Another Blow for E-bike Users in Chiswick
Ealing Council ejects Forest limiting further cross border ride options
E-bikes parked near St. Michael and All Angels Church
March 8, 2026
A decision by Ealing Council to order Forest off its streets has made e-bike use in the Chiswick area even more difficult with only one operator now serving the whole postcode.
Towards the end of February 2026, Ealing Council instructed Forest — the London-founded e-bike operator — to cease operations in the borough which includes most of Bedford Park and Acton Green. Forest had been running without a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Ealing, having expanded its geofence into the eastern portion of the borough in August 2025 to allow its Hounslow users to travel across the boundary to meet demand after Lime was excluded from that borough. At its peak, the operator had an estimated 450 to 500 bikes available for hire within Ealing at any one time, according to a council check of the Forest app in December 2025. Most of these are believed to have been in use at the borough boundary.
The instruction leaves Voi as the only operator whose service area spans both Hounslow and Ealing borough and therefore can be ridden and parked anywhere in Chiswick — a situation that is already putting pressure on supply. With Lime excluded from Hounslow since August 2025, and Forest now excluded from Ealing too, riders in the Chiswick wishing to travel across borough boundaries who previously had access to three operators now have just one. Ealing's own council report acknowledges that Voi operates with a fleet cap of just 500 bikes in the borough, compared to Lime's 1,300. Users have reported increasing difficulty locating available bikes, particularly during peak commuting hours.
The legal basis for ordering Forest out was laid in a cabinet report presented to Ealing Council on 11 February. This document laid out a new enforcement policy targeting both mis-parked bikes from permitted operators and any bikes from operators without an MoU.
Forest had no agreement with Ealing, which in practice meant its riders had no parking restrictions in the Forest app pointing them to Ealing's approved parking locations. Council officers were unable to access live fleet data from Forest, and the operator had no obligation to remove mis-parked bikes or comply with the borough's mandatory designated parking areas..
The report notes that Ealing's approved operators — Lime and Voi — together hold a combined fleet cap of 1,800 bikes, a figure determined in part by the number of available parking bays across the borough. Forest's estimated 500 bikes were operating on top of that cap, with no corresponding parking infrastructure, and with no app-based enforcement directing users to designated bays. Officers described this as increasing parking pressure on a network already in transition from virtual to physically marked bays, with non-compliant hotspots concentrated around Acton and Ealing town centres.
Under the new enforcement procedure, any operator without an MoU is first instructed to reinstate a geofence excluding the borough. If mis-parked bikes are subsequently reported, operators have two hours to remove them before a Fixed Penalty Notice is issued directly to the company. For persistent non-compliance, the council reserved the right to seek a court injunction. The policy was approved for a six-month pilot running from February to August 2026.
More restrictions were introduced due to misparked bikes
Ealing's enforcement approach closely mirrors one already introduced by Hounslow, which published its own dockless e-bike enforcement procedure under which any non-permitted bike found anywhere on the adopted highway — including within a designated parking bay — is deemed mis-parked and subject to removal.
Unlike Hounslow, which ran a competitive tender process before awarding contracts to Forest and Voi in August 2025, Ealing signed its MoUs with Lime and Voi without a formal procurement exercise. Voi was added as a second operator alongside Lime in April 2025, following the departure of Dott and Tier, and after an assessment of operators based on criteria including presence in neighbouring boroughs, types of bikes offered, existing working relationships, and data sharing.
The existing MoUs are set to expire on 25 July and from 25 April, Ealing can begin considering new agreements, and the council report flags that a formal procurement process — similar to those now pursued by around five London boroughs — is under active consideration. Forest may, in principle, be back in the picture after the MoUs lapse, should it choose to bid for a new agreement. That possibility is noted in the cabinet report, though officers are clear that until any new arrangement is in place, unlicensed operation will not be tolerated.
