On a Sunday morning in the summer of 2024, Shivam Sharma, a 27-year-old Delhi resident, went with his friends to rent Yulu e-bikes at Connaught Place. “We were all really excited because none of us had ridden an electric bike before,” Sharma told us. But he was disappointed. “There was a huge crowd with only a limited number of bikes, many of which were in bad condition. I thought I would be able to pick the best one, but I was wrong,” he said. “Because of the rush, you do not get to choose—you just take whatever bike you get, no matter how it is. Mine was not working properly. I had to stop it with my feet.” At the Yulu rental station in nearby Barakhamba, 37-year-old Yaadram Yadav, another Delhi resident, was trying to book an e-bike for the second time in a month. “I use this electric bicycle to learn how to ride a motorbike,” he said.
Most e-bike stations in the city have no staff to guide users or maintain the equipment. But this was still better than the condition of the bicycles available outside metro stations in central Delhi, whose blue and green colours were muted by a layer of dust. They stood as silent monuments to a larger failure: Delhi’s persistent inability, over decades, to embrace cycling as a viable and sustainable mode of transport, owing in large part to policy hurdles and safety concerns.
“People do not understand the concept of renting bicycles yet. These are only leisure for now,” Dhriti Bahal, a storyteller with Delhi By Cycle, a company that has been organising rides in the city for years, said. Rental services are not yet seen as practical transport options. For most Delhi residents, the use of bicycles remains limited to casual rides—barring, of course, gig workers employed with quick-commerce apps, the most ubiquitous users of e-bikes in the city, who can be seen zipping across Delhi roads to complete deliveries.
In 2023, Bahal’s company proposed to a Delhi government body that it could put bicycles around metro stations to benefit both tourists and daily commuters. Bahl said one official told her, “Delhi mein cycle karne wale log nahi hain”—Delhi does not have a cycling population. Another official said, ”Indians can’t cycle.” Sharma, too, felt that Delhi lacked a cycling culture. “In Bangalore, people often commute to their offices by bicycle,” he said. “There is a growing culture of using personal or rental cycles for daily travel.” By contrast, Delhi has very few dedicated bicycle stands and a different public mindset. “People here think riding a bicycle is not classy,” he added.