143: Day 4: Lime Bikes and Broken Legs

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Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello and welcome to the mini-series.

We're now in the second half of the mini-series of the shortlistees for this year's Paul Foot Award.

Let's find out with no further mucking about who today's shortliste is.

My name is Jim Watson and I'm the editor of London Centric, a new London news publication.

And what is the Paul Foot Award shortlisted story that you've written this year?

The story is all about line bikes, which if you live in London or another major city in the UK, you might know as those ubiquitous green rent-by-the-minute e-bikes that are everywhere.

And there's been a lot of moans about the fact that they can block pavements and things like that.

But the thing that I've really focused on is the safety element and the sort of power of a company that just went, okay, we're going to just flood a market with a load of devices that are basically unregulated.

and people will rent them and not know whether a bit is going to fall off the bike, whether when they crash at high speed, the design is even suitable for falling on top of them and perhaps injuring them.

And it all started because one person said, I've broken a leg.

And then a second reader got in touch to say, it's also broken my leg.

And then by the time a third and a fourth got in touch, it's like, there's a story here.

And so really, it's as much about how I'm trying to do proper local journalism where you just listen to what the public are telling you and you go and find out why something's happening on the ground in the city that they live in.

So this is reader generated, this is your Readers of London Centric getting in touch.

This is Readers of London Centric getting in touch and at first I, you know, I was a bit suspicious, I wasn't sure, I used the things and I wanted to know why this was and I started phoning up consultants who work in trauma wards across London and they said it's off the scale, we're just getting loads and loads of people coming in, flying off these bikes and the, you know, obviously injuries happen in any form of transport.

But the thing that's quite notable with this is that they said two things to people come off them.

One, the bikes have a design which they believe might be a flaw, which means that when they fall on top of you, it basically acts like a pivot point and smashes your leg against the concrete and shatters it in a way that

they're really heavy, aren't they?

They're a central body.

They're a heavy battery and the battery is often a heavy bit.

They're all combined on one stalk.

And if it lands, then

your leg gets in the way.

And the other one was that when bits fall off them, they don't immediately get taken out of service.

And it's all part of this who owns the public realm in a city like London, who's in charge and who gets to set the rules.

Because it isn't in this case, Transport for London, it isn't the mayor, it isn't the boroughs, it's a private Californian company who said, look, we're going to change the way that London operates, we're going to flood the streets of these things.

And there was no oversight on the design or their safety or maintenance.

And that just really interested me because who's in control?

No one's in charge.

No one's really got the ability to limit these things on safety grounds.

And we should say the details are incredibly great.

People nearly losing legs, people nearly severing their femural artery, which can kill you easily.

I mean this is not a simple fracture that we're dealing with.

These are horrible incidents.

These people are cycling in daytime and sober.

They're described as motorcycle style incidents.

I mean you know some London surgeons now refer to it as line bike leg.

They just get so many of them coming in that their wards are full of them.

And one particular rider made the point to me that it's easy to dismiss this in some ways, but they described it as a transfer of wealth from the NHS to a Californian tech company.

The safety of the bike isn't up to the standards, which then means that the NHS has to pick up the bill of fixing these people's legs back together.

And the irony is, and this is a really important part, almost everyone I spoke to really likes the product.

Right.

This is not, well, they shouldn't.

I mean, well, no, I mean, I'm a regular line bike rider myself.

The problem is that no one's really overseeing these things.

It's a bit like the same way that Uber about 10, 15 years ago turned up in the UK cities and just went, we're going to change the way the city operates and governments will need to catch up with how we're doing our unregulated approach to a new form of transport.

And Lime have pretty much done the same thing.

They've gone, you know, we're just going to flood a major capital city with these bikes and then the sort of effects will work out afterwards.

Look, maybe this is a naive question.

Right, but if I wanted to set up a razorblade pogo stick transportation company around London, are you saying no one would stop me with a dangerous product that can do people real harm?

