Bid to end plague of badly parked 'dockless' bikes in Camden

Camden Council’s democratically adopted policy specifies that pedestrians are our number one priority. Our Transport Strategy sets out a 'hierarchy' of who our transport and public realm activities aim to serve. Above all, these are: people walking, people cycling, and people who use public transport.

This reflects how people travel around the borough: in Camden, more than two-thirds of residents do not have access to a car, and already more than eight in 10 trips made by our residents are by public transport, walking and cycling. We need to ensure our streets are designed to support residents’ needs. And crucially to enable people to walk, cycle and take public transport if they do not yet do so.

Cllr Adam Harrison says Camden are dealing with badly parked 'dockless' bikes (Image: Camden Council)

Hire e-bikes and e-scooters are popular and assist people to get about in non-polluting ways: 100,000 bike trips start in Camden each month and they bring significant health and environmental benefits.

But to deal with rogue parking, Camden has now placed the e-bikes’ operation on a contractual footing (E-scooters operate via a TfL contract).

This is important because the Government has given councils no formal powers over dockless hire bikes and ministers continue to drag their feet over the issue.

Camden previously backed a London-wide byelaw, which would have given us legal powers to enforce against operators of badly parked bikes. Some boroughs chose not to sign up to this, meaning the whole measure fell.

The new contract will enable us to better control the numbers of bikes in the borough, ensure operators swiftly remove any that are blocking the pavement, and make sure that bikes are parked in bays. It means we can also ensure that operators levy fines on people who do not park properly and place bans on persistent offenders.

We have led the way in being the first borough to roll out bike parking bays. Nearly 200 bays are now in place on the streets of Camden, and more are to follow to manage this issue, and to ensure there is a bay closer to more residents.

In fact, we need to stop calling these ‘dockless’ bikes, and start calling them ‘bay’ bikes – because this is the only way extending cycling opportunities to more people will work while protecting pedestrians.

• Cllr Adam Harrison is cabinet member for a Sustainable Camden, Camden Council.