Are e-bikes the biggest threat to Sydney pedestrians? Here’s what the figures show

As a cyclist, I’m sick of being berated by people seduced by Sydney’s social panic over e-bikes.

These popular two-wheelers, we are told, turn young people into reckless monsters who terrorise pedestrians on our streets. It’s as ridiculous a proposition as the moral panics of the past, when rock ’n’ roll was accused of leading teenagers on a highway to hell.

Public support for policing this “crisis” is pushing new laws and regulations that vastly exceed or contradict real-world threats.

Late last year, when a man in his 30s riding a legal, speed-limited e-bike was killed by a garbage truck on Broadway in Ultimo – an eight-lane dual-carriageway without any bike lanes – most of the coverage suggested he was on an illegal e-bike, and within hours, NSW Premier Chris Minns announced he would halve e-bike power limits.

Before we go on this ride, let’s agree that electric motorbikes, supercharged fat bikes, and similar beasts are not the e-bikes I’m referring to. They’re illegal.

In NSW, Ford Rangers and Toyota Hilux utes seriously injured 2114 people and killed another 163 between 2018 and 2024, Transport for NSW told me.

No one is calling for utes or Dodge RAMs to be banned, yet they can propel two tonnes plus beyond 180km/h. So why is moving less than 60 kilograms past 25km/h so dangerous that police need the power to destroy bicycles? Which criminal offence, or event, justifies that extraordinary expansion of police power? Doing donuts on golf courses? Popping wheelies on the Harbour Bridge?

People get hurt riding bikes. The Sydney Children’s Hospital Network treated 94 children in 2025 for e-bike injury, up from 60 in 2024. St Vincent’s Hospital recorded 200 people with e-bike injuries that required a trauma team last year (2025), and 10 per cent of those needed intensive-care treatment.

But bikes are exceedingly unlikely to kill or injure you if you’re not riding one. Comprehensive data recording how many pedestrians, e-mobility users and cyclists are injured by one another is not collected. The best recent data I found shows that 85 per cent of nationally reported cyclist casualty crashes involved another vehicle, and just 2 per cent of cyclist injuries were related to pedestrians.

Young people can be dangerous and reckless. But the current moral panic pedalled about pedestrian safety is not rooted in reality. There’s been massive growth in e-bike sales from 9000 in 2017 to around 200,000 by 2022.

Cyclists make about 1.2 per cent of trips taken in NSW but are smashed with 16 per cent of the state’s serious injuries.

A total of 205 pedestrians were killed across Australia in the year ending July 31, 2025. WalkSydney analysis found that two of the 205 were caused by people using e-mobility devices.

And while NSW cyclist serious injury rates are rising, pedestrian injuries have fallen. The most recent data, from 2021 to 2024, shows that pedestrian serious injuries are at their lowest levels since 2005, the earliest year in the dataset. That’s despite a massive increase in the number of cyclists and delivery riders on the road, and yes, illegally riding on footpaths.

While driver safety has improved with airbags, automatic emergency braking and other innovations, cyclists’ safety has been eroded by hyperbolic reporting and road rage driven by a disproportionate sense of panic.

There are very few transport options that don’t require fuel, improve your health, and generate joy while operating them; cycling, paddling, and skating are popular. But both state and federal governments fail to mention or seriously consider alternatives to cars and provide no incentives to boost their use. For example, the recently produced NSW government’s “Transport options and alternatives” and the National Fuel Security Plan make no mention of cycling.

We do have a national “road safety crisis”, and in NSW, the road toll has been climbing over the past six years. More than 1100 pedestrians are struck by motor vehicles on NSW roads each year.

Pedestrian fatalities are more common than cyclist deaths on our roads, but those responsible almost exclusively have four or more wheels, rarely just two.

The most recent data shows 920 NSW pedestrians were seriously injured and 1950 cyclists were hurt going about their business because cars and trucks smash into people regularly. Sometimes on purpose. Road rage needs to be directed at real threats, not kids rocking and rolling on the devil’s wheels.

Nigel Gladstone is a senior journalist at The Sydney Morning Herald.

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