CalBike Calls on Southern California Cities to Reverse Discriminatory Bicycle Regulations

E-bikes have grown in popularity over the past few years and are now the top-selling electric vehicle in the US. Along with their increased presence on California streets has come a backlash. While some of the ire has come from people driving cars who don’t want to share “their” streets with any kind of bike rider, some of the hostility toward e-bikes has come from other bike riders. Some dedicated bicyclists think an electric boost is cheating. Others complain about e-bikes going too fast on shared-use paths or in bike lanes. 

What all these complaints (from people in cars or on bikes) have in common is a fear of something new. If you’re old enough to remember everyone being up in arms over the proliferation of shared e-scooters just a few years ago, the pattern will be familiar to you. Now, scooters are a popular and well-used form of shared micromobility with few complaints.

There are good reasons to support the e-bike boom, even if you never want to ride one. Here are just a few.

The e-bike boom contributes to safety in numbers

Studies have shown that the more people ride bikes, the safer it is to ride a bike. So, if adding e-bikes to California streets means an increase in the number of people on bikes, we are all safer. Safety in numbers is one way the e-bike boom contributes to overall bicycle safety.

More bike riders = more demand for safe bikeways

The “windshield perspective” of people who mainly get around by car often dominates public meetings about changes in local streets. The more people who ride bikes — and therefore understand the importance of including connected, protected bikeways — the more voices in the room advocating for bike facilities. 

Perhaps, someday, so many people will get around by bike that communities will install wider bikeways with fast and slow lanes for people biking at different speeds. (We can dream!)

E-bikes are a gateway drug to the joy of bike riding

Some people who ride standard bikes feel like adding an electric boost (or, heaven forbid, a throttle!) is cheating. The bicycle is a beautiful machine, efficient and elegant. It’s terrific exercise — so why ruin it with a motor?

Classic bikes are fabulous for transportation and exercise. So are e-bikes. Studies show that people who ride e-bikes get as much exercise as those on conventional bikes because, although e-bikes require less energy per mile, their riders tend to make longer bike trips. 

For people who don’t feel they can ride a conventional bike because of physical limitations, challenging topography, or the need to transport goods or passengers, the electric motor provides a 100% boost in their time on a bike. E-bikes give people who may feel unsure of their physical fitness the confidence to go for a ride, providing an introduction, or re-introduction, to the joy of bike riding.

Electric bikes make active transportation accessible to a broader range of riders

Not everyone can ride a conventional bike. People with health conditions or those just getting older may need a boost to get up a hill or to get home. Electric bikes offer a helping hand to parents who need to transport kids to school and after-school activities or folks hauling groceries. 

Someone with a long commute might not have time to get there on a classic bike, but the extra speed of an e-bike and the boost can help them arrive on time. E-bikes are crucial to biking in a warming climate because they make it viable to ride on hotter days. An e-bike might enable someone to get to a job that’s hard to reach by public transit, saving them hundreds of dollars a month in driving expenses. 

Yes, e-bikes are fun (as are standard bikes). But they’re also eminently practical, making bike riding a viable transportation choice for more Californians. E-bikes make biking more equitable and open to more people, and that’s something we should all be able to get behind.

E-bikes have the potential to make biking a mainstream mode of transportation in the US

Creating the conditions that allow biking to be a mainstream, common, and comfortable way to get around California communities is central to CalBike’s mission. Since most car trips are less than 3 miles, many more people should be able to use bikes (classic or electric) for everyday transportation.

Infrastructure is critical to getting more people on bikes, but it’s not the only piece of the puzzle. E-bikes make this joyous, healthy, low-carbon form of transportation accessible to a broader range of ages and abilities, and we hope all bike advocates will join us in welcoming e-bike riders on our shared streets.