Well, there'd be consumer protection laws in general, but and you know, you might have the ability to sue the operator of your razor blade pogo stick operator, but the idea that it's not covered by existing regulatory systems, you can't just start a rival black cab operator or something like that, but there's not much to stop you moving into the e-bike market at the moment.

So, it's just a case of the regulation hasn't kept up with the reality on the ground.

Right.

And there's both the sort of clutter around London element, and I think, to be honest, more importantly, the safety element.

So consumers are clearly not being protected.

There's a growing number of lawsuits about this.

People are getting payouts from Lyme.

But if I've broken my leg, I don't want to have to do the suing myself.

I want what's provided to be at least reasonably safe.

We all know that accidents happen, and cycling in London is sometimes not for the faint-hearted.

But I'd like the thing that's injuring me to be a car rather than my own hired bike.

Well, this is the final bit, really.

I took out a train mechanic on the streets of London, we hired 50 line bikes, and we found about 10 to 12%

were so dangerous that he'd want them taken off the street immediately.

And it was interesting because we talked to people riding them around.

They said, Yeah, that fits with my experience.

You know, quite often these bits fall off.

Quite often a kid has knocked them out.

The argument from the operator is, well, what can we do?

People are going to kick the hell out of these things.

And the argument from the lawyers and the victims is, you've basically sold me a defective product that isn't safe when I'm riding around.

And you know I think that's that's the interesting thing to unpick here like what's the level of risk and if there is going to be a risk what I feel I've done with this story is at least alert people to it and tell them to give a bike a good checkover before they ride off at 15 miles an hour.

We should say the bikes weigh about 39 kilos and they're heavy.

They're four times of what a normal bike weighs.

And the irony is these were introduced partly because e-scooters, which are popular in lots of European cities, are not legal on the road or on the pavement in the the UK.

So it was a perfect opportunity to say, well, here's some personal transportation because e-scooters are so dangerous.

Like half of all young Londoners take a line bike.

It's basically a de facto new form of transport, which is probably good.

But people just need to know what the risks are.

Yeah, you're being very cautious and, you know, as you should be in reporting this.

I guess your next step, once you'd found the readers and the trauma surgeons was to contact Lime.

What did they say when you got in touch?

I think one of my favourite things with it as a publication, as a start-up publication, was that initially they asked if I was a print weekly publication, and sort of I got a local fob off, and by the end, it was the global head of comms who was responding to my questions.

So, I think they realized that this was actually going to be a bit of a problem for them as the stories progressed and as they got more and more pickup.

You've seen all of the national papers follow this up, and it's become a bit of a talking point around the bikes.

That sort of shows the benefit of actually having someone on the ground who is able to dedicate a few days at a time to each of these stories in this series, going around, checking things out, and making sure that there's actual reporting done and not just repeating the press releases, because so much local journalism online and all of these things is just basically copying and pasting the press release, at best maybe adding in a comment from an irate person on Twitter.

There's no one just sort of kicking the literally kicking the tires in this case and seeing what's going on.

Can I just check?

What did they say to you when you asked them about this spate of leg smashings that's been going on?

In almost all cases, people don't get their legs smashed, which is definitely true.

But I think the people who are in A ⁇ E for weeks at a time, who now have multiple metal pins holding their legs together, who spent an hour on the floor in a busy London street having come off seemingly for no particular reason, or in one particular video I've seen having multiple bones sticking out of their leg.

You know, I literally couldn't publish that one, even though it was particularly shocking.

You know, these people say, I just want them to get their act together, together, basically, and they need to actually put more money back into maintenance and not going to their investors back in the States.

What about their tyres?

And their tyres, they also shifted from a German model to a Chinese model.

The implication being that they were in some way moving to a cheaper model.

Whether or not that's actually more dangerous or not is something Lyme have pushed back strongly on.

But there's definitely a thing that they are, like all tech companies, going for growth at all costs.

And some of the cost of that growth at all costs is coming onto the British taxpayer who's paying to piece people back together and also the poor unfortunates who are wandering around with a bit of a hobble now.

I know that you've reported that Lyme do pay for injuries, they do payouts, but the stipulations are quite strict, aren't they?

