Calgary city councillor Mike Jamieson recently laid out what residents have been reporting: e-bikes, e-scooters, and electric dirt bikes ridden at excessive speeds, without helmets, through parks, playgrounds, and pathways shared with pedestrians and young kids.
The City was candid that the technology has outrun the rules, that gaps exist between City bylaws and provincial legislation, and that a review is now underway to sort out what applies to which device and what is actually enforceable today.
This is the right call, and a more careful one than these conversations usually get. A review that starts by asking how the rules apply to different device types, rather than treating everything with a battery as one undifferentiated menace, is exactly the right instinct. So this is not a complaint. It is two requests, backed by numbers, to keep the review honest.
First: hold the line on device types, because Alberta law already draws it.
The residents’ concern points at a specific thing: Heavy, fast machines doing motor-vehicle speeds in spaces built for walking. That machine has almost nothing in common with a street-legal e-bike beyond the battery, and the law knows the difference.
In Alberta, a “power bicycle” must have a motor of 500 watts or less, assistance that cuts out at 32 km/h, and fully functional pedals, with a permanent manufacturer’s compliance label. Cross those limits, and the vehicle stops being a power bicycle and becomes a motor vehicle, requiring a licence, registration, and insurance.
Calgary already goes further than most: The city prohibits throttle-only riding on multi-use pathways.
In other words, the illegal e-moto tearing through a playground at 50 km/h is already illegal. It is already, by definition, an unregistered motor vehicle. The tools exist to get this off the pathways.
Meanwhile, the legitimate machines built to that 500-watt standard, cargo bikes included, are not what the 311 calls are about. They are the opposite: The parent hauling two kids to school without a car, or the commuter who left the second vehicle at home.
My own family moves our kids across this city by cargo bike. A good review will make sure the rules can tell us apart from the problem, because the tempting move under public pressure is one broad rule that sweeps everyone up together.
That would punish the compliant riders already doing what the city says it wants, while doing little to stop the person who was never going to follow the rules.
Second, and this is the one I most want on the record: The data on what is actually killing Calgarians is not close.
Here is what our own roads produced. In 2024, Calgary saw 29 fatal collisions. Thirteen of the dead were pedestrians, and five were motorcyclists.
There were no fatal cyclist collisions at all that year. It was the deadliest year on Calgary roads in more than a decade, including a 225 per cent increase in pedestrian deaths. The societal cost of collisions that year was estimated at $1.4 billion.
Then it got worse. In 2025, Calgary recorded 38 fatal collisions, including 15 pedestrians and two cyclists, all up from 2024. Last year was an 11-year high for pedestrian deaths. As of this past spring, 2026 had already seen 12 traffic fatalities, six of them pedestrians.
Read those lists again and notice what is on them: people on foot, people in cars, people on motorcycles. The device now generating the most 311 calls and the most council attention is generating close to none of the actual fatalities.
That is not an argument to ignore reckless riding. It is an argument for proportion, because the thing filling our trauma wards is the thing we have stopped seeing, and have learned to live with.
We know why cars sit at the top of that list. It is physics, and it is measurable.
The best available synthesis of crash data finds that a pedestrian struck at 30 km/h faces roughly a 5 per cent risk of death; at 40 km/h that rises to 13 per cent; at 50 km/h to 29 per cent; at 60 km/h to 50 per cent; at 70 km/h to 75 per cent; and at 80 km/h to 90 per cent.
Put more starkly, for every additional 1 km/h of impact speed, the odds of killing the pedestrian rise about 11 per cent. Speed and mass are the whole story, and nothing else on our streets combines both the way a car does. Speed is not a background factor in Calgary’s toll either. Roughly 24 per cent of the city’s fatal collisions in 2024 involved unsafe or excessive speed, climbing to about 30 per cent by the summer of 2025.
Here is the part where people throw up their hands.
We cannot, as a city, govern the top speed of every vehicle or ride along in every cab to correct every driver. True. But that is not the choice in front of us, and it never was. We do not have to control drivers one by one, because we control the road they drive on.
Speed and caution are not just personality traits a driver brings to the street; they are responses to what the street tells them to do. A wide, straight, forgiving road quietly gives permission to speed no matter what the posted number says. A road with narrowed lanes, tighter corners, raised crossings, and physical protection for people outside cars makes the safe speed feel like the natural one.
We cannot legislate the behaviour we want out of every driver. We can design the road that produces it and then let the road do the enforcing every hour of every day, without a single officer present.
More cyclists = fewer crashes involving them
We know that works, because it turns out to be the same lever twice. Cities with more people cycling have lower collision risk per cyclist, a pattern documented from individual intersections up to whole cities and countries. For years this was called “safety in numbers” and chalked up to drivers behaving more carefully when bikes are a common sight.
