Royal London trauma surgeon warns e-bike injuries burden NHS
An orthopaedic surgeon at one of London's leading trauma centres has said that the number of injuries caused by people riding e-bikes dangerously is a massive burden on the Royal London Hospital and very likely across the capital.
The BBC calculated that 150 e-bike injury cases came through the RLH trauma centre in the past six months. This is a combination of injured e-bike riders and also the pedestrians they hit travelling at speed.
The father of a young girl whose tibia and fibula were smashed when an e-bike hit her in a local park is calling for tighter regulation around e-bikes, highlighting that if the e-bike that hit his daughter was classified as motorised, the cyclist would not have been able to ride it.
Currently e-bikes are considered in the same way as pedal bikes and despite government rules that they should not travel above 15.5mph (25kph), many are adapted to go faster.
London's Walking and Cycling Commissioner Will Norman told the BBC that the rules need changing and that better regulation of rentable electric bikes is hopefully on the way.
Cycling UK, members of the Electric Bike Alliance, however, is anti-regulation of e-bike usage since it would put off people from using them. Cycling UK believes that riding an e-bike riding is good for people's health.
Meanwhile, when injured parties come to the Personal Injury team here, we often have to tell them that because an e-bike rider is not insured as a car driver would be, there is no-one to sue for damages to provide compensation and to fund often vital medical care. In cases where an e-bike rider is employed by a company such as Deliveroo, they are generally covered under the employer's insurance.
Read about a recent case involving Deliveroo.
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