‘How the beep beep beep from Lime bikes became the soundtrack of summer 2025’
And they mayor should embrace it - story 90
I know that sound. I heard it earlier today. That relentless beep beep beep—part comedy sketch, part sonic warning shot—is everywhere in London this summer.
London Centric eventually figured out what causes the sound. It relates to a safety feature.
Londoners have worked out how to abuse this feature, enabling them to use the bicycles without paying — as long as they’re happy to accept a constant beep beep beep as the Lime bike protests that it has been stolen.
There’s a catch, of course. The riders can’t stop, even at traffic lights. Pause for long and the bike locks up. So they just keep pedalling.
Lime says it’s working on a fix, just as it did with the now-legendary click click click of 2023. But the most telling part of the story wasn’t the sound. It was the insight in the last paragraph
Notes & thoughts
This was the line that captured my attention:
All of this points to an unmet demand: The capital’s schoolchildren want bicycles to ride around London.
Lime is, at the moment, unwillingly meeting this need.
A large unmet need
These teenage Londoners are part of the large driver-first community. They want to get around the city on their terms. Convenient, quick and free. (They are happy for someone else to fund this, to maintain the bikes. Teenagers, eh?)
They also form part of that wider group of younger Londoners: impatient with rules, but eager for movement. These kids aren’t asking for cycle lanes or access equity. They’re just getting on with it, with a stolen beep if necessary.
They also reflect a deeper generational shift. As we’ve explored elsewhere, under-35s now dominate shared bike use in London. Whether that behaviour sticks into later life remains to be seen. But the signs are promising. If the mayor could find a legal bike provider to meet this youthful demand, usage—and revenue—would both rise.
If this all sounds oddly familiar, it should.
The same thing happened with streaming music. The earliest services were free, illegal and so attractive but demanded some technical nous. Spotify and Last.FM launched launched with a catelogue which was good enough enjoyed through software and hardware that was easy to use. They quickly dominated the market despite listeners having to pay directly through subscriptions or indirectly through ads.
London could do the same for cycling. The city should lean into teenage demand, not ignore or criminalise it. Make bikes easy, legal, and accessible. Remove the beeping—just not the momentum behind it.
Because here’s the thing: if enough of these young riders stick with cycling, it will shape the city’s future for the better. Not just quieter streets, but healthier ones. Greener ones. Fairer ones.
Maybe this accidental anthem is not beeping annoying. But a signal to a better way of doing things?