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Vicky Castro can’t recall exactly what it was that compelled her to make the jump. All she knows is that she was waiting for the number 35 bus when it happened. Like a beacon it flashed out to her, Gatsby’s green light blinking from across the bay. She felt its pull – she could ignore it no longer. She had to get a Lime bike.
“I had never used a cycle hire before,” Vicky tells me. “I’d seen them, but I'd never had any interest in using them.” The 31-year-old data analyst is one of the many Brummies who has embraced the emerald-coloured vehicles since April, when they replaced the old Beryl e-bikes and e-scooters made available by the WMCA. In that time, the average number of daily users shot up from 750 to 6,536 — nine times the journeys made on their predecessors. By September, more than a million rides had been clocked up, and that’s before they’ve even been rolled out to all parts of the region.
This enthusiasm marks a turning point in the West Midlands' short and somewhat chequered cycle-and-scooter-hire history. Our first flirtation with two-wheeled rentals came on Andy Street’s watch when Swedish micromobility company Voi won the contract to deliver e-scooters to the good people of Birmingham, Coventry, and the Black Country in 2020. But within a few years, that relationship had turned sour; in March 2023, the scheme was abruptly paused without explanation.
It was The Dispatch who discovered why. In December of that year, we exclusively revealed that Voi had delayed informing the WMCA of instances of their equipment malfunctioning, with riders in multiple regions reporting the frightening experience of their handlebars coming clean off the steering column mid-ride. Street was said to have been “furious” at being kept in the dark.
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