Good morning. Today, we’re looking at the dangers of e-bikes. Injuries and deaths are rising — but the law hasn’t kept up.
Bearing down
Sometimes I bike to work. It’s a 12-mile workout alongside the Potomac River — a lovely route. I pedal hard. But a few times per ride, I get a shock: An e-bike zooms past me like an angry locomotive, doing almost 30 miles per hour. It’s always another commuter, like me, schlepping his laptop and shoes to work in a backpack. I wonder each time: What happens if you crash at that speed? The Times Magazine answered that question today. E-bikes are heavy and fast — in some ways closer to a motorcycle than a manual two-wheeler — and they’ve proliferated in the last few years. So have the injuries associated with them, rising by a factor of 10. Policymakers haven’t caught up. I spoke to David Darlington, a freelance journalist who wrote about the issue. It seems like a good thing that a popular new tech is getting us out of our cars and homes more, no? E-bikes are awesome. They’re fun to ride, they ease the pain of hills and headwinds, and they’re already cutting demand for oil by a million barrels per day — four times as much as all the world’s electric cars. But people need to be educated, not just about e-bikes but safe cycling practices in general. The author of one study told me that Americans think of bicycles as toys: They aren’t taken seriously as vehicles, so they don’t require licenses or “driver’s manuals.” But many of the new devices — still defined as “low-speed bicycles” under the law — have powerful motors and travel at speeds that are dangerous for inexperienced riders. How scared should we be? Some devices are more menacing than others. The scariest are “e-motos,” which look like mini-motorcycles and aren’t legal e-bikes at all. I profiled a high school student, Amelia Stafford, who went for a short ride on a friend’s e-moto and ended up with a traumatic brain injury. Pedestrians have been killed when speeding riders ran into them. Is that because riders go so much faster? The top allowed speed is 28 miles per hour. That class of bike is supposed to stay on the road, though enforcement is practically nonexistent. The ones that go 20 m.p.h. are allowed in bike lanes, but even those are faster than “analog” bikes — and the motor can often be “unlocked” to exceed those speeds, hitting 45 m.p.h. and more. Plus, e-bikes usually weigh more than 50 pounds. That’s a lot of inertia, even at a legal speed. So the result is more gruesome when they get out of control. One hospital in Marin County, Calif., studied the crashes there and found that the chance of dying from a conventional bike crash is less than 1 percent, but for e-bikes it was 11 percent. What are the rules for e-bikes? There are few federal laws other than limiting the top speed to 28 m.p.h. (In Europe, it’s 15.5 m.p.h.) Aside from that, states and counties and cities come up with their own rules. You might be required to wear a helmet, or stay out of public parks, or refrain from operating an e-bike with a hand throttle (as opposed to getting a boost only when you pedal) in your town. But if you venture into the next town, none of that may apply. Safety advocates are pressing for tougher rules. Is this the beginning of the sort of crusade that brought us seatbelts? What does the movement look like? Matt Willis, who was Marin County’s public health officer at the time of Amelia Stafford’s crash there, told me, “The technology has moved forward way faster than our ability to measure its impact or develop sensible regulation.” Monica Stafford, Amelia’s mom, thinks that management of e-bikes is at an embryonic stage of development — like automobiles 100 years ago. (Although electric bikes were invented before cars!) Read David’s piece and learn what happened to Amelia Stafford.
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