E-bikes can help push California past the tipping point to reimagine our neighborhoods for a post-carbon future. We dream of a world with ample room to safely walk and bike to get around our communities, with reliable public transportation for longer distances and passenger vehicles to supplement these modes. To get to that world, bicycling can’t be exclusive or only for those brave and fit enough to tangle with fast-moving traffic on roadways designed for speed over safety. We must welcome everyone who wants to pedal to our movement — the slow rollers and fast movers, the young and old, and everyone in between.

This is the final of a series of articles on e-bike safety. You can find links to the rest of this series on our e-bike resource page.

This post was updated to correct some technical information. Thank you to PeopleForBikes for providing additional information about lithium batteries and safety certifications.

E-bikes aren’t inherently dangerous on the road and may even be safer in some situations if the electric boost allows a rider to escape a dangerous traffic situation. Much of the current e-bike safety panic is thinly disguised bikelash. However, there is one e-bike safety concern that does have some basis in reality: battery fires.

The lithium batteries that power e-bikes (and electric cars, scooters, computers, and other devices) pack a lot of power into a relatively small space. These batteries allow e-bike riders to go 30 to 50 or more miles on a single charge. However, lithium batteries burn at high heat if they catch fire, presenting a potential hazard when riders charge their bikes inside homes or garages.

Fortunately, there are several things you can do to safely charge your e-bike battery.

Don’t leave the battery unattended while charging

Your e-bike is very unlikely to burst into flames while you’re riding; most documented e-bike battery fires have happened during charging. When a lithium e-bike battery gets plugged in to charge, it can get overheated if the membranes separating the individual battery cells are too thin. 

Don’t leave your battery plugged in overnight, and keep an eye on it while it’s charging. If it starts to get hot, unplug it immediately and take it outside of your home.

Buy a bike with a safety-tested battery

The bicycle industry advocacy group PeopleForBikes suggests buying a bike with a battery that meets UL 2849 or EN 15194 standard. The UL certification means that an independent laboratory has tested the drive system and battery to a voluntary US safety standard published by Underwriters Laboratories. The EN standard is an EU certification, and the two safety tests are very similar; either can give you peace of mind that your battery has well-constructed lithium cells and a battery management system (BMS) designed to prevent conditions like overheating, overcharging, or a short circuit that can lead to fires.

The only downside of these higher-quality batteries is that they’re expensive, adding to the price of the bike and the battery replacement cost. However, the safety tradeoff is worth it.

Don’t use aftermarket batteries or accessories

Many e-bike battery fires have been linked to aftermarket batteries. In New York City, where e-bike delivery workers can travel 100 miles or more in a day, some use batteries designed to hold a longer charge that lack the proper separation between lithium cells or lack a BMS. Poorly designed batteries can overheat during charging, which may lead to fires.

If you need to replace your e-bike battery, buy the battery designed for the motor on your bike.

Extension cords have also been linked to battery fires. Always plug your battery charger directly into an outlet.

Protect your battery from the elements

When e-bike batteries get damaged, they’re more susceptible to catching fire. Don’t use a battery pack with a damaged case. To keep your battery healthy, protect it from the elements and extreme temperatures as much as possible. 

How the California E-Bike Incentive Program could improve e-bike safety

In addition to a general movement across the country to ensure the safety of e-bike batteries, California’s E-Bike Incentive Program, which will launch soon, could have a positive impact on battery safety. The program, which will provide millions of dollars of incentives to help low-income Californians purchase e-bikes, mandates that eligible models must have safety-tested batteries. That could motivate manufacturers to focus more on battery safety and retailers to gravitate toward e-bikes with batteries that have been proven to be safe. CalBike applauds the California Air Resources Board for making this standard one of the elements of the program.

The greatest e-bike safety threat remains poorly designed streets

While lithium battery safety is important, it’s not the biggest safety threat for people who use e-bikes for transportation or recreation. Most of the e-bike-related fires in the US have occurred in New York City, but many more people have been killed by traffic violence while riding e-bikes. Over half the e-bike crashes nationwide during the study period of a recent NTSB report occurred in the five boroughs of New York City.

