WSJ: From E-Bikes to Scooters, Roads Are Getting More Crowded and Confusing
Scott Mace
From E-Bikes to Scooters, Roads Are Getting More Crowded and Confusing
Cities are trying to figure out how to accommodate the boom in two-wheelers that threaten safety for pedestrians and riders
By Jeff Bailey
Aug. 14, 2025 5:30 am ET
Quick summary
* Cities face growing pains as various two-wheeled vehicles, like
e-bikes and scooters, flood bike lanes and streets.
* Micromobility sales are projected to more than double by 2030,
but U.S. cities are struggling to regulate these vehicles.
* Experts suggest slowing cars and repurposing lanes, but U.S.
infrastructure and driver attitudes pose challenges.
Cities are facing a two-wheeled traffic jam.
Across the country, the streets of metro areas are filling with
powered vehicles that are neither bikes nor Harleys but something
in between—low-cost scooters, minibikes, electric bikes,
skateboards and more, often with surprising speed. Some varieties
top out at 20 mph or 28 mph, while others can hit 40 to 60 mph.
As ridership has grown, these two-wheelers are all crowding into
bike lanes—when they aren’t zipping through traffic or hopping up
onto the sidewalk. And they are making traffic enforcement
challenging, threatening pedestrian safety and complicating life
for transit planners.
“We didn’t know we were building the bike lanes for scooters,”
says Laura Dierenfield, bike infrastructure chief in Austin,
Texas, who is overseeing a build-out of bike paths.
Dierenfield sees the arrival of scooters, e-bikes and other
two-wheeled vehicles as a plus overall, because they are less
polluting and cause many fewer deaths than cars. But, she says,
Austin is starting to see the need to separate different
two-wheelers by speed. Just how to do that is to come; the city
hasn’t developed a strategy yet.
Crowded roads
Whether a city has established bike lanes or has yet to delineate
space for two-wheelers, the traffic jam has only begun. McKinsey,
the consulting firm, estimates that global “micromobility”
sales—including everything from powered scooters and skateboards
to mopeds and e-bikes—will hit $340 billion by 2030, more than
doubling from $160 billion in 2022. And, McKinsey says, 46% of
people in a global survey said they would consider replacing their
current private vehicles, mostly cars, with micromobility ones.
The U.S. lags behind Asia and Europe in two-wheeler adoption, so
people aren’t accustomed to dealing with the vehicles in such
abundance. Their presence often surprises drivers, pedestrians and
conventional cyclists, and many locales are still trying to work
out how to regulate the two-wheelers.
An e-bike in Manhattan. Photo: Jonah Rosenberg for WSJ
Requirements on age, licenses and helmets vary from place to
place, not to mention rules about where the vehicles can travel.
Many of them end up traveling in bike lanes, which would be a
challenge to safety even if all the riders were experienced,
courteous and patient. And often they aren’t.
“Many of our riders are new,” says Calvin Thigpen, director of
public partnerships and policy research for scooter-rental company
Lime. He says scooter riders have an overwhelming preference for
bike lanes, but end up on sidewalks when bike lanes are lacking.
“They encounter a very hostile car environment,” he says.
Lime, like some other rental companies, uses technology on the
scooters to limit their maximum speed.
Among powered two-wheeler riders, erratic riding and failure to
follow traffic laws can be particularly dangerous to others. In
New York, some 65,000 food-delivery workers ply the streets, bike
lanes and sidewalks on a range of two-wheelers, alongside an
increasing number of commuters and others, also on a range of
two-wheelers. Steve Vaccaro, a New York lawyer who represents
cyclists and pedestrians injured in crashes, used to litigate
mostly against drivers of cars and trucks. Increasingly, he says,
his clients were hit by someone on a two-wheeler.
“I have seen an explosion of novel, motorized two-wheelers in New
York City traffic over the last five to 10 years,” Vaccaro says.
Vaccaro, who is also an avid cyclist and cycling activist, says
the city has been slow to make clear which traffic rules apply to
which devices, and in how it enforces the rules. The city has of
late launched a variety of enforcement efforts, including setting
a 15 mph speed limit on e-bikes. Vaccaro and some others want
food-delivery-app companies made legally responsible for the
conduct of their drivers.
A spokesman for delivery service DoorDash says that the company
doesn’t tolerate unsafe driving. If it receives a police report
about rule-breaking, it warns the driver to follow regulations and
drive safely at all times. Repeat offenders are removed from the
platform.
Relative risks
Of course, conventional motor vehicles exact a greater toll than
the two-wheelers, about 40,000 deaths a year. For 2022, deaths
from motor-vehicle crashes included about 7,500 pedestrians and
more than 1,000 cyclists.
A 2020 international
study found that about 80% of crashes that result in the
death of a bike or scooter rider involved a car or truck. (Data on
crashes in which two-wheelers hit pedestrians is spotty.)
“A trip by car or by motorcycle in a dense urban area is much more
likely to result in the death of a road user—this includes
pedestrians—than a trip by a microvehicle,” according to the
report, written by Alexandre Santacreu, a French transit-policy
analyst. Getting more people onto scooters and bikes, and out of
cars, “can thus make a city safer.”
But accommodating the variety of two-wheelers takes space, be it a
shared, wider bike lane or an altogether separate lane.
Countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway have been
taking roadway from cars and giving it over to bikes and
pedestrians for more than 50 years. But even the Dutch, who place
bikes at the top of their transportation setup, haven’t conquered
the problem of proliferation of two-wheeled vehicles traveling at
varying speeds. The country’s ubiquitous bike paths—which
essentially connect all points within and between cities—are
increasingly home to faster-going scooters, mopeds and e-bikes.
Amsterdam is testing the idea of directing faster two-wheelers into normal traffic lanes used by cars. Photo: ANP/Zuma Press
“This is the major challenge of Dutch cities in 2025,” says Chris
Bruntlett, international-relations manager for the Dutch Cycling
Embassy, a government-supported organization in the Netherlands.
For its part, Amsterdam is experimenting with new regulations and
signage that direct the faster two-wheelers into normal traffic
lanes used by cars. Meanwhile, the speed limits in those car lanes
have been lowered to 20 mph—making it easier to integrate
two-wheelers. Helping things further: Dutch drivers are already
accustomed to being surrounded by bikes. (The country, in fact,
has more bikes than people.)
The road ahead
In the U.S., some experts argue that the problems will diminish with time, as people replace car trips with two-wheeler trips, and local officials learn how to regulate the various streams of traffic.
Kersten Heineke, a Frankfurt-based partner who co-leads McKinsey’s micromobility practice, says the U.S. is merely early in a transition that other countries have made. U.S. cities are generally still 90%-car reliant, he says, while a European city well into transit investment is at 50% or less.
U.S. localities need to look to the example of Amsterdam in
slowing cars and then integrating them with two-wheelers, Heineke
says. What’s more, he says, technology already exists to
speed-limit two-wheelers and other vehicles based on their
location, using governing devices that work with GPS.
“It’s a matter of regulation,” Heineke says. As two-wheeled
transit grows—both motorized and conventional—the idea of taking
space from cars should be less of a hot topic. “You can repurpose
lanes. You just need some paint,” he says.
Ultimately, “we won’t be in a world where we have three different
lanes,” says Heineke. “Two is enough.”
In the U.S., where many city avenues hum along at 45 mph, and
speed limits often are disregarded, slowing cars will be a tall
order. So will expanding bike lanes, in a country where carving
out even a single bike lane is often met with driver and voter
hostility.
For now, that leaves every two-wheeler on his or her own. Nicole
McSpirit—a Denver school crossing guard and e-bike enthusiast—has
a Dutch model that tops out at 16.5 mph. The city has well over
100 miles of bike lanes, though many are merely a line of paint a
few feet from the curb and are along major thoroughfares, offering
little real protection from cars and trucks.
Like a lot of experienced city bicyclists, McSpirit avoids those
bike lanes and winds her way through the city on quieter side
streets, when possible. “Drivers think the roads are for them,”
she says.
TWO-WHEELERS
Here are some of the new vehicles zipping everywhere from city
streets to bike paths:
* E-bikes: Depending on power and throttle, these generally top
out at 20 mph or 28 mph, but some less-common high-speed models
can travel as rapidly as 60 mph.
* Typical scooters: Rental company Lime says its stand-up scooters in the U.S. typically are speed-limited according to local government rules, ranging from a low of 10 mph in Washington, D.C., to 15 mph to 18 mph elsewhere. (The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety warns that speed caps on scooters tend to bring them back onto the sidewalk, where collisions with pedestrians occur.)
* Faster scooters: Some scooters can go much faster. Voro Motors, a Panorama City, Calif., firm, sells a $1,495 Roadrunner V3 that tops out at 34 mph, the firm says in its product description. (Confusingly, the word scooter is also used for a moped-like motorcycle alternative with a step-through frame.)
* Mopeds: These two-wheelers, lightweight motorbikes that have a low-powered gas engine or electric motor and in some cases can be pedaled, can reach 40 mph or faster, and in many locales, they are supposed to be in traffic lanes with cars, but they seem to spend a lot of time in bike lanes, too.
* Electric minibike: Sold as starter vehicles for kids, but at times ridden by adults, these go up to 20 mph. Souped-up ones can go faster.
* Single-wheel electric skateboard: Some models have a top speed of 22 mph. Electric unicycles: 28 mph.
* Meanwhile… conventional bikes: A clunky cruiser or heavy, upright Dutch model might poke along at 10 mph to 12 mph. Road bikes can zip along at 15 mph to 20 mph or faster, and some cyclists consider city bike paths fair game for their workouts.
Jeff Bailey is a writer in Denver. He can be reached at rep...@wsj.com.
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Scott Mace
Pump the Brakes on E-Bikes
New York City is on the right regulatory track.
Letter to the editor, Wall Street Journal, published Aug. 17, 2025
I applaud the efforts in New York City to adopt an e-bike speed limit of 15 miles per hour, paralleling safety actions abroad (“New York Has a New E-Bike Speed Limit—and Can’t Enforce It,” Page One, Aug. 8). Scientific literature from Europe, Asia and the Middle East documents the severe neurosurgical, orthopedic, maxillofacial and other traumatic injuries associated with the higher rate of speed for e-bikes compared to traditional pedal bicycles.
The U.S. should learn from this experience and spare the public repeated tragedies. New York can continue to lead the way by implementing new requirements for licensure and registration for those e-bikes that travel at higher speeds more closely resembling mopeds and motorcycles. This will enable law enforcement to identify these vehicles in traffic flow and restrict their use to the roadway instead of bike lanes and sidewalks, where they are more likely to collide with pedestrians in densely populated areas.
John Maa
San Francisco
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