If you think electric bikes are bad, there’s a much bigger menace hitting our roads

Electric bikes are a menace. They go almost as fast as a car (if the car is parking), they’re whisper quiet (which makes them impossible to hear over the podcast playing in your headphones), and worst of all, they’re increasingly ridden by teenagers.

By now, we’ve all seen the headlines. Cities are cracking down. Lawmakers are holding emergency hearings. Parents are demanding bans. “Something must be done,” they cry at local city council meetings before driving back home in 5,000 lb SUVs.

And it’s true – some e-bike riders don’t follow the rules. Some ride too fast. Some are inexperienced. These are real problems that deserve real solutions. But if you think electric bikes are the biggest threat on our roads, just wait until you hear about the slightly more common, slightly more deadly vehicle we’ve been quietly tolerating for the last hundred years.

They’re called cars. And unlike e-bikes, they actually kill people. A lot of people. Over 40,000 people die in car crashes in the US every year. Thousands more are permanently injured. Entire neighborhoods are carved up by high-speed traffic. Kids can’t walk to school safely. But don’t worry – someone saw a teenager run a stop sign on an e-bike, so the real crisis must be those darn batteries on two wheels.

Advertisement – scroll for more content

It’s amazing how worked up people get over a few dozen e-bike crashes when many of us step over a sidewalk memorial for a car crash victim on the way to the grocery store. We’ve been so thoroughly conditioned to accept car violence as part of modern life that the idea of regulating them sounds unthinkable. But regulating e-bikes? Now that’s urgent.

To be clear, this isn’t about ignoring the risks that come with new technology. E-bikes are faster than regular bikes. They’re heavier, too. And they require education and enforcement like any other mode of transport capable of injuring someone, be it the rider or a pedestrian bystander. But the scale of the problem is what matters – and the scale here is completely lopsided. Let’s take New York City, for example. It’s got more e-bike usage than anywhere else in the US, and there are still only an average of two pedestrians per year killed by an e-bike accident. That number for cars? Around 100 per year in NYC. It’s not complicated math – cars are 50x more lethal in the city.

And yet, the person on the e-bike is the one getting the stink eye.

We’ve become so numb to the everyday destruction caused by automobiles that it barely registers anymore. Drunk driving? Distracted driving? Speeding through neighborhoods? It’s just background noise. But the moment someone on an e-bike blows through a stop sign at 16 mph, it’s front-page news and a city council emergency.

Here’s an idea: If we want safer streets, how about we start by addressing the machines that weigh two and a half tons and can hit 100 mph, not the ones that top out at 20 or 28 and are powered by a one-horsepower motor the size of an orange.

But we don’t. Because cars are familiar. Cars are “normal.” Cars are how we built our entire country. And so we turn our attention to the easy target – the new kid on the block. The same old playbook: panic, overreact, and legislate the hell out of it.

Sure, an e-bike might startle you on a sidewalk. But a car can climb that sidewalk and end your life. Which one do we really need to be afraid of?

This isn’t a strawman argument, either. Cars are literally used as mass casualty weapons. It happens all the time. It happened last night in Los Angeles when a disgruntled car driver deliberately plowed into a crowd outside a nightclub, injuring over 30 people. And that wasn’t the only car attack yesterday. Another car rammed into pedestrians on a sidewalk in NYC yesterday morning, leaving multiple pedestrians dead. These aren’t exceptions. This is the normal daily news in the US. It’s depressing, but it bears repeating. This is normal. These are everyday occurrences. Twice a day, yesterday.

While we’re busy debating throttle limits and helmet rules for e-bikes, maybe we should also talk about how tens of millions of drivers still routinely speed, blow stop signs, or scroll Instagram at 45 mph in a school zone. Or how car crashes are the number one killer of teenagers in America. Or we can continue to focus on the kid who forgot to put his foot down at a red light while riding an e-bike to school.

This isn’t satire anymore – it’s just sad. It’s a collective willingness to avoid a real, genuine threat to Americans while simultaneously scapegoating what is, by comparison, a non-threat.

The truth is, electric bikes aren’t the menace. They’re a solution. They’re one of the few glimmers of hope in a transportation system drowning in pollution, congestion, and daily tragedy. They make mobility cheaper, cleaner, and more accessible. And yet we treat them like an invasive species because they disrupt the dominance of the automobile.

It’s time to stop pretending we’re protecting the public from some great e-bike emergency. The real emergency is that we’ve accepted cars killing people as a fair trade for getting to Target five minutes faster.

So yes, let’s make e-biking safer. Let’s educate riders, build better bike infrastructure, and enforce traffic rules fairly. Those are all important things. We absolutely SHOULD invest in training programs to educate teens on safe riding. We absolutely SHOULD cite and fine dangerous riders who could threaten the lives of pedestrians. But let’s stop pretending that e-bikes are the problem when they’re clearly a symptom of a much bigger one.

If you’re really worried about the dangers on our streets, don’t look for the kid on the e-bike. Look for the driver behind them, sipping a latte and going 20 over the speed limit.

Now that’s the menace.

Image note: The first and last images in this article were both AI-generated, and represent everyday car/bike interactions