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The New York Times made the issue of e-bikes and e-motos their cover story on November 30. Below is an excerpt from that issue with statements by John Maa, a trauma surgeon at MarinHealth and Edward Alfrey, medical director of trauma services.
An excerpt from the NYT magazine
November 30, 2025
Indeed, in 2022, over a million e-bikes were sold in the United States, up from 287,000 in 2019, according to the Light Electric Vehicle Association. But what really struck Alfrey and Maa was that e-bike injuries were far more serious than those sustained on conventional bikes. Maa says they were more like what’s seen in motorcycle crashes. A pelvic fracture, for example, was uncommon on a pedal bicycle — only about 6 percent of conventional cycling injuries. For e-bike crashes, though, it was 25 percent.
The most alarming difference was the fatality rate. “On a pedal bike, the chance of dying from an injury is about three-tenths of 1 percent,” Alfrey says. On an e-bike, the data indicated, it was 11 percent.
These findings signaled what was unfolding around the country. During the same four-year period when nationwide sales quadrupled, e-bike injuries increased by a factor of 10, to 23,493 from 2,215, according to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. A study by the University of California, San Francisco, found that from 2017 to 2022, head injuries from e-bike accidents increased 49-fold.
As in Marin, casualties in other parts of the country included e-bike riders themselves and people they ran into. In 2023 in New York City, two pedestrians were killed by e-bikes, and 23 of 30 cycling fatalities were e-bike riders. In South Florida, a 66-year-old woman was killed by a 12-year-old boy on an e-bike, and a 54-year-old man riding a conventional bike died after being hit from behind by a 14-year-old on an e-moto. In Minnesota, a woman permanently lost her sense of taste and smell after being hit on a sidewalk by an e-bike. In San Diego County, the towns of Carlsbad and Encinitas announced public emergencies after a woman and a teenage boy were killed on e-bikes, and in Los Angeles, a 12-year-old girl died after crashing on the back of an e-bike.
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