When footage circulates of children on electric bikes narrowly avoiding a collision with a bus, it tends to sharpen minds in local government. After the Fairfield mayor witnessed such a near-miss captured on camera, the call for a crackdown on illegal e-bikes has become urgent. Yet the mayor's push reflects a broader, more troubling pattern: across Sydney and beyond, the volume of serious e-bike incidents has spiralled beyond what existing regulations and enforcement can contain.
Emergency department doctors at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital treated double the number of injuries relating to e-bike incidents last year compared to 2024. The human toll extends further. An e-bike rider in his 30s died after colliding with a rubbish truck in Sydney in December, marking the fourth e-bike-related death in NSW in 2025. Other fatalities have included a 17-year-old who was the passenger on an e-bike involved in a collision. These are not isolated tragedies; they represent a gap between the speed at which these vehicles have flooded the market and the regulatory framework designed to manage them.
The problem sits at the intersection of three issues: illegal modifications, inadequate enforcement, and a generation of young riders who lack the cognitive development to manage high-speed machinery. Teenagers are riding two and three together on these bikes, without helmets, and far below the age at which an understanding of danger or speed can be estimated. What appears to be a bike increasingly turns out to be something closer to a motorbike dressed in bicycle clothing.
In NSW, legal e-bikes are capped at 250 watts of power, and the electric motor must cut off when the bicycle reaches a speed of 25 km/h. Many devices in circulation violate these limits. Police seized an illegal e-bike capable of travelling at 60 km/h, well beyond the legal maximum, allegedly ridden through the streets of Earlwood by a 12-year-old child. Such seizures have become routine, yet the problem persists because enforcement is thin and the barriers to purchasing non-compliant bikes online remain low.
The NSW government response has begun to shift. A Transport for NSW review will call for a legal minimum age of 12 to 16 years to ride an e-bike in NSW and is considering whether children and teenagers are able to carry passengers safely. Additionally, expanded powers for NSW Police include seizing and crushing illegal high-powered bikes, roadside compliance checks using portable speed-testing devices, and new lithium-ion battery standards aimed at reducing the risk of e-bike and e-scooter fires. From March 2026, NSW will adopt the European safety standard (EN15194), which reverses a permissive approach that had allowed higher-powered devices to circulate.
Yet some observers question whether these changes come too late or go far enough. A retired Hunter paediatrician who raised concerns as early as 2023 said the reforms were welcome but questioned why they had taken so long, accusing the government of being "asleep at the wheel". The gap between growing danger and regulatory response has real costs: young riders in Fairfield, like those caught on that bus footage, navigate roads where the legal definition of a bicycle has become ambiguous and enforcement inconsistent.
For parents and local officials, the message is becoming clearer. Parents need to stop buying children these bikes, and ways must be found to ensure they cannot be tampered with. Until that happens, the footage from Fairfield will remain a warning of near-misses rather than a guarantee of safety.