---
title: "Noted on 6 Oct 2026"
author: Marc Roberts
date: 2026-10-06
url: https://www.marcroberts.info/notes/2026-10-06-dockless-e-bikes-and-the-2028-wait/
---

# Noted on 6 Oct 2026

London's dockless e-bikes made 37 million journeys last year, up by a third, under rules that change every time a rider crosses a borough boundary. Parliament passed the law that lets TfL replace that patchwork in April. BBC London reports it won't be switched on until at least 2028.

Last week the Mayor set out what TfL would do with the power: one set of London-wide rules on parking, safety, fleet numbers and data sharing, and an offer to help DfT draft the regulations so it happens sooner. The operators want it too. Lime and Voi have both called for a single London regime, which isn't something you often hear an industry ask for. With nearly 80,000 bikes between the three biggest, you can see why.

I spent a decade working with shared mobility platforms, and from the inside this borough patchwork manifests as additional software complexity. Each borough's parking rules end up as geofences and no-go zones in the app, and each council gets a separate reporting output that someone has to build and maintain. That's engineering time spent keeping up with the rules rather than improving the product.

TfL has done the joined-up version before. Its e-scooter trial, which started in 2021, made geofenced parking and operator data a condition of a single contract across every borough taking part, and a 2023 TfL board paper noted it had "no direct control over the rental e-bikes from the same companies". The Mayor now names data sharing as one of the first things to settle, and I think that's something that shouldn't wait until 2028.

A question for operators and borough officers: if a shared data spec landed tomorrow, how much time would it save you before 2028?