E-Bikes Are Crazy Fun As Long As You Ride Safely—These 6 Tips Will Help
E-Bikes Are Crazy Fun As Long As You Ride Safely—These 6 Tips Will Help
Electric bikes or e-bikes are more popular than ever, with older riders driving much of the demand. Proponents have touted e-bikes as a way to make cycling more accessible to people more people in general such as the elderly and those with disabilities, to car-free households in urban environments, and to anyone who might hesitate to hop on a conventional bike.
Yet as more riders adopt this new technology, new safety concerns have cropped up. A worrying statistic out of the Netherlands in 2018 sounded some alarms: E-bike deaths in the famously bike-friendly country nearly doubled between 2016 and 2017. About 75 percent of the victims were men aged 65 and older. Peter van der Knaap, director of the Dutch Road Safety Research Foundation, told The Guardian that many incidents involved riders simply failing to properly mount or dismount their e-bikes. And a more recent study showed that those trends continued into 2019.
In 2019, dozens of riders reported injuries while riding electric Citibikes in New York City, prompting Lyft, the company that owns Citibike, to temporarily pull all of the approximately 1,000 electric bicycles from the city’s streets amid safety concerns, as the New York Times reported.
Of course, as e-bikes make up a greater share of the bicycle market, they’ll also be involved in more crashes and cyclist fatalities. But riders interested in going electric should learn how to handle this new kind of bicycle to ensure their safety. E-bikes are often much heavier than regular commuter bikes, reach higher top speeds, and make usually manageable corners and obstacles more dangerous. Here are six e-bike safety tips you should know.
E-bikes are fun and useful, but they can come with their own challenges. Here are six safety tips for managing these faster, heavier bikes.
