Near-impassable: resident raises alarm over ‘sea of bikes’ cluttering pavements near Broadway Market

Lime bikes at Broadway Market, May 2026. Video still: Terry Stewart

Footage captured over the May bank holiday weekend has reignited concerns about dockless e-bike parking in Hackney, after a local resident filmed a tangle of abandoned hire bikes strewn across the pavement near Broadway Market.

The video, recorded by 70-year-old Terry Stewart at the corner of Whiston Road and Pritchard’s Road – a spot which is not a designated parking bay – shows bikes piled up in a manner that Stewart says makes the street near-impassable for those with mobility or sight impairments.

“There’s no infrastructure to the whole system,” Stewart told the Citizen.

“I’m on my own and I’m partially sighted. A woman with kids in a pram wouldn’t be able to use that street, because she’d have to push the pram up the road, and it’s a danger when you have to start moving children and prams onto the road to avoid all these cycles.”

He added: “You have to have an infrastructure, you have to have an enforcement team – either the police or the borough – which enforces the rules and regulations and doesn’t allow others to abuse that at expense to other people in the community.”

Hackney has been one of the capital’s most enthusiastic adopters of dockless hire schemes, which offer on-demand, affordable journeys often quicker and greener than the bus.

In March, the Town Hall announced a deal with Lime giving residents the one of the lowest upfront fares in London at a flat £1.75 per ride.

The borough is currently signed up to a five-year contract with Lime and Voi, with options to extend, valued at £93 million as of February 2025.

But the question of where riders leave the bikes at the end of a journey has dogged the schemes since they first appeared on London’s streets in 2018.

Operators – including Lime, Forest, Voi and Bolt – strike separate agreements with each highway authority, meaning rules vary from borough to borough.

Riders are supposed to end journeys in designated bays, with fines for those who don’t, but as Stewart’s video shows, enforcement appears patchy.

Asked what regulations are in place locally and who is responsible for enforcing them, a Hackney Council spokesperson said: “Hackney has among the highest use of e-bikes in London. We have worked with both Lime and Voi to install a high density of dedicated parking bays for the bikes, and compliance is generally good in the borough.

“There will be 400 designated parking bays by the end of the year, which are the only places riders are permitted to leave the bikes.”

The spokesperson did not address the enforcement question directly.

Critics of the schemes point to a wider transparency problem: operators routinely treat journey and parking data as commercially sensitive, leaving councils with little leverage when things go wrong.

Last year, Sir Sadiq Khan compared the dockless market to the “Wild West”, warning that regulation had “not caught up with the pace of people’s desire to use cycle hire bikes” – a view echoed since by Lime’s own chief executive, Wayne Ting.

For regular riders, the Town Hall’s promise of cheaper and easier journeys will be welcome. For residents like Terry Stewart, every additional bike on the pavement is another obstacle on the way to the shops.