California has, fortunately, seen relatively few fires caused by improper e-bike charging or overheated batteries. But traffic violence poses a real and ongoing threat to people on all types of bikes and CalBike is committed to working toward safer streets for all vulnerable road users.

“Teens Are Dying on E-Bikes. Should California Regulate Them?” This recent New York Times headline exemplifies a disturbing trend in reporting on e-bike safety. Headlines like this imply that e-bikes are lethal (not motor vehicle drivers colliding with people on e-bikes) and perpetuate the dehumanization of people who ride bikes and make invisible the role of traffic violence perpetrated by motor vehicles.

To combat what is, at its core, anti-bike sentiment, we look at examples of reporting on micromobility, good and bad, and provide suggestions for more accurate and balanced coverage of e-bike safety. We hope this guide will assist journalists and help the rest of us become more savvy news consumers.

Collisions are not accidents 

One of the most basic tenets of reporting on traffic injuries and fatalities is that most traffic collisions are not accidents. An accident is something beyond the parties’ control that can’t be avoided. For example, a tree toppling onto a car is an unfortunate accident. 

Yet even the New York Times, the most respected paper in the US, included this sentence in the article cited above: “Several teenagers, in California, Oregon and other places, have died recently in e-bike accidents….” 

The first mistake here is the word “accidents.” These were fatal collisions between people riding e-bikes and people driving cars. The second mistake is labeling them “e-bike accidents,” which shows implicit bias against e-bikes and places the blame on bike riders for these collisions. Reporting like this makes the true danger (bikes sharing roadways that lack sufficient infrastructure with speeding cars and trucks) invisible.

A more accurate way to write this sentence would be: “Several teenage e-bike riders in California, Oregon, and other places have died recently after being struck by motor vehicles.” That doesn’t assign blame for the collision, but it includes both parties involved and leaves open the possibility that e-bikes are not the proximate cause of these tragedies.

Matt Richtel’s recent series of articles about the menace of e-bikes in the New York Times is beautifully deconstructed by Streetsblog’s recent article about how to spot bad bike reporting. In one piece, he says, “But the recent deaths of several teenage riders have raised concerns about the safety of some types of vehicles, and about whether they legally qualify as e-bikes.” The “vehicles” in this sentence are e-bikes, which is odd because the vehicles that led to recent deaths have all been cars or trucks. 

Once again, this renders the role of motor vehicles invisible and ignores the need for infrastructure investment, placing the blame for fatalities on the deceased riders and exonerating the system that led to their deaths. It’s also hard not to see the hysteria about e-bikes as hypocritical when we accept tens of thousands of deaths by car annually as the cost of modern transportation. 

Don’t paint e-bike riders as reckless thrill seekers

Recent e-bike rhetoric has borrowed an old anti-bike trope. People riding e-bikes are reckless! They don’t care about their safety or anyone else’s—especially teenagers! It’s similar to the way some have long demonized all bike riders as crazy and lawless.

The truth is, most e-bike riders, like most bike riders, ride cautiously, knowing their vulnerability on roads shared with heavy, fast-moving cars and trucks. In riding safely, sometimes people on bikes do things people driving cars aren’t expecting, such as take the lane. Of course, some bike riders make unsafe choices on the road at times, as do some car drivers. But implying that all e-bike riders (or even all teen riders) are reckless is incorrect and biased reporting.

A quote from the New York Times piece shows this bias: “In the span of a few days, two teenage boys riding electric bicycles had collided with cars.” From reading this, you might assume the e-bike riders rode recklessly, but that is not the case. 

One of the boys referred to in that sentence was Brodee Champlain-Kingman, whom witnesses described as following the rules of the road and “doing everything right.” He was rear-ended by a van. It’s hard to understand how that could be described as him colliding with a car. In the other instance, the person interviewed about the collision didn’t witness it but found the bike rider under the wheels of the car. While we don’t know who was at fault, it sounds as if the car struck the bicyclist, not the other way around.

Let’s rewrite this sentence for clarity: “In the span of a few days, two teenagers were struck by cars, and one later died from their injuries.”

