It’s rush hour at the intersection of West Boulevard and Camden Road in South End.
Shoes strike the pavement as office workers cross the street. A train bell rings nearby. And one by one, men in button-ups and other commuters whiz through the intersection on electric scooters and e-bikes.
As e-bikes become more common on Charlotte’s streets, so do concerns about how some people are riding them.
The debate is now moving from neighborhood complaints to City Hall. Charlotte’s Safety Committee is expected to consider the issue in August, as Waxhaw and Davidson adopted their own rules for e-bikes and other electric vehicles. But Charlotte has little data showing how often e-bikes are involved in crashes or which types are causing the greatest concern.
Charlotte City Council member Kimberly Owens holds coffee meetings with District 6 residents nearly every Friday and says e-bikes have become a constant complaint.
“Without exception, every time I have one of these, at least one person is there expressing a concern about e-bikes,” Owens said.
She says residents have described young riders popping wheelies, circling in the road and weaving between cars.
“I’ve raised three boys,” Owens said. “Like, I get the daredevil teen mentality — 'I am invincible.'”
That’s why she’s pushing the Safety Committee to take up the issue, following the lead of cities like New York, which now limits e-bikes and e-scooters to 15 mph, or possibly Washington, D.C., which offers vouchers to some low-income residents to buy e-bikes, helmets and locks.
But not everyone sees e-bike riders as the problem.
Charlotte resident Thomas Haapapuro, a longtime cyclist, says the public often reacts differently to reckless behavior depending on who is responsible.
Near his home, he says both children on bikes and adults in cars regularly ignore the same stop sign. But only one group draws complaints online.
“The woman that complains most on my Facebook forum, her house is right there,” Haapapuro said. “And I see her complain all the time about the kids not stopping at the stop sign, but not a peep about the cars not stopping at the stop sign.”
Haapapuro worries rules aimed at a small number of reckless riders could make transportation harder for people who ride e-bikes responsibly.
“There are people that are going to misuse every system that exists,” he said. “But throwing out everything because of a little misuse, I think is a dangerous thing.”
Others say the bigger issue is speed.
Cathy Hasty says she’s grown concerned with how quickly bicycles pass people on county greenways.
Hasty is 69 and rides an e-bike herself. She says the reckless riders she sees are often adults.
“They fly by me sometimes,” Hasty said. “And if I was to just kind of absentmindedly shift to one side, they would plow over me.”
Hasty does not want Charlotte to ban e-bikes. She says regular bicycles can also become dangerous when riders move too quickly through shared spaces.
She thinks small speed bumps on shared paths could help.
“To me, it’s more about the speed than it is about the technology,” Hasty said.
That speed can also present dangers to riders themselves.
Angela Bryan is a trauma and injury prevention coordinator with Novant Health. She says crashing a speeding e-bike can cause serious injuries.
“A lot of head trauma and broken bones are probably the biggest things we’re seeing,” Bryan said.
E-bikes were associated with an estimated 59,200 U.S. emergency department visits in 2024, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission report released in April.
WFAE asked the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department for data showing how often e-bikes are involved in crashes, but the city said it doesn’t track that.
Owens says collecting more information may become part of the Safety Committee’s work.
“All we have are disparate anecdotes,” Owens said. “We need to combine forces and get some information. That may be where we come out.”
She says the committee could consider rider education, enforcement, infrastructure changes or new regulations.
For now, Charlotte officials still lack a clear picture of which vehicles and behaviors are causing the most harm, or even just how widespread the problem is.
