The increasing number of traumatic injuries from e-bikes in the United States has caught the attention of physicians, lawmakers, pedestrians and others.
While there is a shared concern about people recklessly riding the trendy machines, there are significant differences among roadway safety advocates about the best ways to prevent accidents – including whether the government should focus on improving infrastructure rather than regulating e-bikes.
“When we think about e-bike crashes and deaths related to e-bikes, the vast majority are cars and trucks killing people on e-bikes as opposed to people on e-bikes injuring somebody else,” said Alexa Sledge, director of communications for Transportation Alternatives, an organization dedicated to making New York’s streets safer.
“What we really want to see is an improved and expanded infrastructure to protect people that are biking, protect people that are walking and make sure that there are different protected areas for all types of transportation.” Roberta Simon’s experience was not part of what Sledge calls the “vast majority”.
Simon was walking in Central Park in August 2024 when a teen riding an e-bike crashed into her.
She woke up four days later in a hospital with a traumatic brain injury, 40 staples in her head and a tube in her throat.
It took Simon, an attorney, six months to return to her daily activities.
“I can’t stress enough how lucky I am,” she said.
Seventeen people in New York City were killed in e-bike crashes in 2024, according to the city’s department of transportation.
Across the US, e-bike injuries have steadily increased, with 1,600 recorded nationwide in 2018, according to a report in the medical journal Jama Surgery, and just four years later, in 2022, there were 23,000.
E-bike sales went from 50,000 in 2018 to 527,000 in 2022, according to the market research firm Circana, and the US e-bike market has been projected to grow from roughly $4.4bn in 2026 to more than $6.2bn by 2031.
“I see [an e-vehicle injury] every single day,” Dr Ashley Pfaff, a trauma and critical care surgeon at Bellevue hospital in New York, told City Journal last year.
In Tampa Bay, Florida, where at least 28 people were killed in e-bike crashes over the last five years, a local pediatric emergency room physician told the Tampa Bay Times that the traumatic injuries had caused a “paradigm shift in what we do in emergency medicine”.
California has also experienced a surge in e-bike accidents; two towns near San Diego declared a state of emergency following fatal crashes.
New York City saw 901 e-bike injuries in 2025, a 41% increase from 2024, according to the transportation department.
And at Bellevue in particular, where Pfaff works, a study found that 7% of all trauma visits there between 2018 and 2023 were due to micromobility – small, lightweight and low-speed modes of transportation such as bicycles, e-bikes and e-scooters – injuries.
Nearly 69% of those patients needed to be admitted to the hospital and almost a third needed intensive care.
To prevent more of these injuries, the NYC E-Vehicle Safety Alliance is advocating for city and state legislation titled Priscilla’s Law, named for Priscilla Loke, a preschool educator who was walking in Manhattan in 2023 when she was struck and killed by someone riding an electric Citi Bike, which are available for New Yorkers to rent throughout the city.
Priscilla’s Law would require people to register their e-bikes and e-scooters with the state’s department of motor vehicles and attach license plates....