10News gets it almost right in its account of the same incident: “Brodee Champlain-Kingman was riding his electric bike north on South El Camino Real when he tried to make a left turn onto Santa Fe Avenue. He was hit by a work van.” Change that to “the driver of a work van,” and it’s an accurate and fair description of the crash.

Be skeptical of official sources

ABC7 headlines a piece on those scary, scary e-bikes with a statement attributed to Huntington Beach police: “E-bikes pose dangers to novice users.” While all vehicles are more challenging for novices, especially cars, this headline makes it sound like e-bikes are dangerous speed machines that riders can’t control.

A little factual information might be helpful here. Yes, people are able to ride faster on an e-bike than they could on a regular bike, but the most common e-bikes top out at 20 mph, a speed that a fast road biker can easily surpass. People still generally ride e-bikes slower than most people drive their cars, even on narrow streets. If someone on an e-bike has a solo crash, they may get more injured than they would on a standard bike because of the greater weight of the bike. A person on an e-bike has no more defense against a 2-ton vehicle than any other vulnerable road user (people biking, walking, on scooters, etc.).

A more accurate way to say this might be: “Riding on roadways lacking safe bike infrastructure poses a danger to novice and expert bicycle and e-bike riders.” 

Another account of the crash that killed Champlain-Kingman, this one from NBC7 in San Diego, includes this sentence: “The San Diego Sheriff’s Department said he rode into the path of a work van, was hit and was taken to the hospital where he later died.”

While the reporter has plausible deniability because they’re repeating a statement from the sheriff, it’s irresponsible to repeat a statement that heavily blames the bike rider, as if he recklessly “rode into the path” of the van. Again, we know that he was aware of safe bike riding practices and did what he was supposed to do.

This statement implies that the van owns the road in front of it (“the path of the van”), rather than the van driver having a responsibility to not run into other road users. In addition, the use of passive voice (“was hit”) reinforces the inevitability of this collision. 

The sheriff’s statement removes agency from the van driver and places the blame squarely on the bike rider: He rode into the path of a van and was hit. It’s part of a larger trend of treating traffic violence as a crime without a perpetrator, a force of nature. The bike rider is mentioned but not the van driver, removing culpability from the human behind the wheel to drive cautiously, look out for vulnerable road users, or even brake in time.

This framing also renders the role of infrastructure invisible. Why was the bike rider forced “into the path” of a motor vehicle? Probably because he was trying to get somewhere on his bike, and that required him to mix with fast-moving motor vehicle traffic.

The way we talk about traffic violence bolsters our society’s “cars will be cars” attitude, one that accepts roadway deaths as inevitable. A better way to report on this might be: “The San Diego Sheriff’s Department said the driver of a work van hit him, and he was taken to the hospital where he later died of his injuries.”

Take the time to get the facts straight

In one of its pieces on Brodee Champlain-Kingman’s death, NBC7 includes this informational nugget: “The state of California does have some laws regarding e-bikes, including a minimum age of 16 years old for anyone riding an e-bike that can go over 28 miles per hour.” Unfortunately, this is incorrect. Class III e-bikes are restricted to riders at least 16 years old, but they have a maximum speed of 28 mph. California’s e-bike classifications top out at 20 mph (Class I and II) and 28 mph, information easily accessible from the DMV.

Even government agencies sometimes mangle the truth in their rush to paint e-bikes as dangerous. A 2022 National Transportation Safety Board report that, while rightly highlighting the need for better data collection to determine the number of collisions involving micromobility devices, is chock full of misstatements. For example, the report says, “In fact, a study conducted using data from 180 University of California, Los Angeles, outpatient clinics, found that e-bikes may have a higher rate of fatalities than motorcycles and cars (Kimon and others 2022).” The only thing correct in this sentence is the name of the primary author and the number of clinics whose data were surveyed. The cited study is of e-scooter injuries, not e-bikes, and the abstract concludes: “Our observed e-scooter injury rate is likely an underestimate, but is similar to that previously reported for motorcycles. However, the comparative severity of injuries is unknown.” And injury rate is a percentage based on mode share, not an absolute number. In absolute numbers, cars are the biggest menace to pedestrians, bike riders, other cars, and often themselves.

