Florida Personal Injury Lawyer Blog
Southwest Florida Injury Lawyer on E-Bike Injuries vs. Conventional Bicycle Injuries
Electric bicycles, aka “e-bikes,” have become incredibly popular here in the Sunshine State. If you’re unfamiliar, these are pedal-operated bicycles equipped with an electric bike motor to assist. U.S. sales of e-bikes topped $1.3 billion in 2022, and Floridians love them, as they’re allowed on most roads, bike paths, and trails where traditional bikes can operate.
That said, a Key West injury lawyer can tell you their introduction hasn’t been a super-smooth ride. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) says that micromobility device injuries treated at hospital emergency rooms nationwide have increased 23 percent every year since 2017. (This includes not only e-bike injuries, but those involving hoverboards and e-scooters.)
But such increases do make sense for the simple fact that these devices didn’t even exist a few years ago. The risks they pose are worth knowing, but none of it really changes the fact that the bigger safety threats on South Florida roads are:
- Infrastructure that wasn’t designed to safely accommodate alternative modes of transportation (i.e., wide roads, high speed limits, no sidewalks, etc.).
- Reckless motor vehicle drivers.
If you’re injured in a Florida e-bike accident, a Key West injury lawyer can explore all avenues of compensation (i.e., defective helmets, rental bike agency liability, product liability claims against the e-bike manufacturer, etc.). But such cases are probably going to closely mirror conventional Florida bicycle accident claims than anything else – and those are most typically against motor vehicle drivers.
E-Bike Injuries Often Resemble Conventional Bike Injuries
Questions have been raised about whether e-bikes are better classified as “motor vehicles” – more aligned with motorcycles than traditional bicycles.
But in one study published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, researchers looked at injury patterns involving e-bike operators, bicyclists, and motorcycle operators. They found that the injury patterns of e-bikers resembled that of bicyclists “much more” than that of motorcyclists. Continue reading
