Dockless Bikes Coming to Hillingdon?

The English Devolution Bill has now passed into law and serves to further devolve centralised power to locally elected representatives. What has this to do with cyclists? It now allows a single framework to be established for the whole of London when dealing with dockless bike hire from firms such as Lime, Dott, Forest and Voi.

We wrote previously about the issue here in Hillingdon with no dockless schemes operating, apart from the limited one based at Brunel University, leading to the issue of abandoned bikes at the border with Ealing and Hounslow boroughs.

Now the responsibility for regulating and licencing operators will lie with London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, who is responsible for transport in the city through his oversight of TfL.

The Uxbridge Gazette quotes a TfL spokesperson as saying: “We wel­come the new legis­la­tion which will provide TfL proper powers to reg­u­late dock­less bikes across Lon­don. This would provide the future abil­ity to replace the exist­ing patch­work and bor­ough by bor­ough approach with a con­sist­ent licens­ing scheme for Lon­don. We’re work­ing closely with Lon­don’s bor­oughs and other part­ners to develop pro­pos­als for a Lon­don­wide licen­cing scheme and will be set­ting out fur­ther details in due course.”

We can only hope that this means we will see responsible dockless bike operators appearing in Hillingdon soon.