NYC’s E-Bike & Scooter Death Headlines Leave Out a Vehicle

This one is about street safety, not home energy upgrades, but here's the gist. Recent reporting on New York City e-bike and scooter deaths called 2025 a record year, which put the focus on the riders themselves. But city crash data tell a fuller story: of 17 e-bike riders killed in 2025, 15 died in crashes involving a motor vehicle. Three of five scooter rider deaths and 105 of 112 pedestrian deaths also involved a motor vehicle. That doesn't say who was at fault, but it shows these are largely car-and-truck crash numbers, not just an "e-bike problem."

There is a real safety issue buried in the data — city enforcement figures show over half of e-bike and scooter deaths from 2017-2025 involved devices capable of going faster than legal limits (above 25 mph for e-bikes, above 20 mph for scooters). That supports cracking down on illegal high-speed devices, separate from ordinary e-bikes.

The piece also notes these electric trips often replace car trips, cutting tailpipe pollution and traffic noise, and that a citywide comptroller review of 2020-2023 pedestrian deaths found cars and trucks involved in 434 of 449 cases, versus six for e-bikes and scooters combined. None of this affects home energy upgrades, but it's useful context if you've seen the "record" headlines and wondered what's really behind them.