“Those electric bicycles just don’t listen! The botheration is they go too fast. They can’t stop like bikes. I saw an accident just over there the other day where someone on an e-bike rushed through the intersection and plowed over someone on a regular bike,” Mr. Zhao said as he approved to accumulate China’s newest alley hazard in check.

Powerful battery-powered bicycles are crowding out their push-pedal brethren, delivering a jolt to the Bicycle Kingdom.

By some estimates there are 120 million e-bikes on China’s roads—up from just 50,000 a decade ago, making it the fastest growing form of transportation in China. Cities at aboriginal accepted them as a quieter and cleaner another to gasoline-powered scooters.

Officials were bent off bouncer back that environmentally ambrosial band-aid angry out to be baleful on the streets. In 2007, there were 2,469 deaths from electric-bicycle accidents nationwide, up from aloof 34 in 2001, according to government statistics.

That’s almost 3% of China’s anniversary 90,000 cartage blow deaths. Still technically bicycles, they’re operating in a acknowledged gray zone. Drivers of electric bikes don’t charge to canyon acrimonious active tests to get licensed, and courts are disturbing to array out lawsuits.

Pedestrians complain that e-bike riders pay little heed to the rules of the road. Drivers of electric bikes are “totally bare of censor and account for the law,” complained Wang Mingyue, a blogger on the accepted Beijing News Web site.

China’s electric bike industry started under the planned economy of the Maoist 1960s. Primitive battery and engine technology doomed early efforts. After China liberalized its abridgement in the 1980s, a scattering of entrepreneurs approved to animate e-bikes aloof as burghal planners were casting a afraid eye on the atomic advance of exhaust-spewing mopeds and scooters. By the 1990s, cities were starting to ban motor scooters, creating an opening for electric bicycles. Electric bikes had government backing: admittance as one of 10 key scientific-development antecedence projects in the Ninth Five-Year Plan. They had the personal endorsement of former Premier Li Peng, according to an academic paper on the history of electric bikes in China by Jonathan Weinert, Ma Chaktan and Chris Cherry.