The e-bike panic has the shape of a moral emergency. The evidence doesn’t match.
City councils from London to New York to right here in Metro Vancouver are moving to ban e-bikes and e-scooters from sidewalks, citing pedestrian danger. It’s an easy vote; nobody wants to be the councillor who “didn’t do anything” after an elderly resident gets knocked down. But we spent the past several weeks doing what we should always do before legislating fear: checking what the best evidence says.
The most rigorous study available – 498 pedestrians struck by bicycles, e-bikes and e-scooters at a major trauma centre – found that the type of device made no statistically significant difference to how badly the pedestrian was hurt. Age mattered enormously; the vehicle didn’t. This is not a fringe finding buried in a preprint. It’s the best-designed direct test anyone has run on the exact question cities are legislating on faith.
The argument is not that we should allow e-bikes/scooters and bicycles on sidewalks. Rather, a blanket sidewalk ban, implemented without protected alternatives or pedestrian-focused safety measures, relocates the risk rather than reduces it. Pedestrian safety is fundamental, but moving inexperienced, vulnerable children and youth riders from sidewalks into high-speed traffic can substantially increase injury severity.
Effective policy should reduce risk for both groups simultaneously through audibility requirements, enforceable low-speed limits in shared spaces used by vulnerable road users, targeted enforcement against overpowered devices and protected infrastructure that removes the conflict altogether.
If you push e-bikes off the sidewalk without giving them anywhere safer to go, they don’t vanish; they merge into traffic built predominantly for motor vehicles without consideration of other vulnerable road users. The physics here should worry us as much as the physics of a bike hitting a pedestrian worried city council: the energy gap between a car at 60 km/h hitting a bicycle is in the same range as a bicycle at 30 km/h hitting a pedestrian. We are not eliminating danger by relocating e-bikers. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says as much plainly: riders’ own injuries get worse, not better, when a motor vehicle is involved, and riders cite exactly this fear as their reason for choosing the sidewalk in the first place. One Israeli study found e-cyclists use sidewalks more, not less, at intersections with heavier car traffic. That’s not lawlessness, that’s self-preservation.
This specific trade-off should worry us more for young riders than for anyone else, and it’s not just that children are smaller. Two separate, well-documented risk factors compound in a young rider. The first is inexperience, skill and hazard-recognition deficits that affect any novice. The second is developmental: adolescence carries a documented, biologically grounded peak in risk-taking.
Ban without building and you’ve just created a new kill zone for our vulnerable children.
A sidewalk ban, on its own, treats the symptoms and ignores the diagnosis we made about SUVs years ago: the built environment, not the individual road user, is where real leverage is. The single strongest piece of evidence in the entire e-bike and e-scooter safety literature isn’t a rule at all; it’s a design choice. Where protected bike lanes exist, upward of 80 per cent of riders use them, regardless of what speed limit or sidewalk rule is on the books. Riders don’t need to be cajoled into taking the safe path. They need one to exist.
This doesn’t mean we don’t do anything until we build more protected environments. Where children, seniors, and dog walkers congregate, such as sidewalks, trails, parks and shared paths, the case for strict, well-enforced speed limits is strong, grounded in both crash-injury biomechanics and what pedestrians themselves report as the speed at which they feel safe (roughly 10 km/h). But even here, the criminology we’ve spent much of our career on has something specific to say: certainty of enforcement beats severity of punishment, every time. A bylaw officer or park ranger who is reliably present on sidewalks and trails matters more than an occasional, headline-grabbing impoundment. We proved this with drinking and driving in Japan in 2007: a lowered legal limit paired with consistent enforcement cut alcohol-related crashes among young drivers by nearly two-thirds.