For riders in Chiswick — which straddles the Hounslow-Ealing border — the practical consequences are immediate. Forest operates across both Hounslow and the neighbouring boroughs of Brent and Hammersmith & Fulham, but is now excluded from Ealing. A rider starting a Forest journey from, say, Chiswick High Road and heading towards Ealing Broadway or Acton will find their bike unable to end a trip in Ealing. Voi remains the only operator that bridges both boroughs, but with just 500 bikes deployed in Ealing, demand frequently outstrips availability.
The powering down or geo-fence exclusion of operators from either borough has led to large number of bikes being deposited at borough boundaries. Large number of e-bikes are left in the vicinity of Turnham Green Tube station and around St. Michael and All Angels Church.
The situation is grimly familiar to anyone who has followed the Hounslow-Richmond boundary dispute that erupted after Hounslow replaced Lime with Forest and Voi in August 2025. There, with Lime still operating in Richmond but banned in Hounslow, riders began dumping bikes at the boundary as electric motors cut out at the borough threshold. Comedian Dara O Briain memorably compared the scene to Checkpoint Charlie. The Chiswick border between Hounslow and Ealing risks becoming a new flashpoint of exactly the same kind.
Lime had operated in Hounslow borough since 2023 and had built a substantial user base: by June 2025, nearly 30,000 active users were making over 127,000 trips a month. But complaints about poorly parked bikes dumped on pavements — blocking wheelchair users, families with prams and visually impaired pedestrians — had been accumulating. The council's MoU with Lime expired in May 2025, and rather than renew it, Hounslow ran a competitive tender. Forest and Voi were appointed as exclusive operators from 11 August 2025, with Lime geofenced out of the borough entirely.
The announcement sparked immediate controversy. Lime disputed that poor parking was the real reason for its removal, suggesting instead that a rival had simply offered the council more money. That allegation gained traction when procurement documents were published which showed that Forest had scored just 45 out of 60 in the quality section of its bid — being marked down on parking management, safe vehicle design, and affordability — yet had achieved a perfect score of 40 out of 40 in the fees section, with its financial offer said to be approximately five times the council's initial expectations. Hounslow defended its process, with cabinet member Councillor Katherine Dunne writing to clarify that the tender was weighted 60 per cent on quality and 40 per cent on price, and that because all bidders had met strong quality thresholds, price had become the deciding factor.
A spokesperson for Lime said the company's service quality had been acknowledged as superior in the bid process, but that Hounslow had chosen otherwise on commercial grounds. Lime warned that prioritising fees over quality risked creating an unpopular, patchwork network that would suppress overall cycling rates — a prediction that was borne out almost immediately, as Forest raised its pay-as-you-go service fee by 50 per cent within weeks of winning the contract, citing the doubling of borough fees it was now required to pay across London. Lime's own data suggested the operator change caused a 50 per cent drop in local trips.
A petition on Change.org calling on Hounslow Council to reinstate Lime gathered signatures from users who reported being unable to find Forest or Voi bikes for return journeys, disrupting daily routines and prolonging commute times.
The local situation is part of a wider structural problem. Each London borough currently negotiates its own arrangements with e-bike operators, producing a patchwork of permissions, exclusions and enforcement regimes. Ealing's own cabinet report notes that the council, TfL and other boroughs are working towards a pan-London micromobility licensing framework, but that this is dependent on devolution legislation passing through Parliament — and is not expected to be in place before spring 2027 at the earliest.
Until that framework arrives, individual councils will continue to act in isolation, with the border between any two boroughs potentially marking the edge of an operator's permitted zone. Industry voices have called for TfL to run a single, unified tender with a clear per-bike fee structure — similar to models operating in cities such as Paris — rather than the current situation which seems to be based on which provider can give councils the most money.
For now, Ealing's six-month pilot enforcement period runs to August 2026, the same month its existing MoUs with Lime and Voi expire. The council has said it will consider a formal procurement process at that point, and has committed to exploring pragmatic arrangements with neighbouring boroughs for boundary parking bays at key locations such as Underground stations close to the Hounslow border.
A Forest spokesperson said, "Following conversations with Ealing council, Forest riders are no longer be able to end their ride in Ealing. We’ll be working closely with the council over the coming months, and hope to return to the Borough this summer."
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