Diary of an (Ex) LimeBiker™
A neon flash interrupts my bus window daydream. Two cyclists, pedalling in tandem. A bright green helmet rolling around in one basket. They push languidly as the motor weaves them through Oxford Street’s footpath hierarchy. A stream of innovative phosphorescence gleams in the afternoon sun behind them. The bus pauses and they sail ahead. One rider keeps his thumb on the bell of convenience. Their fluorescent profiles fade into the afternoon’s shadows as the shrill resonance echoes down the street after them. Six weeks prior, LimeBiking™ through the cool, midnight air, my silhouette glowed too. Brighter, greener. A sheen of suburban enlightenment that has since faded with each week’s hospital appointment and each day’s utterly inefficient bus ride.
Six weeks ago, the world blurred around me and my green chariot. The whirring motor drove me, brilliant and impulsive, through the humming darkness of a summer’s night. My radiance reflected off emerald traffic lights and iridescent street signs. Up the hill, turned towards the starlit sky, I pedalled hastily; pedestrians questioned my imperceptible, glinting existence. And then, a familiar weightlessness. I materialised out, above the stratosphere, Liming™ across the cosmos. I was infallible, invincible, perfect. A universal shift then, I landed back onto the pavement, sweaty and immobile, into a reality of broken bones and slow living. The pace of performances, parties and post-semester pay-checks slowed to a crawl. Was the freedom worth the fall?
A crimson coating on the abandoned vehicle, spotted from the walk to the ER the next morning. There it lay, unparked and unashamed. Its battery depleted, its white and green coating obscured by dried blood. The morning air assuaged the throb of my own battle wound. Could I skirt fault for this injury? Could I accuse those radiant bikes, vehicles of convenience, affordability and adrenaline, of ensnaring me in their motorised spokes? Or must I dip into a pool of reflections and acknowledge my own hand in this?
I was not always a LimeBiker™. The gradual emergence of commercialised E-Bikes on the corners of Sydney’s CBD left me unphased. They weeded between the cracks of asphalt and cement around Redfern and Town Hall. A mechanised city bloomed before our eyes. The assimilation of subscription-service ‘freedom’ into everyday living persisted until ‘micro-mobility’ became a staple of Sydney’s daily commute. A sliced wedge, a citrus wheel. Lime’s™ budding insignia spoke to the city’s desire for novelty and personalised mobility, unmediated by restrictions or regulation. With Lime’s™ roots in the ground, it wasn’t long before they wrapped around my own jaded limbs.
Zodiac-inspired cocktails preceded my first ride into the traffic-lit streets of Newtown. A block down from the dumpling restaurant, an innocuous group of freshly grown LimeBikes™. Tormentingly accessible, they whispered something of reckless abandon, liberty, a fanciful freedom from the constraints of road rules and train timetables. It wasn’t long before a ride became something else, something irresistible, relentless, repeated. My senses, alight in green.
Later, words of the accident’s frequency were used to console me. I was not the only LimeBike™ wrestler in the hospital on Macquarie Street. A friend’s broken foot. A coworker’s concussion. A rider’s fatality. At work, drunk guests wax poetic over a desire to dim the LimeBike’s™ glow. Slurred notions of regulations, bike paths, legislation. My tumble, however, was perhaps of a different consequence. I was silver and quick in the night, my decisions were unfiltered by both beer and youth. An inability to disengage hijacked my mechanical legs as I flew up and down the climb merely for the thrill of the wind in my ears and the stars in my hair. It served me right and wrong to fall; my naivety, my hubris met Lime’s™ capitalisation on a human desire for liberty and pleasure and did not leave unscathed.
A bandaged finger, my weakest link. I fractured all over. Uselessness pervaded every day of left-handed living. Seven-digit touch typing rendered days slow, inefficient. Outside, bloodstained bikes disappeared and reappeared overnight, moved as if by some disembodied poltergeist. A familiar whirr drifted past my window. A predictably green streak of residue lingered in the street. Was the rider’s safety assured by their judicious restraint? Their rational, entirely un-recreational ride? Or were their injuries imminent? Relentless, repeated, would Lime’s™ impulsive spark offer them the stars too?
Safety, Sustainability, Community, Innovation. The words on the ‘Lime Micromobility’ website taunted me as I searched for their insurance policy. A dull ache as my finger clicked through ‘The Lime Times’. 2025 Ride Replay: A celestial year in motion: “2025 was a year shaped by the stars and tracked through every Lime adventure.” My constellations turned dark. Their brilliance died the night I reached them. I pushed the cool, night sky away and sat with the stillness of December’s warmth.
I am cautious now. I watch neon cyclers with envy and disbelief. I do not act with the passion of a month or so ago. Infallible, invincible, perfect. The words which spurred my frantic pedalling have since dimmed. Now, I order an Uber and watch the stars go by, far above my head, and I leave my hands inside the vehicle at all times.