What's More Dangerous for Teens: Cars or eBikes?

Warren Wells, policy and planning director at Marin County Bicycle Coalition, posted a long thread (all worth reading) about teens and crashes — whether bike or car-related. 

Here are a few particular parts: 

We've spent a ton of time talking about teens getting injured on e-bikes (or illegal e-motos). We've heard that crash rates are skyrocketing. Marin County Dept of Health even set up a dashboard to see how many e-bike/e-moto crashes are happening.

But how many kids are getting hurt in cars? 

Here is the crash count and crash rate per 100k in Marin by age. 


Some things to note here. The number of under age 16 e-bike crashes in the last two years, the whole thing we're having a panic over is, 54 — or 2/month. 

Compare that to 398 conventional bike crashes for 16+. It's ~1/7th! Wow!

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Lastly is the "nature of accident." This is a little fuzzy, but a "traffic" crash is one where a bike collided with another vehicle (typically a car) and a "non-traffic" crash is a solo crash.

Right off the bat, we see that close to half (44%) of teen e-bike crashes involve a car.

Interestingly, for every age category and bike type, solo crashes make up a majority of reported crashes. 

But of all the categories, teen e-bike crashes are the most likely to involve a car. So I'm not sure that's an e-bike problem!

Ok, that's a lot about the e-bike dashboard. I want to get back to my initial question. How does this compare to the number of teens getting injured in car crashes?

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Among just teens age 16–19, in 26 months there were 156 kids injured as car occupants, 2/3rd of them drivers. This is 6 injuries a month. 

17 of those injuries were serious (meaning likely life-altering) and 5 were fatal. Five! Compared to 0 teen e-bike (or e-moto) deaths in a similar time.

The big lesson here is that we should not be letting teens drive cars, and that transporting them by car is as least as big a threat to young people's health as riding a bicycle, at least on a population basis.

While we're talking about the public health effects of driving, it's worth mentioning the number of young people struck by cars, many of which are transporting other kids to school. 

In this 26-month period, 44 people age 19 or under were injured when hit by a car, and 8 were seriously wounded.

The data clearly show that teen passengers, and especially teen drivers, are frequently injured in traffic crashes.

All I want is for our public health officials to treat this issue with as much seriousness as it deserves, relative to the effort they have expended regarding e-bikes.

Because when all I hear is about is e-bikes and nothing about teen drivers (aside from the obvious grief about an individual crash), it becomes hard to see the furor about e-bikes/e-motos as anything other than a moral panic.