Public space is not costless.
As London heads toward local elections on May 7, voters will hear plenty about housing, crime and the cost of living. But on the streets, literally underfoot, a smaller, more visible issue is shaping perceptions of how well the city is run: the explosion of dockless e-bikes.
What should have been a triumph of consumer choice and green innovation has instead become a daily frustration. Across the capital, rental bikes are left sprawled across pavements, obstructing pedestrians and provoking growing public irritation.
For many, this looks like a failure of the market. In reality, it is the opposite. London’s e-bike chaos is what happens when markets are poorly defined, not when they are too free. Private companies are doing exactly what one would expect in the current system. Their incentives are simple: more bikes on the street mean more rides and more revenue. But the space those bikes occupy, public pavements, is effectively unpriced and weakly governed.
This is not a free market. It is a market missing its most basic ingredient: clear rules. In any functioning market, scarce resources are allocated through prices and property rights. In London, pavement space is scarce, valuable and heavily used, but it is treated as if it were free. The result is predictable: overuse, congestion and conflict. Economists have a name for this: the tragedy of the commons. When no one owns a resource, everyone has an incentive to overexploit it.
The deeper failure lies in London’s fragmented approach to regulation. Borough councils each set their own policies, strike their own deals and enforce their own rules, often inconsistently and politically motivated. Meanwhile, Transport for London has largely avoided imposing a coherent, citywide framework. It is disorganised to the point that not even TfL knows how many rental e-bikes there are in London. The result is not deregulation, but disorganisation.
This matters politically. Local elections are, at their core, a referendum on competence. Voters may not follow the intricacies of transport policy, but they notice when streets feel cluttered, unmanaged and chaotic. The e-bike issue has become a visible proxy for a broader question: who is actually in charge of London’s public space?
Some will respond with calls for bans or heavy restrictions, pointing to moves in cities like Paris to clamp down on micromobility, where it has banned rental e-scooters. That would be the wrong lesson to draw.
E-bikes and micromobility remain a valuable innovation. They expand transport choice, reduce reliance on cars, and offer a flexible alternative for short journeys. Scrapping them would mean sacrificing real consumer benefits because policymakers failed to set the right conditions.
The better approach is not to abandon the market, but to make it work properly.
That starts with recognising that public space is not costless. If companies are using London’s streets and pavements as part of their business model, they should face clear, predictable charges for doing so. Pricing mechanisms, whether through permits, per-bike fees or congestion-style models, would make operators think carefully about fleet size and distribution, as well as making local authorities think about their pavements and their conditions.
Second, responsibility must be unambiguous. Operators should be accountable for where their bikes end up, with meaningful penalties for persistent non-compliance. A system where rules exist but are rarely enforced is worse than none at all.
Third, London needs a single, coherent framework. The current borough-by-borough patchwork creates confusion, distorts competition and undermines enforcement. The fact that each borough can license different operators creates perverse outcomes: a commuter crossing an invisible boundary, enforced through geofencing, can suddenly find their e-bike unusable mid-journey if the destination borough contracts a rival provider. The result is predictable. Journeys are cut short, and bikes are abandoned on pavements, not out of carelessness but because the system leaves users with no alternative. This is a failure of market design. A unified approach would provide clarity for companies and consistency for residents.
None of this is anti-market. Quite the opposite: it is about creating the conditions in which markets can deliver better outcomes.The lesson for candidates on May 7 is straightforward. Voters do not want to see innovation stifled, but they do expect it to be managed competently. Allowing a useful new technology to descend into visible disorder is not a sign of liberalisation, it is a sign of weak governance.
London’s e-bike problem is not that the market has been allowed to run wild. It is that City Hall has failed to set the rules that make a market work. Get those rules right, and e-bikes can still be a success story. Ignore them, and the backlash will only grow, along with the temptation to replace messy liberalisation with blunt prohibition. At the ballot box, that is a choice Londoners may soon be asked to make.