If the goal is genuinely to protect pedestrians without repeating the SUV error, the policy must be built specifically for sidewalks, trails and shared paths, not as a backdoor way of forcing riders into traffic. Beyond building basic infrastructure – instead of tearing it out as Ontario is doing – there are four elements to achieve this, each grounded in what works rather than what sounds tough:
Make ban modification, not speed itself, the primary enforcement target. This matters more than it sounds. Prevention is better than cure. New York police have said publicly that radar doesn’t work well on a bicycle-width frame; it’s genuinely hard to clock a rider accurately from a moving patrol vehicle. A striped speed governor or an illegally overpowered motor, by contrast, is something an officer can verify by inspection in under a minute, no radar gun required. Several U.S. counties already draw the line here – Suffolk County, N.Y., and Sacramento County, Calif., among them. An e-bike modified to exceed its class’s legal motor output or speed cutoff is treated as a fundamentally different, unauthorized vehicle, not a bicycle that happened to be going fast. That’s the more enforceable, defensible standard, and it should trigger the harshest penalty, not ordinary speeding tickets.
Use the enforcement capacity cities already have. Sidewalks and trails are municipal property. Most cities already employ bylaw or parks enforcement officers with independent authority to issue citations, separate from police, and not competing with 911 calls for priority.
The silence problem nobody’s regulating. There’s a hazard in this conversation nobody’s named yet: e-bikes are quiet. When electric and hybrid cars moved into the mainstream, regulators flagged the same problem: pedestrians, especially those who are blind or have low vision, rely on engine noise to register that a vehicle is approaching. Congress didn’t leave the fix to voluntary industry practice; the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act led to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 141, which now requires every new hybrid and electric car to emit an audible alert at low speed for exactly this reason.
No equivalent requirement exists for e-bikes or e-motorcycles, the very vehicle class now expanding fastest among young, inexperienced riders. And the inexperience compounds a real, measured risk, not a hypothetical one: even trained, licensed motorcyclists die at roughly 27 times the per-mile rate of passenger-car occupants, according to NHTSA’s 2024 data, with the youngest riders showing the highest rate of speeding involvement of any age group. If training and licensing don’t neutralize that risk for adults, we shouldn’t assume it will for children, who have less training.
Helmets belong in this package, as one layer, not the fix. None of this replaces the case for helmets, which remain one of the more consistently supported rider-protection measures we have. But we want to be as honest about this as we were about the sidewalk ban: helmet recommendations alone barely move the needle. Compliance in voluntary contexts has been measured as low as 4 to 5 per cent in some jurisdictions. Even where helmets are legally mandated, the research is specific about why riders still skip them; it isn’t ignorance of the law, it’s low perceived risk and a belief that the rule won’t be enforced. In other words, helmet policy suffers from precisely the same certainty problem as speed policy, and needs the same fix: visible, consistent enforcement, not just a rule on the books.
The value of getting the helmet part right is not a side note; it’s one of the best-supported findings in this whole area. A systematic review of meta-analyses found helmets reduce serious head injury regardless of age, crash severity or crash type, with the benefit largest in exactly the higher-risk, shared-road conditions e-bikes create.
The Canadian Pediatric Society (CPS) has been emphasizing helmet safety for more than a decade; tellingly it has shifted its focus toward protected infrastructure as the stronger lever, with helmet promotion as a complement, not a substitute. We don’t need to import this argument from elsewhere. Our own pediatric society already made it.
Meanwhile, the carnage is happening across Canada. Data from the Canadian Pediatric Surveillance Program (CPSP) shows that 10 Canadian youths died from injuries involving e-scooters and similar devices in 2025 alone.
While this piece was in progress, trauma physicians at the Montreal Children’s Hospital published exactly the pattern described above from their own emergency department. E-scooter-related injuries among children and teens are up tenfold since 2023. Sixty-five per cent of the injured children arrive with complex trauma requiring surgery or ICU admission. Fifty-six per cent are under 14, Quebec’s own legal minimum age to operate one.
We spent two decades arguing that pedestrian and cyclist safety research lagged embarrassingly behind occupant safety research. We shouldn’t now build e-bike policy the same way, by legislating on instinct while the evidence sits, again, mostly unread.
