“Those electric bicycles just don’t listen! The problem 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 bottleneck out their push-pedal brethren, carrying a blow 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 caught off guard when that environmentally appealing solution turned out to be deadly 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 legal gray zone. Drivers of electric bikes don’t need to pass stringent driving tests to get licensed, and courts are struggling to sort out lawsuits.

Pedestrians accuse that e-bike riders pay little heed to the rules of the road. Drivers of electric bikes are “totally devoid of conscience and respect for the law,” complained Wang Mingyue, a blogger on the popular Beijing News Web site.

China’s electric bike industry started under the planned economy of the Maoist 1960s. Primitive array and agent technology bedevilled aboriginal efforts. After China liberalized its economy in the 1980s, a handful of entrepreneurs tried to revive e-bikes just as city planners were casting a worried eye on the explosive growth of exhaust-spewing mopeds and scooters. By the 1990s, cities were starting to ban motor scooters, creating an aperture 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.