Bruising time for e-bike users and industry

Is it too late to turn things around?

It’s been a bruising time for e-bike users and the industry. West Midlands Police just issued a total apology for wrongly seizing and destroying a legal e-bike; they say they are dropping charges against the rider and offering full compensation to the bike shop who owned and leased the Tern HSD. They may have acted under the threat of a legal challenge and a lot of national news coverage, but the apologetic email they sent Birmingham Bike Foundry seems genuine and complete.

Stunt pegs for pedals? Dinner plate-sized motor on rear wheel? Battery spewing a cornucopia of wires, cable ties and bungees? Friend, this is not an e-bike.

Elsewhere, Good Morning Britain apparently ran a snippet this morning on research showing one in three e-bikers admits to jumping red lights sometimes. A BBC story that ‘e-bike injury payouts top £100m, pushing up premiums’, recently led MP Fabian Hamilton to ask for a correction to the piece, which inaccurately conflated e-bikes with e-motorbikes. As if that’s not enough, Merseyrail has banned e-bikes from its trains, stations, car parks and facilities, over what they say is a ‘fire risk’. That’s despite no evidence legal e-bikes catch fire.

It’s no consolation that most of these huge headaches for e-cycling in Britain issue from a fundamental misunderstanding of what an e-bike actually is – again, conflating them with illegal conversions and e-motorbikes.

Against this backdrop of misinformation and outcry, steps forth the industry. I imagine the Bicycle Association (BA) and the Association of Cycle Traders (ACT) holding hands and heading through the smoke and mirrors of a dimly lit hall, entering the fighting ring’s blue corner, while in the red corner are assembled as all of the above in their clamour and dazzle*. An accidental troupe of franken-thoughts, if you will (the latter, not the former).

Needless to say, it’s going to be a hard fight to win – truth versus misunderstanding, nuance vs outrage. It’s also a case of the lie having made its way around the internet before the industry got its shoes on.

The re-launch of the industry’s E-bike Positive scheme last week didn’t come a moment too soon. Revived as a ‘trust mark’, shops and brands who want to sign up now need to prove – verified by in-person inspections from the BA or ACT – they deal in safe, legal machines. That is, those that don’t catch fire or assist the rider beyond the 15.5mph legal limit for an EAPC (electrically assisted pedal cycle). It’s a good scheme and, unlike the early days of its comparable, the Red Tractor scheme, there will be genuine verification products are safe and legal. They’re even planning on doing secret shoppers to check bike shops are keeping to the rules.

It’s been a little over a year since the All Party Parliamentary Group on Walking and Cycling’s report I authored on ‘fake e-bikes’ recommended the industry develop something like a kitemark. Insurers and Transport for London explicitly told us that’s what it would take to lift the various building and transport bans, is why.

There were apparently hopes among industry figures that the new Product Regulation and Metrology (PRAM) Act would ban sales of these illegal machines instead – which is why it apparently took a while for them to act. Sadly, justice delayed is justice denied. The PRAM Act will indeed seek to ban sales of illegal e-bikes but its secondary legislation, the levers with which the law will be enacted, hasn’t been published yet. Until then, our ability to tackle the issue in the real world is rather theoretical.

In the meantime, the blows keep coming. I was briefly poised to go on GMB this morning to talk about e-bikers jumping red lights, but the piece got scaled back and I was stood down. I did speak to a researcher on the show, however. Suggesting there’d been an increase in e-bike collisions, the researcher mentioned they’d spoken to injury lawyers about the £100m payouts figure. My ears pricked up: I just had an email exchange over a rather misleading press release on just this topic. The presser claimed e-bikes and e-scooters were responsible for £100m worth of collision injury payouts, as had the BBC piece, and the PR company offered someone from JMW Personal Injury Solicitors to talk about it. When I challenged them on their wording, the PR admitted they meant ‘e-motorbikes’, but rather than correcting the press release, they said they would ‘take this into consideration’ when pitching solicitors for comments in future. Damage done, I did nonetheless manage to tell GMB’s researcher that the injury lawyers’ side of the story might not be what it first seemed.

The blurring of fact and feeling doesn’t apparently end there. Cycling Electric’s Mark Sutton, ever diligent, says he’s asked for the evidence used by Merseyrail to justify their e-cycle ban, and hasn’t received anything that properly explains it.

Still, there is progress.

West Midlands Police admitting their error and pledging to halt the way they were incorrectly testing e-bikes is a big first step. The Association of Cycle Traders also recently launched new training to help police distinguish between legal e-bikes and e-motorbikes; if police countrywide use that, it will achieve a lot. The last thing e-bike riders need is fear of being stopped, having their bike seized and threatened with points on their licenses – not least given there’s no clear way to get a seized e-bike back.

The Trust Mark is a big step forward, too. The idea is to put ‘clear blue water’ between the safe, regulated e-bikes and e-motorbikes, and to reassure the public they can buy and use EAPCs with confidence.

However, for the large part, the circumstances under which West Midlands Police officers made their mistakes haven’t entirely gone away. It will take time for people to realise e-bikes aren’t the villain here. A lot of insurers are still banning all e-bikes from buildings, for now. This is clearly a problem if you want to use an e-bike, without leaving it on the street for thieves to pick up.

The red corner already has a substantial advantage, in having won public opinion, albeit accidentally. New E-Bike Positive research found 84% of people just don’t understand the difference between legal and illegal machines. The title belt, if there were one, would be a reversal of some of this misunderstanding. The Trust Mark doing its job, the reversal of building and transport bans and, please, the media checking its facts before publishing. The blue corner has landed a few blows, but there’s a long way until the fight is over, and no doubt there’ll be more mis-steps along the way*.

Oh - and to add, the Department for Transport could accelerate the success of the Trust Mark by backing it. The new cycling minister is reportedly Justin Madders, of the PRAM Act. The Act is there in part to tackle ‘fake e-bikes’, so he’ll know just how important it is to get on top of the issue.

*I don’t follow professional fighting is the disclaimer here, but I did recently watch The Iron Claw.