Far from a cycling decline, unused bike parking at offices proves London’s developers have solved the wrong problem, writes Lime’s head of government relations Stef Lehmann
An empty office bike rack tells you where someone hasn’t stored their own bike for eight (if you’re lucky) hours. It doesn’t tell you anything about how people are getting to work.
That distinction has been missing from the debate about unused cycle storage in London’s office buildings. Research from the London Property Alliance found that around three quarters of cycle parking spaces in the 21 office buildings it studied were vacant at peak times. Developers have a fair point: space should earn its keep. But it is a leap from there to concluding that London needs less cycle parking.
Seen in isolation, the research could make it sound like cycling is ailing in one of Europe’s largest metropolitan areas. In reality, the opposite is true: London has seen record cycling levels over the last few years.
Transport for London (TfL) estimates that daily cycle trips rose by 12 per cent in 2025, to 1.4m. That’s the highest it’s ever been, and recent TfL data also shows that at least one in 10 cycling trips – we suspect more – are made on shared e-bikes.
What has changed is the choice of bike. You can now cycle to the office without owning one, leaving it behind that evening because of one too many drinks, worrying about it being stolen in the meantime, or finding the space to store it at home. (This Is Awkward has some great examples of the latter.) Some are so attached to this way of getting home now that they resort to rather inadvisable behaviours. No repeat of the Tube strike Lime Hunger Games, please.
Obviously, no one is suggesting that all secure underground bike racks are suddenly turned into shared e-bike parking. But we are suggesting two other things.
We want to work with private landowners
Firstly, if developers are concerned about that space going to waste just to satisfy a now dated city planning requirement, making alternative outside space available for shared e-bike parking should also count.
Secondly, we want to hear from private landowners who have space for shared e-bike parking more widely – because there isn’t enough of it in London.
No shared e-bike operator goes a day without hearing about overcrowded parking bays. Some of this is in the nature of the service we provide: no one can predict where every journey goes, because we don’t run on rails or along set routes. Lime’s on-street team of more than 400 people therefore moves around our vehicles throughout the day, every day, based on those travel patterns that are regular and predictable.
The more fundamental issue, though, is that shared e-bike parking has struggled to keep pace with demand. Operators must contribute to tackling this, and Lime has committed £5m to a London Parking Fund as part of our £20m London Action Plan – £1.5m of which is already being spent by boroughs as part of the first tranche. But funding is not always the biggest challenge. Everyone knows how contested London’s street space is, and some changes to how space is allocated can create winners and losers – costing precious political capital.
This is where private land comes in. We can work directly with the landowner so that installing a funded parking bay takes far less time. And there’s a knock-on benefit: increasing bay supply across London, particularly in the most high-demand areas in the City and Westminster, will take progressively more pressure off overstretched individual bays.
Private land won’t solve every parking problem. But it can help deliver more space where people need it, without waiting for every solution to come from the public highway and local councils.
So our view is that operators, boroughs and developers should be looking at the best use of London’s public realm together. If some private cycle storage is underused while nearby shared bays are full, regulations should take changing travel habits into account and pivot to shared e-bike parking. Developers can still have their basement gyms too – and officegoers can extend their post-exercise high by cycling home.
Stef Lehmann is head of government relations at Lime UK & Ireland