Maitland is building more shared paths. It keeps no record of what goes wrong on them.

The question was well framed, which is why the answers are worth reading. The councillor noted e-bike use has grown including among young riders and is likely to keep growing as active transport infrastructure expands under two council plans, and then narrowed the ask: Road rules, vehicle classification and enforcement are matters for the NSW Government and NSW Police and are not the subject of this question. What was left is the part council does control, education and monitoring.

What council does do

There is no dedicated program, but there is work. Council’s Road Safety Officer, funded through the NSW Local Government Road Safety Program, incorporates e-bike safety information into existing road safety education and community engagement activities where relevant. The answer explains why that is defensible: As compliant e-bikes are regulated under the same road rules as bicycles, the majority of road safety messages relating to safe riding behaviour, helmet use, visibility, shared path etiquette and rider responsibility apply equally to both bicycles and compliant e-bikes.

The activities are named rather than gestured at: National Road Safety Week engagement, kindergarten orientation sessions, school information evenings and P&C meetings, and a monthly Traffic Talk social media campaign, one recent edition of which focused specifically on e-bikes. On the paths themselves, council has installed Ring Before Passing pavement decals on selected shared paths.

Council also promotes other bodies’ material rather than creating separate technical guidance, pointing residents to Transport for NSW on the rules and to Fire and Rescue NSW regarding the safe charging, storage and disposal of lithium-ion batteries. One forward step is worth noting: the Road Safety Officer is investigating opportunities to work more closely with local bicycle retailers to provide TfNSW educational resources at the point of sale, which puts the information in front of a buyer at the moment they buy.

The gap is in the counting

The fourth question asked whether council holds data on e-bike incidents on its own paths, and whether it can monitor that as use grows. The answer is no, and the reason matters more than the fact.

Council’s crash information is primarily sourced from Transport for NSW and is based on crashes reported to NSW Police that meet State reporting requirements. Then the consequence, in council’s own words: Consequently, many minor incidents, falls or conflicts occurring on shared paths are not captured within these datasets.

Put those two sentences together and the shape of the problem is clear. The dataset is built for roads and for crashes serious enough to reach police. A collision between a fast e-bike and a walker on a shared path, or a fall, is exactly the event it is least likely to record. Council says it instead monitors available crash data, customer requests, community feedback and observations from staff, which is a reasonable substitute and is not a count.

Our view, and it is a view. This is not a criticism of the road safety work, which is more substantial than a one-line answer would suggest. It is that the two halves do not match. Council is expanding a shared path network under a Draft Active Transport Plan, it identifies pedestrians and cyclists as priority user groups under a Safe System approach, and the measure that would tell it whether the paths are getting safer or more dangerous as e-bike numbers rise does not exist at the path level. The council said as much when a councillor asked, which is to its credit, and the answer names no plan to build one.

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