City Hall Pledges a Fresh Fleet as the Previous Fleet Is Located Under a Bridge in Hackney
LONDON, ENGLAND | Lord Khan, the Labour mayor of London, discussed dockless bikes at the party conference in Liverpool on Tuesday 29 September, according to ITV News. City Hall said the matter was “being looked at”, which officials confirmed is the stage after “being scoped” and before “being looked at again”.
A spokesman said the mayor was keen to see dockless bikes in every part of London that wants them, subject to a framework, a pilot, an evaluation of the pilot and a second framework drawn up by people who have read the evaluation.
A Fleet in Every Sense Except the Physical
The draft Dockless Cycle Delivery Framework runs to 94 pages. Page 3 contains a glossary. The glossary defines “bike” as “a user-facing mobility asset with two wheels, subject to the provisions of Annex F”.
Annex F is longer than the framework it belongs to. It covers what happens when a bike is left lying across a pavement, an event the document calls a “kerbside dwell incident”. Each incident must be logged by a Dwell Incident Officer. The post has not yet been filled, because the recruitment process is set out in Annex G, which is still in draft.
The first pilot will involve 40 bicycles. The launch event will involve 60 members of staff, a lectern and a banner reading “Bikes, Reimagined”. Organisers said the banner had been approved after three rounds of consultation on the comma.
The comma survived all three rounds. A proposal to replace it with a full stop was rejected as “too final” for a programme still at the pilot stage. A dash was considered and ruled out on the grounds that it implied speed.
Tomasz Wrona, 34, a courier from Dalston, said he had followed the announcement with interest. “I’ve been told about these bikes since I got my first helmet,” he said. “The helmet’s dead now. We buried it at Clapton.”
Mr Wrona said he would not be buying a replacement until the bikes had been seen in the wild. “I’m not doing it on spec again,” he said. “When there’s a bike, I’ll get a helmet. When there’s a second bike, I’ll start to believe it.”
Where the Last Bikes Went
The announcement coincided with a clear-up by the Hackney Towpath Volunteers, a group of local residents who spend Sunday mornings dragging objects out of the Regent’s Canal. The group recovered nine bicycles, a shopping trolley, two traffic cones and a lanyard.
The lanyard belonged to a City Hall official. It was returned with the ID card still attached. The card read “Head of Active Travel Futures”. The official said the lanyard had been lost during an away day in 2022 and that he had assumed it was being “held in the pipeline”.
The official has since been issued with a replacement lanyard. It is a brighter shade of green and comes with a safety clip, which colleagues described as a lesson learned.
Officials are now considering whether the Regent’s Canal could be counted as an existing docking station. It has held bicycles securely for years, needs no app, has never once run out of space and has not asked a single rider to rate the experience out of five.
Volunteer co-ordinator Sheila Ocampo, 62, said the bikes were in poor condition. “Nobody’s been looking after them,” she said. “I had a look at the tag on one. It says ‘Property of the Future’.”
City Hall said the bikes were not connected to its own programme but that it would be “happy to learn from the experience”.
The volunteers have offered to hand over the nine recovered bikes free of charge, which would enlarge the pilot fleet by almost a quarter overnight. City Hall said any donated asset would first need to be assessed against the framework. Ms Ocampo said the bikes had already been assessed by the canal, and had not passed.
What the Market Did in the Meantime
Private operators have run dockless hire schemes in several London boroughs for years. Users unlock a bike with a phone, ride it to where they are going and leave it somewhere sensible. No framework is involved. The operators answer to customers, who are quick to delete an app.
Imogen Fairweather, a regional manager at one hire firm, said her company launched a new borough in about three weeks. “We had a spreadsheet and a van,” she said. “I’m told the pilot has a steering group.”
Transport for London publishes its own cycling information for those who want to know what is already available. The Adam Smith Institute has published research on how cities can let private firms run transport services without a launch event.
The mayor’s office confirmed that it welcomes private investment in cycling and intends to set up a working group to discuss how it might welcome it.
The first pilot bikes are due to be delivered in the spring. A spokesman said the date was “aspirational but not unfounded”. He declined to say which of the two words was carrying the weight.
Five Humorous Observations
- Ninety-four pages to define a bike. I’ve owned bikes my whole life. Nobody asked me for an annex.
- They lost a bike in a canal and found an official’s lanyard. That’s not a coincidence, that’s a crime scene with a lanyard.
- A banner with a comma that took three rounds of consultation. Somewhere there’s a man whose entire career is that comma.
- “Held in the pipeline.” That’s what people say about a parcel from Royal Mail. Same speed, no tracking number.
- The private firm needed a spreadsheet and a van. The council needs a steering group. One of them gets a bike to you by Thursday.
Disclaimer: The mayor’s reported comments provide the news premise. Other conversations and scenarios are satirical commentary. This article is entirely a human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world’s oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. Neither owns a dockless bike, although one of them has a lanyard under review. More London satire and funny news stories can be found without a framework, a pilot or an Annex G.
Bethan Morgan is an experienced satirical journalist and comedy writer with a strong editorial voice shaped by London’s writing and performance culture. Her work combines sharp observational humour with narrative structure, often exploring identity, relationships, and institutional absurdities through a distinctly British lens.
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