Summer will be here soon and with it, the e-bikes will swarm the roads once again, frightening drivers and, especially, scaring the heck out of the parents of teenagers.
It’s hard to believe just how recently these nifty and innovative vehicles arrived on local roads: Looking back at press releases from then-Governor Cuomo’s office, we were surprised to realize that e-bikes were only formally made road-legal in New York State in 2020. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, sales exploded to a million units around the nation in 2022 — but the following year, 2023, is when they actually arrived in large numbers on the East End, at least as far as we could observe from our windows overlooking Main Street, where e-bikes zip in and out of honking traffic, ride against the flow, bump onto and off curbs, pull wild U-turns, pop up in crosswalks, and chase pedestrians off sidewalks with nail-biting regularity.
There are many obvious benefits to e-bikes. They are affordable, egalitarian, and allow people to get to and from job sites without cars; they reduce energy consumption; and they have the potential to de-clog overcrowded, traffic-jammed roads. But the dangers are just as obvious.
With the newness of the e-bike, it has been hard to put a number on the magnitude of the safety problem, because numbers didn’t exist. This week, however, we received a new statistic that was both shocking and not at all shocking: “Micromobility-related” — that is, related to e-bikes and e-scooters — trauma cases at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital increased by more than 900 percent from 2023 to 2025. That is a scary figure. A pediatric trauma surgeon from Stony Brook and representatives from the Suffolk County Police Department’s Highway Patrol, the New York Coalition for Transportation Safety, and the district attorney’s office will be holding a press conference tomorrow to publicize the ways in which e-bikes are injurious to Long Island children.
Suffolk County, as we reported last week, has moved to tighten the rules of the road. E-bikes are now expressly banned from any road with a posted speed limit above 30, and every rider must now wear a helmet. (The earlier helmet regulation pertained only to certain classes of e-bikes, muddying the enforcement picture.) Further, no one under the age of 16 may operate an e-bike in public at all, period.
Whether e-bike riders will experience the new rules of the road as a crackdown remains to be seen. Barring the (unlikely) dedication of special police manpower to their enforcement, it’s hard to see how seriously riders will take the regulations.
We would like to point out that the Suffolk County law does provide another mechanism for enforcement: E-bikes can be impounded by the police if the operator is riding dangerously, not wearing a helmet, under age, intoxicated, or fleeing police. Some municipalities, from Hoboken to the Village of Babylon, have written local codes for the impounding of e-bikes when a dangerous line has been crossed.
Our town board and village boards should consider this impounding movement seriously. Teenagers and young adults are the most at risk when it comes to dangerous e-bike riding, and, as any parent of one can tell you, they are more likely to respond to the threat of losing their ride — even if only temporarily — than they are to warnings from trauma surgeons or their parents.