In London e-bikes have basically take over delivery of small stuff. A decade or so ago they tended to use motor scooters but there are a lot less restrictions on e-bikes.
They don't follow any road rules and ride on the footpaths at insane speeds.
They're not actually legal - I believe the law is that if they can go over 17kph without pedalling then they must be registered, have indicators, etc. But nobody seems to do anything about it.
I guess some elderly pedestrians must die before something is done.
"In the five-year period from 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2020, there were 14 deaths reported to an Australian State or Territory Coroner where an electric e-micromobility device, including e-bike, e-scooter and electronic self-balancing device, contributed to the death"
"Seven of the 14 deaths were related to e-bikes); 7 deaths were in Queensland and 5 in Victoria (by jurisdiction of investigation); 6 deaths were in the age group of 35–44 years; 5 were females."
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"Last year the state recorded eight deaths related to personal mobility devices, including e-bikes and e-scooters, quadrupling the number from the previous year, with more than 3000 people presented to 26 emergency departments."
In addition, the reporting is lacking in this area.
"Often, e-bike injuries are grouped with other road users: motorcycles, bicycles and e-scooter therefore making it difficult to track its use, correlates of it and any injury or harm from it."
There's some serious road use education and rule adjustment called for; it's a perfect storm of young riders, on and off roadways and footpaths, speed, horsepower, and mixed traffic (cars, pedestrians, eVehicles with relatively high speeds).
It's not one or the other in my eyes - both can be a problem. When someone whips by me on the sidewalk on an e-bike or moped at 20+ MPH, that's a serious danger as well. I agree that I haven't heard of anyone specifically dying from this, but it's absolutely a public danger.
An elderly pedestrian I know was recently struck by a car. Compound fractures, dislocated joints. He’s looking at a long recovery and a pile of medical bills, because the driver was barely insured and in the US we’re somehow fine with that. So it comes down to momentum transfer, and I’d much rather he’d have been struck by an e bike.
These frustrations are just as real as the resultant medical bills.
But the situation is here because we have a new technology (micromobility) that's struggling to find ways of adapting into the current car-centric infrastructure.
Another possibility is we recognize the benefits of this technology and redesign our infrastructure for it. And yes, it's a long, expensive process that requires changing minds (which is probably the hardest thing to do), so it will happen over years or decades.
So I'm not trying to diminish the problems, I'm just offering an alternative framing: clearly there's something behind this technology, and so we should be asking what does a world that incorporates it properly look like?
And there's the excessive reactionary regulation that makes people not comply with the rules.
If you put some reasonable speed limit and look at the other important factors like weight, you won't need to register anything that runs as fast as a child on skates, and can focus on what is really the problem.
I just looked it up, it's actually 25kph, which is faster than the average speed of a pedal bike rider.
So assuming that the safe amount of momentum we're happy with (without registration, etc) is that of a pedal bike rider, if we take into account the extra weight of an e-bike, that seems like a pretty lenient cutoff. Overly lenient in my opinion.
In the UK the police sometimes confiscate some of the illegal bikes that can to 30 mph+. The legal ones are limited to 15 mph. But yeah it's kind of chaotic.
Because bikes go the wrong way up one way streets, ride on sidewalks, don't use lights at night and run red lights whenever they feel like it. Think Brownian motion. If there are a lot of them (and there are in New York City) the odds of getting hit by one if you're not super duper careful is high. Worse if you are older and don't see so good or move so fast.
I don't think it is fair to compare Netherlands to other countries like UK or France because Netherlands has a well established culture around bikes and bike lane infrastructure is one of the best in the world, so it will be the last country that will have any issues because of e-bikes.
Well, we (in NL) are used to bikes going mostly the same speed and people in cars and bikes following the rules. With overpowered fat-bikes, it's now much more chaotic than a decade ago.
The established road / bike path system here runs so smoothly that changes like this cause problems. People can't seem to improvise. I've also been to Cairo a lot and had a bit of a traffic culture shock. I believe that the chaotic Cairo traffic seems to cope much better with unexpected situations.
