour in excruciating pain while waiting to be taken to hospital. Security guards from the nearby Crédit Agricole bank looked after him, putting up screens around him and providing him with water. When paramedics first arrived they thought Alex had a sprain. It was only when he was x-rayed in hospital it was revealed that the femur — the upper leg bone — on his right leg was “just shattered into pieces”.Alex was asked by a doctor how he had achieved such a severe injury as a cyclist: “The doctor said this is the sort of accident that comes from motorbikes, this is not a bicycle accident. He couldn’t believe the logistics of how I got there.”
The following day he was operated on, with a metal bar pinned into his leg. Following months of recuperation, Alex is able to walk again. But he will spend the rest of his life with extensive metalwork inside his body. One large pin links his hip and his knee as a result of the Lime bike injury. He narrowly avoided severing the femoral artery: “My consultant said this is an injury that in other situations might kill people.”
Alex’s knee and femur (upper leg bone) after being pinned back together. X-Ray supplied to London Centric.
The bigger question is whether Alex’s injury was a freak moment of bad luck or part of a wider safety issue with Lime’s rental e-bikes, which have become ubiquitous across the capital in recent years.Alex has spent an extensive amount of time trying to understand how he broke his leg so badly on that day in the City of London. His suspicions have focussed on the design of the Lime bike, where the centre of the bike’s frame curves to a single point: “The only way that I can understand it having happened is that the central strut acted as a fulcrum over which the bone was snapped on the road. I don’t think for a minute that the injury would have happened on a normal bicycle.”
London Centric has spoken to three Londoners who, in recent months, have received severe leg breaks after falling off Lime bikes and having their bones shattered. All had similar stories they wanted to share as a warning to others. All of the incidents happened during the daytime. None of the individuals involved had been drinking. All three had concerns about the maintenance of the brakes on Lime bikes. They also all felt that the design, weight and speed of the e-bikes used by Lime can transform what should be relatively minor falls into life-changing injuries.
One individual who spoke to London centric said that during their extended stay at an inner London hospital with a broken leg, staff breezily asked “Lime bike?” after seeing so many riders were presenting themselves with similar injuries.
Another person who suffered a serious leg injury said that when they went into A&E at University College Hospital at midday the doctor said it was “fourth broken bone that he’d seen that morning from Lime bike accidents”.
A spokesperson for Lime said regularly maintain their bikes: “We are saddened to hear about these unfortunate incidents and we wish these riders a swift recovery. At Lime, safety is our highest priority. It guides how we design and maintain our vehicles, how we develop technology and educational materials to encourage safe riding, and how we work with cities to provide safe riding environments. Lime’s strong safety record in London has resulted in 99.99% of trips ending without a reported incident.”
Despite this, a leading London surgeon who specialises in knee reconstruction has told London Centric that he has seen a “big increase in Lime-bike related injuries” arriving on his operating table.
Mr Jaison Patel is a consultant trauma and orthopaedic surgeon at Barts NHS Trust and Align Orthopaedics. He was the doctor who helped put Alex’s leg back together — and he set out to London Centric his concerns about the safety of the rental vehicles which have become the go-to method of transport for hundreds of thousands of Londoners.
Lime, a San Francisco-based tech company which has raised more than $1 billion from investors including delivery company Uber, is not the only rental e-bike operator in London. But it’s by far the biggest and most popular, swamping rivals such as Forest by flooding the market with tens of thousands of e-bikes. While the negative aspects of bikes blocking pavements has attracted ire, it has also had the positive benefit of introducing vast numbers of Londoners to cycling. “I’ll get a Lime” has become an everyday phrase in the capital. Actor Timothée Chalamet even turned up to the London premiere of A Complete Unknown, his Bob Dylan biopic, on one of their vehicles – and joked afterwards that he had been fined for parking it in the wrong place.
Timothée Chalamet, with both legs intact, riding a Lime bike
In many countries it has been e-scooters which have become Lime’s main offering but these remain heavily regulated in the UK. Instead, in London, it is their rental e-bikes which dominate, after taking advantage of a lack of rules governing where they can be parked. The thing that makes rental e-bikes attractive is that they offer a solution to the ‘final mile’ problem that plagues commuting on public transport. Lime’s success is based on removing the 15 minutes spent trudging from your home to a bus stop or train station in the morning and the 15 minutes spent walking to your place of work at the other end.For many of the capital’s residents the Lime bike is a godsend, speeding up journeys that wouldn’t be otherwise possible and taking cars off the road. Lime often promotes its success in convincing Londoners who have never previously cycled to cruise around the city on two wheels. One of the main attractions to riders is they remove the need to worry about bike theft in a city where police rarely investigate the crime.
And despite the enormous upfront costs of buying the bicycles, Lime is profitable on a global level. The most recent company accounts for its UK subsidiary show that it increased revenue by 214% to £63.5m in 2023, with a statement that its UK operations were still "fast growing" — suggesting the British arm of company may now be earning even more money. On a global level, Lime’s parent company is getting its finances ready for a mega-listing on the New York Stock Exchange, with a need to make sure investors don’t see any risks to its ongoing growth — such as safety concerns in one of its biggest markets.
The current design of Lime bike on the streets of London — and other major cities around the world — is the fourth generation of the company’s bicycles, introduced in 2022. They are solid and built to survive life on the city streets in all weathers. They weigh 39kg — the equivalent of six stone in imperial measurements — which is about four times heavier than a normal pedal bike.
They also once have one central metal bar — also known as a down tube — to make it easier for people to get on to the bikes. The Lime users who spoke to London Centric pointed towards the curved edge of this tube, a feature that is more pronounced than on rental e-bikes run by rival London operator Forest, as one of their main concerns.
