Some kids who cycle, and their parents, worry e-bikes are a danger to them

On a sunny Sunday afternoon on Sandford Avenue, eight-year-old Jack McCallum was running a shop in the centre of the road.

He and a friend or two were selling water and MiWadi for 50 cents, Jammie Dodgers and fruit, perched in bowls on a wooden frame now sheltered under two bridging umbrellas. 

Across Dublin this past Sunday, 25 streets were designated play streets, in honor of 25 years of Car-Free Day, and this was one of them.

Jack said he cycles in the cycle lane sometimes these days – not just on the footpath – and he prefers it too. “Because it's more dangerous and fun.” 

Sometimes there are cars right next to him, he says. Others, fast e-bikes and e-scooters buzz by and those can throw him off too, he says. 

“Because they keep going right past me and almost hitting me. I have to swerve onto the path again,” he says. 

Seven-year-old Harry Groome, who says he’s second-in-command after Jack at the shop, says he doesn’t ride on the cycle path yet – he sticks to parks and footpaths. 

“Because we have lots of cars around here,” Harry says, “and because I fell off my bike on, like Christmas Day”. He also said he finds e-bikes a bit scary.

Their mothers both said the same – e-bikes and e-scooters are something they find stressful when sharing the same narrow bike lane as the kids. 

Aaron Copeland, a co-founder and director at A Playful City, a consultancy that works on creating more friendly streets, says, yes, some e-bikes go too fast. 

And, that fear of fast-moving e-bikes and e-scooters can prompt parents to decide not to let their kids cycle in cycle lanes, driving them where they need to go instead – which means more cars on the road, which means they’re more dangerous to cycle on, creating a loop, Copeland said.

But the e-bikes and e-scooters are not the main problem, and banning them from cycle lanes wouldn’t be the solution to making Dublin significantly safer for kids to cycle in, say Copeland and others. 

More enforcement of the laws by Gardaí, to keep people from riding e-bikes and e-scooters too fast, in the wrong places, or dangerously, would be good, they say. Design changes to separate faster-moving cycle-lane users from slower-moving ones would be good too.  

Ultimately, though, the main threat to cyclists – of any age – going around Dublin is people driving cars, not people on e-bikes or e-scooters, according to the Road Safety Authority (RSA). 

Between 2020 and 2024, 892 cyclists were seriously injured in a collision with another vehicle, according to an RSA report published in May. 

Of these 75 percent were cars, and another 18 were heavy-goods vehicles, light-goods vehicles, buses or motorcycles. Another 4 percent were other pedal bikes, leaving only 3 percent in the “Other/Unknown” category – e-bikes and e-scooters aren’t broken out. 

The law

Legally, e-scooters are allowed in cycle lanes but must obey a 20km/h speed limit, according to the RSA. E-bikes with a maximum speed of 25km/h can use cycle lanes too, it says. 

But there are people riding e-bikes and e-scooters in Dublin that can and do go much faster.

“One was seized on Capel Street recently – that’s a pedestrianised street – and it was adapted to do 55km/h,” said a motion from Finn Gael Councillor Danny Byrne at the Dublin City Council Mobility and Public Realm Strategic Policy Committee on 3 September.

Byrne’s motion called for more enforcement to stop illegal use of e-bikes and e-scooters. 

“We want to see monthly reporting from An Garda Síochána and Dublin Fire Brigade on collisions, seizures and enforcement actions relating to e-scooters and e-bikes within the city boundary,” Byrne said.

But the council’s executive manager for traffic, Brendan O'Brien, said that from the Traffic Department’s point of view, they agree there’s a problem here, but the changes aren’t in their remit. 

“The regulations are there which define the speed that they're allowed to operate at, and it's very clear that where they're modified to do 55 kilometers … they are illegal,” he said. 

A brake on independence

Traffic was by far the top concern of Irish parents of 9- to 10-year-olds surveyed when it comes to giving their kids more independence to travel around, says Fiona Armstrong.  

Armstrong was one of the authors of the academic paper, “Parental Attitudes to Risky Play and Children’s Independent Mobility”, which was published in July. 

“The overall concern was about traffic, as in traffic speed, the volume of traffic, and the lack of safety measures such as footpaths, etc, in rural areas, or street lighting in both rural and urban areas,” Armstrong said.

She said the survey didn’t specifically address e-bikes. But considering they do increase the speed sometimes on footpaths, she said, personally, she thinks increasing enforcement of illegal high-speed e-bikes on footpaths would be good.

She said having high speeds that make kids or their parents worry, and therefore limit children’s independence is detrimental to their development.

From the RSA’s perspective, though, kids under 12 years of age should not be cycling on their own in or near traffic, a spokesperson said. 

“It is too dangerous. They do not have the skills and experience required to be safe in traffic on their own. They should be accompanied by an adult or responsible person,” they said.

Less dangerous by design

The problem with e-bikes zipping along in bike lanes isn’t that they are going too fast, necessarily, but that they are going faster than others in the lane, says Bill Schultheiss, Toole Design’s director of design and engineering for North America, which designs streets. 

Ideally, the infrastructure would be designed with designated space for them, says Schultheiss, to separate them from slower cycle-lane users.

"The foundation of traffic engineering, in a lot of ways, is trying to minimise speed differential between users,” he said. 

“So if you're on a sidewalk, you should be moving it closer to sidewalk speeds for people walking. If you're in a bike lane, you know, I think it's reasonable that those speeds are more of the human powered speed, 10 to 15 miles an hour is fine," he said. 

E-bikes are here to stay, and he said for him, they’re an amazing innovation in transportation technology. “It’s attracting more people to bicycle. It’s expanding the distance people are willing to travel.”

The question is how to build infrastructure that makes using them safe for the riders and those around them, Schultheiss said. 

He said he sees solutions where there’s more space – and that’s happening around the world.

“The bike boulevards are popular in the US,” he said. “Bike traffic calm streets are quite popular in the Netherlands, like, you don't really need the separate bike lanes on those kinds of networks of streets, that are traffic calmed.” 

“But I think on the separated pathways, you know, I think we should, we should be doing things with a speed differential between users,” he said.

It’s the cars

Copeland, of A Playful City, said that focusing on e-bikes or e-scooters as a threat to little cyclists’ safety is actually missing the point. 

“There's a much bigger elephant in the room. It's a two-tonne SUV, or it's a two-tonne electric car." He said.

"If you really are concerned about safety, you're looking at speed reduction, traffic calming,” Copeland said “You need to look at the wider context.”

The vast majority of parents said they wanted to give their kids independence to travel around, and that’s critical for their future, says Armstrong, co-author of the paper on the subject.

“It's hugely important that they have a level of independence appropriate to their stage of development, and that's arguably less to do with their years and more to do with their maturity,” she said. 

“We can't expect children to know how to do and manage certain situations if they've never been exposed to them,” she said.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.