In brief, UK reporting on “ebike” collisions and battery fires confuses lawful, UK/EU-compliant electric bicycles with illegal, unregistered, uninsured electric motorcycles. As a result, public perception is deeply skewed compared to the actual risks posed by bona-fide electric bicycles.
A similar phenomenon can be seen in California, but there is drafted legislation to mandate accurate advertising of “e-motos” versus ebikes, with fines accruing to vendors that fail to correctly represent what they’re selling.
IMO, it’s hard for me to blame consumers whom, given high gasoline/petrol prices, need some form of transportation that gets them where they need to go and minimizes external harms (eg automobile risk of injury). Evan correctly identifies vendors and importers that flout the law and push the legal risk into riders. At the same time, e-motos are legit for off-road use and here in California, they’re great fun in that regard. At bottom, fair advertising isn’t controversial; it’s no different than wanting to know the ingredients in food products.
On a separate note, Evan also flagged a case of police misidentification and confiscation of a lawful e-bike. Which I find particularly surprising, given that UK police tend to be more uniformly instructed than their American counterparts. No doubt that Californian police have also confused ebikes with electric motorcycles on occasion, but the result in the UK seems is to go immediately to confiscation and destruction without any meaningful system of review. Which seems problematic, at best
Yes, I totally agree with you.
The US is a bit complicated because there aren’t really national laws governing trail usage. Most are managed by local municipalities and the rules vary. However, anecdotally I will say that most do not allow class 3 e-bikes. I know mine do not. However, based on comments I see it appears the rules are widely flouted.
Yeah, they’re technically not allowed in a lot of places. But there’s absolutely zero enforcement of this.
Part of the problem is that enforcement would be a huge pain. The difference between a legal and an illegal ebike is often impossible to discern at a distance, so actual effective enforcement would require stopping and closely inspecting all suspicious-looking ebikes, which would be a huge pain for people who are riding legal ones. (And would cost a lot of money to pay the enforcers.)
Yeah I agree with you. Not to mention the potential violence any amount of police involvement inevitably brings.
However it’s starting to feel like there needs to be some kind of solution. If we don’t come up with a good one, a bad one may be forced on us. Unfortunately, I don’t really have any easy fixes.
Well, there’s the possibility of enforcement at the manufacture/import/sale level. Make it illegal to manufacture/import/sell any ‘ebike’ that’s too powerful or too fast. (Defined as any vehicle in the general shape of a bicycle or tricycle, having bicycle-like pedals, and exceeding speed/power limits.)
That moves enforcement away from the street level, making it less difficult and less dangerous.
You’ll still have some issues with previously existing overpowered ebikes, and from the occasional person who builds/modifies a DIY one of their own, but that will be much rarer and much less of a problem than what we have now, where anybody can buy one off of Amazon at any time … often maybe not even realizing what exactly it is that they’re buying.