Last year, David Darlington lent his considerable research and writing talents to the e-bike/e-moto debate in a groundbreaking article in The New York Times Magazine. He opened with the tragic injuries suffered by a Marin County teenager riding an Ariel Rider e-moto and went on to explore the growing dangers posed by these powerful machines.
Darlington’s reporting was excellent. The headline writer, not so much: “Are E-Bikes Out of Control?” A more accurate headline would have been “E-Motos Are Out of Control.”
But one statistic in the article deserves a closer look. According to a MarinHealth physician:
“On a pedal bike, the chance of dying from an injury is about three-tenths of 1 percent. On an e-bike, the data indicated, it was 11 percent.”
Eleven percent? Of what?
Surely not all e-bike riders. If 11% of us died every time we rode, hardly anyone would be left after ten rides.
So what does that alarming number actually mean?
A clue appeared in a December 2025 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed by another MarinHealth physician:
“In Marin County, a study in 2024 revealed that nearly 1 in 8 e-bike trauma patients brought to the emergency room by ambulance died from their injuries.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. The denominator isn’t all e-bike riders, or even all riders involved in crashes. It’s a much narrower group: trauma patients transported to the emergency room by ambulance.
Start with a group of seriously injured patients, and the resulting death rate is bound to sound frightening.
It’s a bit like reporting that a high percentage of people receiving last rites die. That may be true, but it tells us very little about the likelihood of dying in the general population.
The 11% figure tells us nothing directly about the likelihood that an e-bike rider will crash or die.
According to a reliable source, the 11% figure is based on just 28 trauma patients, three of whom died, over an unspecified period. The underlying data have not been publicly released. Indeed, as far as we’ve been able to determine, the physicians have not published a peer-reviewed study supporting the widely quoted comparison. Instead, the statistic has circulated through newspaper articles and op-eds without public access to the underlying data.
To be sure, three deaths are three too many, no matter how long a time period involved . But a percentage derived from just 28 patients is a shaky foundation for sweeping conclusions about public safety.
And what about the comparison with conventional bicycles?
The article reports a 0.3% death rate, which could represent just one death among approximately 333 patients.
Are the doctors saying that MarinHealth treated 361 bicycle trauma patients arriving by ambulance during some undisclosed period, of whom 333 crashed on conventional bicycles and 28 on electric devices? And that one conventional cyclist died, compared with three electric-device riders?
Perhaps. But we simply don’t know whether the two rates even use comparable patient groups and time periods.
Until MarinHealth releases the underlying data and explains its methodology, we’re left guessing. That’s no way to build public policy.
There’s one more problem, and it’s central to the mission of E-Bike Access.
Hospital records do not reliably distinguish between legal electric bicycles and powerful electric motorcycles masquerading as e-bikes. Even the lauded Marin County bicycle crash injury data published on the Bicycle Safety Dashboard treats all e-moto crashes as e-bikes.
That’s no small distinction. A legal pedal-assist e-bike and an e-moto capable of motorcycle-like speeds are very different machines, with very different risks.
Yet if both are recorded as “e-bikes,” the resulting statistics may exaggerate the risks associated with ordinary pedal-assist bicycles.
We don’t know how many of those 28 patients were riding legal e-bikes and how many were riding e-motos. And that’s precisely the problem.
We don’t need misleading impressions of risk to make the case for e-moto safety. We need accurate data that identify the actual problem.
Because good policy starts with a simple principle: Diagnose before prescribing.
Final point: As much as good data is useful, we don’t need to wait for data to know that e-motos are dangerous and illegal — and that the schools and police should not be allowing them.