Here are the facts:

• More people ride e-bikes now, so more bike-involved crashes involve someone on an e-bike.
• Deaths of vulnerable road users have risen over the past several years. The proximate cause of most of those deaths was collision with a motor vehicle. The largest increase has been in pedestrian deaths.
• Occasionally, someone on a bicycle or e-bike hits a pedestrian and injures or kills them. These incidents are so rare that it’s impossible to determine trends. 

Stories that got it right

There are, unfortunately, many more examples of how to get it wrong when reporting on e-bike safety. But there are also reporters and news outlets that get it right. Here are a few positive examples of reporting on bike and scooter collisions.

• NBC Bay Area. Headline: “Electric Bike Rider Killed in Crash With Tesla in Fremont.” The first sentence repeats this basic information. No mention of an “accident,” and both parties to the crash are cited.
• The Coast News Group, reporting on the death of Christine Embree in Carlsbad. Despite calling the crash an “e-bike death” in the headline, the article states: “The city is reeling after a Carlsbad woman riding an e-bike with her 16-month-old child was struck and killed by a vehicle….”
• KPBS reporting on Embree’s death. This article mentions the need for “safer roads” in the headline, includes the fact that the victim’s husband complained to the city about speeding in their neighborhood just weeks earlier, and has perspective from the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition. It also includes this description of the incident, in a quote from Embree’s husband: “Never in a million years did I think three weeks later, my wife, would be hit by a 42-year-old female who lived in the neighborhood traveling approximately 40 miles an hour and blew a stop sign.” That clarity in describing the driver and her actions should be a model for reporting, when the information is available.
• The Delmar Times did a deep dive into the data on collisions involving bike riders to find the data behind Carlsbad’s 2022 declaration of emergency around e-bikes. While the piece doesn’t question police attribution of fault, it provides a trove of data and data visualizations, something we’d like to see more of as discussions around e-bike safety evolve.
• ABC7 Los Angeles offers a model for how to write a headline about a crash between a motor vehicle driver and a bike rider.

Tips for fair and accurate reporting on collisions involving e-bikes

Many reporters can and do get it right when reporting on e-bike safety. Here are some tips for accurate reporting on e-bike safety and bike-involved collisions:

• Talk to bike coalitions and advocates from safe streets advocates, not just car drivers. Consult with organizations like the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals, which have committed to helping reduce bias in crash reporting. If you’re not sure who to call, call us at CalBike and we’ll help!
• Look for evidence. Don’t conflate anecdotal accounts with a huge rise in collisions due to e-bikes.
• Don’t rely on law enforcement to provide the full picture of a collision. Information on the size of the vehicle, the roadway conditions (especially in a bikeway), and actions taken (or not taken) by drivers is often absent from these accounts. 
• Don’t take official data about the parties responsible for accidents at face value. Police attribution of blame in crashes may be skewed by anti-bike bias, especially in collisions involving bike riders under 18.
• Compare data on fatalities among all vulnerable road users to find trends and potential causes. For example, the rate of pedestrians killed by cars is rising faster than the rate of people killed while riding bikes. That points to other culprits, such as distracted driving and new car and truck designs that are more lethal to vulnerable road users.
• Unless the situation appears to involve equipment failure or a solo crash with injuries, don’t imply the e-bike is responsible for the injuries due to the speed of the bike. No vulnerable road user will fare well when tangling with a motor vehicle, whether they are riding an e-bike or not.
• Don’t imply that a “car hit a bike.” Unless it’s a self-driving car, a person was behind the wheel, and they’re responsible for the safe operation of their vehicle. Include the driver in the story.
• When missing or inadequate infrastructure plays a role in conflicts between people on bikes and people in cars, call that out.