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
Honestly i think the big problem isn’t regulation, it’s the lack of good bike infrastructure.
People only ride on sidewalks because they feel unsafe on the road and don’t have any other option, so if you make sure there are bike paths (even if they’re shared with pedestrians, just make them wide enough) that take people where they want to go, then they’ll generally stop being a nuistance for pedestrians.
And people get these pseudo-mopeds because they want the benefits of the e-bike format (lighter, less regulated, can go on bike paths) but feel a need to go fast, which isn’t helped by forcing them to share space with drivers of gargantuan vehicles that consider 30km/h to be frustratingly slow…
Another big problem is people having to travel ludicrous distances all the time, which surely contributes to this problem being so common in big cities (and the entirety of the US).
My town has a really decent bike network and yeah, i don’t really ever see people going upsettingly fast other than e-scooter riders (and even then it’s not that common). People who want to go fast just get actual mopeds or motorbikes, and people who want the form factor of an e-bike don’t feel the need to go faster than 25km/h, which generally works fine since there’s enough space on the shared paths.
Then look at london, where Evan lives… Infamous for generally having bike infrastructure summed up as “slightly better than nothing” to the point where some basic fucking bike paths got branded as “bicycle superhighways”…