Top docs call for action on speedy e-scooters and bikes

Perth Now

2 days ago

Doctors have thrown their weight behind a push to tackle high-speed electric scooters and bikes, as the national injury and death toll among riders, passengers and pedestrians grows.
The Australian Medical Association says a national body is urgently needed to develop an Australia-wide safety strategy and regulations for e-mobility vehicles.
"Doctors around the country have seen a massive spike in injuries," emergency medicine representative Sarah Whitelaw told AAP on Thursday.
"Complex limb injuries, young people with facial injuries that will impact them for the rest of their lives, chest injuries and brain injuries.
"The devastation from patients and their families, who tell us over and over that they just had no idea that they could get so significantly injured."
The peak national body for doctors also wants better data capture to help decision makers and for infrastructure that, for example, separates electric mobility devices from pedestrians.
A national strategy also needed to recognise the different types of electric rideables and the way they were being used, so that specific policy could be formulated, Dr Whitelaw said.
"We need, right now, a national body that's set up to bring all this information together and have a national approach, not this piecemeal state and territory approach," she said.
"We're at the very beginning of electric mobility devices in Australia and we are going to see hundreds of thousands more of these devices."
From 2016 to 2021, there were 14 deaths reported to an Australian state or territory coroner in which an electric mobility device, including e-bikes, e-scooters and electronic self-balancing devices, contributed to the death, according to the Monash University Accident Research Centre.
A University of Melbourne study of media reports from January 2020 to April 2025 found the number of electric mobility device-related deaths across the country had more than doubled to 30 during that period.
One of the most recent fatalities was in Perth on Saturday, when a teenage boy allegedly riding erratically on an electric dirt bike struck and killed a 59-year-old woman in a suburban park.
The 17-year-old was charged with manslaughter, and a Western Australian parliamentary committee inquiry into electric rideable devices, which started this week, has been expanded to include e-bikes.
An inquiry has also been launched in Queensland, and the NSW and Victorian governments wrote to the federal government earlier in July calling for a crackdown on the importation and sale of some e-bikes and e-scooters being illegally ridden on Australian roads.
High-speed and dangerous mobility devices are being imported and sold and the states want them banned.
In Australia, the maximum speed e-scooters can be ridden is from 20 to 25km/h, depending on the jurisdiction.
E-bike motors must cut off when the bike reaches 25km/h.
NSW and Victoria also called for tougher safety regulations and import laws for lithium batteries, citing the risk to public safety an "increasing" number of fires posed.
The federal government has been contacted for comment.