Please explain how that would work. Given that e-bikes are a tangible physical product that you can't hide and has a large supply chain that needs to be operating behind it to keep it working and in existence.
Simple. There's too many of them to enforce a ban. Try enforcing a ban on bicycles. When ebikes are that common, the level of trouble needed to enforce some kind of ban is going to be far more trouble than its worth. Right now, in my community, I think ebike commuters and recreational riders, combined (i.e. all bike riders) probably outnumber bicycles. Maybe by rather a lot. I count as I go about my regular routes and - in a community with rather a lot of bikes on the paths and the roads, sometimes I see 75% ebikes.
My community enforced a 12 mph ebike-on-the-path speed limit a couple of years ago IIRC. Comments at the time were centered along the lines of "how will you enforce that?" The answer is they don't. But it also signaled the complete disappearance of city-council-based complaints. We did see a few bicycle cops on the path for awhile but they disappeared fairly quickly. Not a surprise that funding dried up in favor of better uses for the resources.
Banned e-bikes would be subject to confiscation. Most folks aren't going to risk letting something that they spent thousands of dollars on be taken away, or for that matter spend thousands of dollars on something that they lose if they operated it outside...
Easy to type that and thats it. Confiscating personal property lawfully acquired is, frankly, ridiculous to even contemplate. Think for a minute how utterly impossible it has been to try that with firearms. Move towards private property confiscation (again... where that property was lawful at the time of purchase and lawfully acquired) and that is a can of worms with zero chance of success.
The NYC confiscations were done on bikes that were never lawful in that jurisdiction, so they don't count.
Banned e-bikes means they couldn't be sold in bike shops or even have spare parts distributed. So even if you have one it won't be running for very long...
You can't even do that with gun parts. What are you going to do? Scan the mails from AliExpress? Do you realize what kind of infrastructure that would require? Again thats easy to type but an enormous amount of actual resources (legal and physical) to actually make happen somewhere besides an internet forum discussion.
Banned e-bikes mean your LBS couldn't and wouldn't work on it. So the large percentage of e-bikers who can't fix a flat won't be riding for very long...
NYC can't even shut down underground battery 'repair' shops. When there is a buck to be made, people will step into that vacuum. But again I don't see any chance of it getting this far outside of a forum post. For such a thing to happen a lot of other extremely unlikely things have to happen first.
Banned e-bikes means you couldn't operate a business renting e-bikes. 'nuff said.
Yeah thats true. But so what? That isn't going to do a thing to prevent ebikes from being in private hands. If anything it would mean more people buy them if they can't rent the things.
Here locally, a couple of shops rent Surrey bikes. Those things are an absolute menace and I can remember one day with two separate paramedic trucks at different places along the main community bike path where children had been smashed into by them. Everybody hates the things and for good reason. But they're still being rented. The businesses are local, they pay taxes and no local politician on general principles wants to shut down a longtime local business... or be seen doing that. This is another argument that gains far more traction on the internet than it does in real life.
Yes, you could argue that a ban would be stupid. But governments do stupid things all the time and usually get away with being stupid.
This isn't going to be one of those. Sure lesser things can and will happen. Stuff like UL certification.
A whole other angle to this that hasn't been contemplated: Ebikes are the only real bright spot in the profit/loss statements of many bicycle manufacturers, and that industry makes contributions and has lobbyists. Again to address the narrow question of the possibility of a ban: This is one more reason a ban is simply never going to come close to happening.
Still another angle: Ebikes are a key to a progressive clean air agenda at a policy level. The government WANTS more ebikes from a long term policy perspective (at least that is certainly true here in California). They aren't going to give up on that because of some Nervous Nellies trying to swat a fly with a sledgehammer, which is what any talk of a total ban is ... and then some.