But the most comprehensive study to date, examining more than 17,000 fatalities and 77,000 severe injuries, found the gains were driven less by the raw number of riders than by the infrastructure built for them: Separated, protected bike lanes that calm traffic and slow cars for everyone.
The results are hard to ignore. Portland’s bike mode share rose from 1.2 to 6 per cent between 1990 and 2010 while its road fatality rate fell 75 per cent, with fatal-crash rates also dropping sharply in Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, and Chicago as protected lanes went in.
The infrastructure that brings people onto bikes is the same infrastructure that stops drivers from killing people. That is the fix, and it is not a crackdown.
Now weigh our response against the problem. Calgary spends about $5 million a year on mobility safety. Edmonton spends closer to $50 million, and Toronto around $80 million. We are under-investing in the hazard that is demonstrably killing people, at the exact moment we are gearing up a review and an education campaign for the hazard that mostly is not.
My ask is simple. Finish the review and finish it well.
Enforce hard against the genuinely dangerous machines, which are already illegal and already motor vehicles under the law. Write rules precise enough to protect the legal e-bikes that are quietly taking cars off our roads.
Put real money behind the street design that the evidence says actually saves lives, so that a visible campaign against the small hazard never becomes the reason we feel we have addressed road safety while the $1.4-billion problem idles at every intersection.
The councillor is right that the technology moved faster than the rules. The harder truth is that the deadliest technology on our streets moved the fastest of all, decades ago, and we simply got used to it.
We cannot ride shotgun with every driver in this city. We can build streets that make the right speed the easy one.
Keep the distinctions sharp. Keep the cars in frame.
- Cody Littlefield is a dad and strategic designer based in Crescent Heights, Calgary. Originally from San Diego, California, he spends too much time thinking about how cities are built and whether his kids can safely cross the street.
Works Cited
Alberta e-bike law and device classification
“Electric Bike Laws Canada 2026, Province-by-Province Guide.” KwickStock, May 2026. https://kwickstock.ca/en/blog/lois-velo-electrique-scooter-electrique-canada
“Alberta E-Bike Laws (2026): Rules, Fines and Where to Ride.” Zeus Ebikes Canada, February 2026. https://zeusebikes.ca/blogs/news/alberta-ebike-laws-2026
Calgary collision and fatality data
“Record-high fatal collisions prompt joint response from the Calgary Police Service and the City of Calgary.” City of Calgary Newsroom, 22 September 2025. https://newsroom.calgary.ca/record-high-fatal-collisions-prompt-joint-response-from-the-calgary-police-service-and-the-city-of-calgary/
“Calgary Safer Mobility Plan, Annual Briefing 2025.” City of Calgary, Mobility and EMCS Traffic Safety Team, 2025. https://www.calgary.ca/content/dam/www/transportation/roads/documents/traffic/calgary-safer-mobility-plan-annual-briefing-2025.pdf
“2024 marks highest number of fatal road collisions in over a decade.” CBC News, 30 January 2025. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-traffic-safety-collisions-record-year-injury-fatal-1.7445399
“City asks for urgent $1M as Calgary pedestrian deaths increased 225% last year.” CBC News, 8 May 2025. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/pedestrian-deaths-increase-1.7530354
“Calgary council looking for solutions in wake of rising traffic fatalities, pedestrian deaths.” CBC News, 13 June 2026. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/traffic-fatalities-city-council-study-9.7232495
Vehicle speed and pedestrian fatality risk
Hussain, Q., Feng, H., Grzebieta, R., Brijs, T., and Olivier, J. “The relationship between impact speed and the probability of pedestrian fatality during a vehicle-pedestrian crash: A systematic review and meta-analysis.” Accident Analysis and Prevention, 2019. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0001457519301058
“Vehicle speed and pedestrian fatalities: Evidence to support safe speeds.” Road Safety Authority (Ireland), 2023. https://www.rsa.ie/docs/default-source/road-safety/r4.1-research-reports/safe-speeds/vehicle-speed-and-pedestrian-fatalities-2023.pdf
Cycling numbers, infrastructure, and road safety
Jacobsen, P. L. “Safety in numbers: more walkers and bicyclists, safer walking and bicycling.” Injury Prevention, 2003. https://www.littlerock.gov/media/2355/jacobsen_2003_safety_in_numbers.pdf
“Cycling lanes reduce fatalities for all road users, study shows.” ScienceDaily, reporting on research from the University of Colorado Denver and the University of New Mexico published in the Journal of Transport and Health, 2019. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190529113036.htm