They say you need to be disabled really thoroughly, including, for example, complete loss of one kidney.

And I don't quite know how you'd manage to lose a kidney in one of these accidents.

That would be very impressive.

I mean, the end effect basically is unless you really, really smash yourself up permanently, you're not really insured on one of these things.

And that's why people are having to turn to lawyers to try and get payouts for the loss of earnings, for the time off work.

You know, I've spoken to people who are still unable to walk a couple of years later.

A couple of years later?

Yeah.

You know, it's really permanently messed up their life.

Obviously, you can injure yourself in all manner of ways.

And as something gets more popular,

there's going to be a risk of this happening.

But I just think that people need to be be aware of what product they're using and the attitudes of the company that are running it.

I want to ask a couple of questions about London Centric because this is the, I think, newest of the outlets shortlisted for the awards this year.

This is your outfit that you set up.

Can you just tell us a bit about the genesis of London Centric?

Because I think it's really interesting about how journalism is changing.

Yeah, so I used to be the media editor of The Guardian.

I covered a lot of the declining, terrible state of the local press in the UK.

And eventually I went, well, I probably ought to do something about it.

I left my job at the Guardian, basically bought a laptop and went, right, how do we do local news then?

And what I decided to focus on was a handful of things really in depth.

power, accountability, interesting things, not being boring and definitely not reproducing press releases just for the hell of it.

So whereas your average local news website is just covered in ads, it's chasing clicks, your reporters are being told to do eight stories a day, half of them are about something unrelated that they've seen on Twitter or the middle aisle or Aldi or whatever.

London Centric promises just a handful of in-depth things covered really well by someone who actually knows how to do journalism.

And crucially, that works because people are willing to pay for it.

Some of the stuff is free, some of it you've got to pay for.

I try not to be dull, I try to make it interesting, and the crucial thing is that thousands of people have gone, okay, we really like the pitch, we really like what you're producing, and we'll pay to read it.

And that gives me the freedom and ability to actually go in depth, to not worry about doing that clickbait headline that clogs up your social feed to sort of do complete rubbish that the council's putting out and to hold people like Sadiq Khan to account.

And yeah, there's definitely a touch of the private eye attitude in terms of digging into the financials for people, not just accepting the press release line and

trying to sort of piece together the people.

I've already had my fair number of legal threats.

It is terrifying.

It is slightly terrifying to be operating essentially as a sole operator.

I've got one reporter working with me now, but I am the editor, chief reporter, chief content officer, the chief marketing officer, the legal representative, the social media manager,

everything rolled into one.

How are you dealing with these legal threats when they come in?

Do you have a different persona you answer as to the influence?

Sort of the old job of sort of the PA picking up the phone and pretending to be someone else.

No, you just have to deal with them.

I mean, I did pay one lawyer with a very expensive lunch, an old legal friend, to give some advice, and I've now put things on a more formal footing because I think that's a bit sensible.

But I think it shows two things.

One, it is possible running an absolute bare-bones operation to do proper journalism, that not everything is an end-of-days race to the bottom, and that people will support things that they believe in.

I also think it's enormously stressful and overwhelming at the same time.

And that I do slightly miss the days where a whole office of learned colleagues could guide me through various proces, take things off my plate, and help get a story out.

Well, as the chief reporter of London Centric, Jim Waterson, would you like to thank your editor, Jim Waterson, for all the support he's given you?

I think that that would have to be the

acceptance speech when inevitably this story wins the award.

No, you know, there's some incredibly strong entries here and without sounding too cheesy, I'm slightly overwhelmed to even be in the same category with a publication that I launched only seven months ago, which is still run on a shoestring doesn't quite describe it.

It's, you know, it's, it's, we're just about holding it together.

Well, it's a terrific story.

I can't wait to find out what happens next with Lime as well.

And I will be bringing my own bike into the center of town from now on.

Thank you very much, Jim.

Thank you.

Thanks to Jim.

Do cycle safely.

And we'll see you tomorrow for episode five.

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