Pirate's Cove

It’s a small price to pay to save the world from global boiling, you know

Rise of ‘Lime bike leg’: That’s the epidemic of shattered limbs and mangled knees caused by the 86lb bikes. Now doctors and victims reveal the danger and say: ‘I’m NEVER going on one of those again’

On a warm Saturday afternoon in west London, Theo thought he had found the perfect shortcut home to avoid waiting for the bus from Paddington station.

Minutes later, he was lying on the pavement in agony – not a victim of a traffic accident but of the electric bike he’d hired for £1.
‘I was hurtling down what I thought was an empty and quiet residential road,’ he told the Mail. ‘I could hardly see the scooter when it pulled out from the corner of my eye just ahead and I panicked.’

Theo, 27, grabbed the brakes and tried to swerve. He remembers skidding along the road then toppling to the ground, followed by a searing pain as the neon-green Lime bike – all 86lb of it – landed on his legs.

Residents heard the crash and called for help, after which Theo was ‘hauled into an ambulance and taken to St Mary’s Hospital. After many painful hours and scans, it emerged I had fractured my tibia’.

I certainly hope the ambulance was an EV and the hospital ran on wind and solar

This particular injury – now popularly referred to as ‘Lime bike leg’ – is among dozens of serious traumas being linked to a surge in e-bike use across the capital and beyond, as the green revolution sweeps towns and cities from Cambridge, Manchester and Milton Keynes to Nottingham, Slough, Liverpool and Derby.

What initially began as an initiative for clean, convenient transport has become, for a growing number of users, a one-way trip to A&E.

In orthopaedic wards across London, surgeons are seeing an increase in otherwise healthy young people arriving in emergency units with tibia and femur fractures, mangled knees and crushed wrists. (snip)

‘E-bike injuries are in general very common now – we are seeing them on a daily basis,’ [Jaison Patel, a trauma and orthopaedic knee consultant] says.

‘I see broken bones, wrist fractures, collarbones, femur and a few tibia fractures as well as open fractures (when the bone has come through the skin). It definitely feels like an upward trend – a lot of my colleagues have mentioned that they too have seen an increase.’

We’re saving the planet, Jaison. Might want to focus on that, instead of all the broken bones. Sheesh!

Oh, and, being a Daily Mail piece, the broken bones and injuries keep going on and on.