The second individual who spoke to London Centric, who asked to remain anonymous, was cycling on a Lime bike in south London when he tried to slow down. He said the bicycle immediately “spun out of control”, with his suspicion being that the back brake hadn’t engaged properly.
Hitting the road was bad but — just as with Alex — it was the impact of the Lime bike’s central bar falling on top of him that did the real damage: “Because it doesn’t have a crossbar the whole weight of the bike, including the battery, came down on my leg and smashed the shin bone.”
The second individual’s leg pinned together after being crushed by a Lime bike. X-Ray supplied to London Centric.
He said the weight distribution of Lime’s e-bikes causes issues: “The tyres are not good enough for the weight of the bike and I’m not sure the brakes are good enough given the weight of the bike.”The individual also suffered an unusual ignominy as they were lying on the ground in the middle of the road: Trying to end their ride and stop Lime charging them by the minute while he waited for an ambulance. He asked a stranger to move their e-bike to the pavement and take a photo to prove the bicycle was correctly parked. Once at hospital, staff doing their rounds instinctively asked “Lime bike?” because such injuries are so common: “The admitting people in A&E said I was lucky as they get a serious head injury once a week from a Lime bike.”
The person also had concerns about how Lime responds to such incidents, having immediately got in touch with the company to tell them about the incident: “Three days later they said they’ve closed the ticket as they hadn’t heard back from me. I replied with a picture of my leg in plaster.”
Patel, the orthopaedic consultant, warned that the substantial weight of Lime’s e-bikes, especially around the middle of the frame, appears to be causing a large number of leg breaks when the central bar lands on top of riders: “It ends up creating a pivot point. You’re causing a bend in the bone with the heavy force. Speed is probably also an issue because you tend to go a bit faster on a Lime bike.”
He said this was causing a new sort of bicycle injury to appear. In the past, he would expect cyclists to present themselves at hospital with injuries from hitting another vehicle. Lime bike leg breaks are different, he said, often caused by people toppling over without riding into anyone else.
In many cases the fractures are from either people falling off at speed, trying to cushion a fall with their bodies, or being hit by pressure points on the heavy frame when they’re already lying on the ground. Patel said: “Most people I see from Lime bikes aren’t collisions, they’re accidents that happen on the bike.”
Even celebrities aren’t immune, with the singer Self Esteem sharing pictures of her heavily-bruised leg and knee after falling off a Lime bike last summer.
Patel cautioned that part of the issue is inexperienced riders or people who have been drinking alcohol and riding late at night: "They’re not easy to use. If you’ve never driven an electric bike, they’re heavy compared to a normal bike. An amateur picking it up for the first time, having had a few drinks, they just can’t control it. It’s heavy in the middle and it falls with a lot of force because of the weight of the battery in the middle.”
Despite this warning, none of the people spoken to by London Centric had been drinking and all were injured during daylight.
Tom Hurst, the head chef at highly-rated Smithfield restaurant Cloth, was commuting to work on a Saturday morning last year when a woman stepped in front of him: “I swerved to the left, hit the curb, and went over the handlebars. It happened so quickly I can’t remember if the bike fell on me but then I was in excruciating amounts of pain.”
He described himself as a “seriously cautious” cyclist who switched to rental e-bikes after having four bicycle stolen in the capital. He said he continually found the brakes on Lime bikes were not up to scratch and had previously been cycling along when their pedals fell off: “It’s the maintenance. Without a doubt something needs to be done about the state of the bikes. Granted, if I’d have been on my road bike, I’d have still swerved and hit the curb. But it’s the speed you can go at and the weight of the bike that made the injury worse than it probably was.”
Hurst hit the ground with force, with “the bottom of the heel bone shattered in lots of different pieces.”
He says he was due to have his bones pinned back together with metal implants but, due to a lack of NHS capacity, he was bumped from the operating table at the last minute. Instead, he spent months off work watching as his restaurant received glowing reviews, while lying in a static position in the hope his bone would naturally fuse back together: “They said don’t move, don’t do anything, so I just lay there for seven weeks solid. It luckily stayed in place and the edges have reattached. I won’t be fully healed for a year.”
What really struck him most about the whole experience, however, was the response from the staff when he turned up at A&E on that first morning: “We got seen at midday and the doctor said we were the fourth broken bone that he’d seen that morning from Lime bike accidents. And that was on a Saturday. I imagine it’s the same in every NHS hospital in London.”
Patel, the orthopaedic surgeon, said part of the issue is “educating the person that’s cycling” about how to ride safely on an e-bike in London. He said there’s enormous societal and health benefits to be gained by encouraging people to cycle around the capital but some people seemed unaware of how to handle rental e-bikes.
Yet he shares concerns about potential design and maintenance issues with Lime’s bikes: “I am about preventing injuries rather than treating them. If there is an issue something should be done.”
As for Hurst after months of static recuperation waiting for the bone to fuse back together he’s back cycling to his restaurant — on a Lime bike: “I live nine minutes from work on a bike or thirty minutes by train. They’re good. They stop me from getting my bike stolen. But the maintenance needs to be improved.”
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Seemed to be the gist of Evan Davies' extended dscussion on BBC Radio 4 PM this late afternoon, implying legal jeopardy for Rebekah Brooks.
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9000
What did Saab ever do?
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Had a look at Reagan's time as leader of the Screen Actor's Guild?
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Removal of all cycling infrastructure that is 'clogging up the roads'?
Have a looky here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsETzrRr3is&list=PLybg94GvOJ9GEuq4mp9ruJpj-rjKQ_a6E&index=109
-rjKQ_a6E&v=JsETzrRr3is