Shock and Oww: Investigating E-Bike Injuries - Who's injured, what's hurt, and how it happens

Students: Alex Hickey, Spencer Snook

Faculty Mentor: Kevin Fang

Geography, Environment & Planning

College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts

An e-bike trade group estimates that e-bike sales in the United States quadrupled from around a quarter million in 2019 to over one million in 2022. With the proliferation of e-bikes in the United States, debates over safety have emerged. For example, since 2020, The New York Times has published at least eight articles broadly questioning the safety of e-bikes, including on three consecutive days in the summer of 2023. Such concerns have drawn the attention of government as well. In 2023, the California State Legislature passed SB 381, which commissioned a study on e-bike safety, and in 2024, passed a pair of bills authorizing pilots of stricter rules on e-bikes in parts of the state. Additionally, at the federal level, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission recently launched an assessment into whether new rules were needed to ensure greater safety for e-bikes. Given the increasing interest in e-bike safety, we explored a database of injuries associated with the use of e-bikes. We looked at records from 953 injuries from 2023 with the goal of determining who was injured, what their injuries were, and how they were injured. Demographically, we found individuals with e-bike injuries were 36.3 years old on average, and only 15 percent were minors. This was surprising given some loud concern about e-bikes and kids in the aforementioned New York Times articles and some of the recently proposed legislation in California. Additionally, in terms of demographics, nearly 80 percent of the individuals with e-bike injuries were men.