100,000 rides a day

More than 100,000 Londoners hop on a rental e-bike every day to get across the capital. Almost none of them think about what is on the handles.

So we went swabbing

The Daily Mail took sterile bacterial sampling swabs onto the street to test the handlebars of Britain's most popular rental bikes.

Four brands on trial

Forest, Lime, Voi and the classic Santander Bike, still known to everyone as the Boris Bike, each gave up a handlebar sample.

Worse than a toilet seat

The average rental handle carried more than 100 times as many germs as a toilet seat. The worst bike came in at 418 times dirtier.

And traces of faeces

The swabs turned up bacteria that signal recent faecal matter contamination, not just ordinary skin grime.

A boom since 2018

Lime launched its first UK bikes in 2018. Rental e-bikes are now in almost every major British city because they are fast, cheap and everywhere.

One in ten journeys

TfL reckons 10 per cent of the 1.5 million cycle trips made in London each day are on a rental of some kind. That is a lot of hands on a lot of grips.

How the test worked

Surface-swab enumeration testing: a sterile swab, then a professional lab. The sample goes onto a Petri dish and incubates at 32.5C for three days.

Counting the colonies

Scientists count the visible patches that grow. Each colony represents a live bacterium or cluster from the bike, giving a score called the aerobic colony count.

The toilet benchmark

To make the numbers mean something, the team also swabbed the seat in the gents' toilet. It scored 430,000 colony forming units.

Voi came out cleanest

The Voi bike, one of the less common brands, scored just 1,010 colony forming units. Every other bike tested was far worse.

The Boris Bike result

The Santander Bike scored 2,700,000. That is 27 times the Voi and over six times the toilet seat.

Lime at 60 million

The Lime bike returned an aerobic colony count of 60.6 million, more than 140 times the toilet seat reading.

Forest topped the chart

The dirtiest bike of all was a Forest, at 180 million colony forming units. That is 418 times the toilet seat.

Heat may hide the truth

The lab warned that a bike left unused in hot weather loses organisms, so a low score can flatter a filthy handlebar.

“If some of the bikes had not been used recently and the temperatures were high, any organisms on the surface would start to die off”

Staph by the million

The Forest sample yielded over 1.3 million colonies of Staphylococcus aureus, the staph infection bug. Usually harmless on skin, but a pathogen if it gets inside you.

E. coli and streptococci

The same sample carried E. coli and faecal streptococci in high numbers. Both can cause infection and food poisoning, and both point to recent contamination.

“These organisms do not survive long in the environment so they usually indicate a recent contamination”

Could be the birds

The lab was careful about the source. Faecal traces might be human, or they might be bird droppings landing on a parked bike.

“This contamination could be from humans, but it could also be from animals, e.g. bird droppings”

One bike per brand

This is not peer-reviewed science. A single bike was tested per brand, so no Forest is guaranteed filthy and no Voi is guaranteed clean.

The operators push back

TfL said its sample showed no E. coli or staph and that handlebars are cleaned regularly. Voi said any public surface carries bacteria. Lime and Forest declined to comment.