From “Fun Toy” to Trauma Ward: The E-Bike Crisis

E bikes out of control. E bikes are out of control. According to the New York Times, America quietly turned loose a fleet of unregulated high powered E bikes and emotos. And the crash that nearly killed 15 year old Amelia Stafford shows the cost. Amelia hopped on the back of a friend's emoto for a short ride. No helmet, no license, no training. The bike toppled. Her friends laughed until they saw the blood. Surgeons had to remove part of her skull. One doctor says e bike trauma now looks more like what seen in motorcycle crashes than bicycle falls. In Marin county, the chance of dying from a pedal bike injury is about 0.3%. On an e bike, it's 11%. Huge, huge difference. Nationwide, e bike injuries have exploded tenfold as sales boomed. These aren't bikes. Plus, as one friend put it, they're mini motorcycles. We need speed limits, age limits, licensing, and real enforcement. Or we're just letting kids ride deregulated motorbikes through school zones. Okay, what's the real message here? These E bikes are out of control. It's like giving full powered motorcycles to small children and people are getting run over and killed. It's time to, first of all get actual kids on real bicycles again so they get a little exercise. And for everyone else, it's time to regulate it, put some speed limits. You don't need to go more than about 15 miles an hour on a bike. You want to go faster than that, take another form of transportation. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. Now, I don't want to be a hypocrite. I do have not an E bike. I do have an e quadricycle. And this is something that you've seen in circuses, you've seen it in TV shows. You see it on boardwalks in Jersey, in Atlantic City. You see it at the zoo in Miami. So I'm pedaling this bike. It kind of looks like a golf cart. It kind of looks like a Fred Flintstone car if you're old enough to remember that cartoon. And I do have an electric assist now, mine doesn't go more than about, I think, eight miles an hour. It also, because it's on four wheels and has a roof, it's pretty stable. You see it coming, it's easy to spot, and I think it's pretty safe. I've not seen any injuries on quadricycles and there are too few of them, I think, to actually show the stats. So having said all that, I got to tell you, these, these E bikes are out of control frequently when I'M in New York City. I like to walk up and down the Hudson River. There's a great walkway through Chelsea, Upper west side. And it used to always be relatively calm. You would see people biking, pedaling. Yeah. They would go a little bit faster. They'd say, on your left or on your right. Everyone got along well with the last few times I've been there, they're zooming by so quickly that it's almost. I've seen almost near death a couple of times. Someone is. A pedestrian is not expecting a bike to come by 35 miles an hour or more. And they are zooming. Now, there are signs that say no E bikes there, but people just ignore the rule. Perhaps the new mayor can do something about that. I question the wisdom of so many parents giving their kids E bikes. Well, but TJ all the other kids have E bike. What's wrong with your kid pedaling? I have to. I have to sound like a grumpy old man, but I just don't know what was wrong with my childhood where I actually pedaled a bike all over the neighborhood constantly. And did we do stupid things on our bikes? Sure. My friends and I were of the generation where we all wanted to be Evil Knievel. So we would build these ramps out of old doors, and there were. Sometimes they would go four feet up, two doors together, and instead of jumping over cars, as Evel Knievel did, we would jump over Christmas trees and count how many Christmas trees. And sometimes we got hurt. Fortunately, I never broke anything. But it's not that every childhood needs to be risk free, but do we need to dramatically superpower the risk children have and at the very same time reduce their options of getting exercise? Now, if you have some kind of physical mobility problem and you're simply unable to ride a bike and pedal it under your own power, okay, get an E bike. But if you have a healthy child, healthy teenager, get them E bikes, let them pedal. We're in a nationwide epidemic of obesity. 70% of Americans, depending on how you define it, are either officially obese or are overweight or both. And part of the issue is we just aren't doing anything. We're not moving enough. If you're sitting on an E bike and all of your action consists of your. Your wrist, hand movement moving 10cm, you're not getting any exercise or certainly nothing compared to actually pedaling. Now, by the way, when I'm on my E bike, I. I am pedaling in my equadricycle. I am pedaling the entire Time. One of the reasons I got it is I wanted to, in fact, get more exercise. I did not want to be one of these old guys in Florida puttering around on a golf cart. I might look like an old guy in Florida and every other aspect, but nobody sees me just sitting on my buttocks riding a golf cart around. And I'm kind of happy about that. Okay, back to the real issue of these E bikes. I'd like to know from you, are you seeing these in your own community as a problem? Now, I live in a pretty safe suburb that is still being built out. There's a lot of empty lots and empty houses here. But I'm already seeing kids, and they're all nice kids zooming really fast, doing wheelies and, hey, I like to do wheelies on my banana bike back in the 70s, but it wasn't motorized. It's just easier to not only hurt yourself, but to hurt others. And that's my big problem. If you want to do something risky for yourself and you're over 18, you should be allowed to. The problem is when you're on streets, when you're on sidewalks, when you're on bike paths where people are used to a bike going by at 10 miles an hour, and now you're zooming by at 30 miles an hour, it's just too easy to kill someone or to harm yourself. It is time we have more regulation. And if you're going to be on a public street, a public sidewalk, a public bike path, there needs to be some miles per hour limit. Now, some of these, these E motorcycles, really what they are, they call themselves E bikes are going 30, 38 miles an hour, and kid gets on no helmet. It is asking for brain damage. Essentially, California now pilots age limits and helmet rules for these Class 2 bikes. I think they're on to something. And, you know, everyone's in favor of get big government out of my life. But, you know, if your kid's a vegetable for the rest of your life, maybe big government's not so bad all the time. The fatality risk, again, they're just so much higher for these E bikes. Nationally, according to the times, E bike injuries jump from 2,200 to 23,000. In just the last four years. Head injuries from E bike crashes increased 49 fold between 2017 and 2022. Now, I have been on vacation. Full disclosure, when I've been on vacation in certain cities, I know once in Austrian Alps, my family and I, we rented E bikes. And it was enjoyable. I did wear helmets. I did stay off main streets and one of the best times ever was out in San Francisco you cross the Golden Gate Bridge and then you're up, going up and down the mountains. In Sausalito it is much more enjoyable because those are some steep mountains if you're pedaling on your own. So I see the need especially in mountainous areas. But I live in South Florida. It's completely flat. You have to exert very little energy to propel a bike when it's flat and at some point it's not for everyone but for a lot of people it's just profound laziness. And my concern is we're embracing this technology. I love technology, I use technology. But to embrace technology that on the one hand makes you physically much less fit on the other hand dramatically increases accidents, injuries, head injuries and even death. That's not a win win proposition. That's not a win lose proposition. That is a win. That is, excuse me, a lose lose propos.