> the main issue with eBike safety is automobiles.
If you're a fit cyclist, riding on decent surfaces, respect the safety speed limit and don't have to ride around pedestrians staring at phone with headphones randomly walking into your path.
Even in countries with good biking infrastructure ebike accident rate is comparable to motorcycles - because for the most part they are shitty motorcycles (brakes, tires, forks/frame) with the safety advantage of being limited to very low speed (which many people circumvent).
Strapping a child seat to a motorcycle would get me arrested/child taken by social services - bit strapping one on a ebike makes me hip.
> Even in countries with good biking infrastructure ebike accident rate is comparable to motorcycles
Well, sort of. If you go by count of any incident regardless of severity, sure. But stratify the results and the picture becomes very different. Motorcycles are far more likely to be seriously injured in an at-fault crash, whereas cyclists are far more likely to be seriously injured if the other party is a car and at fault.
Like I said that's true for single rider that's fit - but what about having a passenger on, or being driven by kid/older person ?
Ebikes seem like bikes but they let you go way faster than you would with a bio bike - I don't think it's responsible treating them as such and using child seats or allowing anyone to ride them without training/helmets.
Helmets don't do shit in a lot of cases when you get hit by an automobile - especially some lifted truck that is going to smash you square in the chest - which is why infrastructure is far more important than helmet wearing. Cyclists wear helmets in the US much more than in the Netherlands - and die at far higher rates because we have bad cycling infrastructure.
It's not a bad idea to wear one in any case in my opinion, but it really is about the infrastructure. Here's the same author of the piece being discussed explaining why he doesn't wear a helmet much:
A few years ago a coworker was hit by a truck riding in to work. He called me before getting into an ambulance and said he’d miss our 830AM meeting. Later, he had no recollection of that, he must have been in shock.
His helmet was split in two, and it messed up his shoulder pretty badly and needed months of PT, but no neurological damage that could be detected.
This is in Silicon Valley, he had moved from the UK a year or two prior.
I'm not disagreeing with that - I'm saying that even with that I still don't think it's responsible to ride around with a kid in a child seat on an ebike. Not judging you for your choice - if you're a responsible and experienced driver I'm sure the risks are way lower.
But it's not something I'd do, or support as a public policy.
> Overall, the report concludes that the main culprit in all bicycle (regular and electric) injuries was the rider’s own behavior (44 percent) — a steering error, for example — while 32 percent was road conditions. And the majority of these accidents affected only the rider. Two-thirds of the 110,000 traffic victims treated in Dutch hospitals last year were cyclists, VeiligheidNL says. The survey was conducted with hospitalized riders between July 2020 and June 2021.
Even in countries with top biking infrastructure ebikes are significanly more dangerous.
Again - if I suggested I drove my kid to kindergarten on a motorcycle I'd have social services on my door. When I'm exposing them to a similar risk on an ebike that's OK ?
If you think about this for two seconds, it's pretty normal that in the country that has done the most to eliminate cars as a risk to cyclists, cyclists injuries are more their own fault.
The stats from the article you cite say that eBikes are 1.6 times more dangerous, whereas road bikes come in at 2.0 and mountain bikes at 3 for mountain bikes.
So in the grand scheme of things, that extra speed has a bit of a cost but less than some kinds of completely human-powered bikes, and it's nowhere near the cost the lack of infrastructure in the US that is absolutely lethal.
If you're a fit cyclist, riding on decent surfaces, respect the safety speed limit and don't have to ride around pedestrians staring at phone with headphones randomly walking into your path.
Even in countries with good biking infrastructure ebike accident rate is comparable to motorcycles - because for the most part they are shitty motorcycles (brakes, tires, forks/frame) with the safety advantage of being limited to very low speed (which many people circumvent).
Strapping a child seat to a motorcycle would get me arrested/child taken by social services - bit strapping one on a ebike makes me hip.