Fast e-scooters are a menace. Don't lump e-bikes with them.

A couple of years ago, early in my time as an e-bike owner, I was cruising down an unprotected Manhattan bike lane at 17 or 18 miles per hour when a car suddenly pulled out into my path a few car lengths ahead of me. If I had been much closer, I thought, I wouldn’t have been able to stop in time to avoid it.

That changed my approach to on-street e-bike riding: Since then, I’ve generally kept the power setting at three (out of five) on my bike’s electric motor and my speed below 15 mph. Many other people have been making similar discoveries about the risks of e-bikes and e-scooters as their use has exploded over the past few years, occasionally breaking bones or even losing their lives in the process. E-mobility comes with lots of benefits — in my case the ability to ride to work through lovely, hilly Central Park on warm summer mornings without arriving at the office drenched in sweat. But there’s a learning curve involved with safely using electric two-wheelers that I’m still not sure I’m on the right side of, and I don’t think local governments in the U.S. and elsewhere are anywhere close to striking the right balance of rules, enforcement, training and infrastructure adjustments. Moreover, a backlash against e-bikes is brewing that states and cities should resist.

That backlash stems in large part from a new generation of electric two-wheelers that have no business traveling on bike paths, bike lanes or possibly anywhere at all. Last week, a high-speed stand-up scooter was involved in a head-on crash with a bicycle on New York City’s Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge that killed both riders. No one knows for sure how fast the rider of the Teverun Blade GT II was going as he veered out of his lane on the bridge’s narrow bike path to pass a slower cyclist, but the vehicle’s Chinese manufacturer boasts that it has a top speed of 53 mph and is "inspired by the raw power and bold contrast of race machines."

I can’t think of any balancing of risks and benefits in which a stand-up scooter that can go 53 mph comes out ahead, and, in fact, the Blade GT II and superfast scooters like it are illegal in New York — although because they look just like legal scooters that max out at 15 to 20 mph, the ban isn’t easy to enforce. The same goes for "e-motos," high-speed e-bikes that are basically motorcycles and often not allowed on public roads. They have been involved in recent fatal crashes in New Jersey, California, the UK and elsewhere.

Even most two-wheeler advocates want nothing to do with these vehicles and have been calling for a crackdown in New York. Targeting manufacturers and retailers is one approach, with Amazon.com Inc. recently halting sales of e-motos on its marketplace in California in response to uproar there. Removing existing illegal vehicles from the streets is tougher because it’s hard to tell they’re illegal until you see them going 50 mph — at which point chasing after them isn’t exactly a public-safety victory. Police in the Netherlands are now equipped with portable devices that can detect whether a vehicle’s electric motor is more powerful than allowed by law, so maybe that’s what U.S. law enforcement will have to resort to as well.

At the moment in the U.S., most of the political activity seems to be the direction of cracking down on all electric two-wheelers. The carve-out for low-speed e-bikes successfully advocated by People for Bikes, which is backed by bike manufacturers, is at risk of breaking down — not in New York City, probably, but definitely in its suburbs and elsewhere. In the People for Bikes model legislation, which has been adopted at least in part by all but a handful of U.S. states, e-bikes are divided into three classes:

—Class 1 bikes provide assistance only when pedaled and at speeds up to 20 mph.

—Class 2 provide power without pedaling, but only up to 20 mph.

—Class 3 have to be pedaled and provide assistance up to 28 mph.

The idea was that Class 1 and in most cases Class 2 e-bikes would be treated just like other bicycles, while Class 3 would be subject to more restrictions but nothing like the licensing requirements that exist for faster gasoline-powered motorcycles and mopeds. E-scooters weren’t included in the taxonomy, but the speed-restricted ones have generally been treated like Class 2 bikes.

In January, though, New Jersey enacted a law that requires all e-bike riders to have driver’s licenses, and Class 2 and Class 3 e-bikers to have insurance. In March, the Nassau County Police Department on New York’s Long Island announced that Class 2 and Class 3 e-bikes and all e-scooters were banned from county roadways and bike paths, although it’s not clear it has the authority to do this. Lots of other states and localities are talking about tighter rules.

Public discourse on this topic has been dominated by people outraged by e-bikes and those outraged by the crackdowns. As an e-bike user who is conscious of the risks involved, I keep looking for a clear middle path between the two camps and struggle to find it. For a while, I thought that allowing only pedal e-bikes on bike paths and lanes might be the solution, but upon extended observation I have to concede that e-scooters, with their ease of stepping on and off, are in some ways better suited to crowded urban environments than e-bikes. Speed restrictions clearly make some sense but can have perverse consequences — a study of shared e-scooter use in Washington, D.C., where speeds are capped at 10 mph, and Austin, Texas, where they’re capped at 20 mph, found that Washingtonians are much likelier to ride their scooters illegally on sidewalks. Having experienced the liberation of being able to get everywhere by bike as a teen exchange student in the Netherlands in the 1980s, I want American teenagers to be similarly free but worry that unleashing them on programs for sharing e-scooters and e-bikes is leaving too many injured and dead. And while I love that I can now get around New York and other U.S. cities on bikes that I can unlock and drop off all over town, I’m aware that pedestrians are the true lifeblood of cities and that many feel less comfortable and safe on city streets and sidewalks since bike- and scooter-sharing took off.

The risk to pedestrians from two-wheeled vehicles nonetheless remains quite small, with just 41 U.S. pedestrians dying from collisions with "pedal cyclists" (that how it’s recorded in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mortality database) since 2018, and 389 from collisions with two- or three-wheeled motor vehicles — compared with 20,988 from collisions with cars and light trucks. Bicycle-related pedestrian fatalities are actually down relative to the years before 2018, but that’s not the case for those caused by motorized two- and three-wheelers, of which there were 62 in 2024 compared with just 33 in 2017. In any case, fatalities among riders of two-wheelers are far more common — 9,966 pedal cyclists and 43,734 motorcyclists since 2018 — and have risen sharply in recent years while other traffic fatalities seem to be back on a downward trend after a big increase during the pandemic.

Despite the risks, I keep getting on my e-bike. Lately, riding north on the newish Third Avenue protected bike lane in Manhattan after work before cutting over to Central Park, I occasionally feel like I’m seeing a vision of a New York City where that doesn’t feel quite so risky. The lane is quite wide and so heavily used that I’ve yet to see a car or truck dare to block it or pedestrian step into it without looking first. Crucially, the stoplights on the avenue are timed to accommodate vehicles traveling at 15 mph. U.S. cities went to extreme lengths to accommodate the automobile in the 20th century, even though cars are in so many ways antithetical to urban life. They’re really only just getting started on figuring out how to make things work for bikes, e-bikes and e-scooters, which I have to think will turn out to be far more compatible as long as they can resist the current backlash.

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of "The Myth of the Rational Market."