Because two-wheelers are often small, cheap, and fast, they are reasonably well-suited to congested urban environments. In cities with few good options, more and more people depend on two-wheelers to meet basic transport needs. In places like India and Indonesia, two-wheelers comprise the overwhelming majority of registered vehicles (72% and 83%, respectively). While this has improved access to jobs, education, and services, especially for low-income people, the negative impacts on both individual users and society continue to grow. The characteristics that make two-wheelers so popular (being small and quick) also make them deadly to riders and those around them, especially on streets that lack separated spaces for pedestrians and cyclists.

And this issue is getting worse. Injuries and deaths from two-wheelers are soaring and recently surpassed deaths from passenger cars for the first time. Indeed, the danger is so great that the Indonesian Transport Minister has urged citizens to avoid using two-wheelers for travel during a recent holiday. In Thailand, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were ten times as many two-wheeler deaths as deaths from the pandemic. In addition to safety issues, places with large mode shares of two-wheelers are often noisy, polluted, and generally very difficult to walk around.

Two-Wheeler Electrification: A Partial Fix

Replacing fossil fuel-powered two-wheelers with electric two-wheelers (or e-two-wheelers) dramatically helps reduce noise and air pollution, and is crucial to addressing the challenges of climate change. There is now a lot of investment supporting this transition, bringing down purchase prices and providing more charging and parking infrastructure. Demand is growing as a result: the Kigali-based e-two-wheeler company Ampersand, for example, now has a 7,000-person waitlist for e-two-wheelers in the city of Rwanda.

This is good news, right?

E-two-wheelers are certainly much better for the planet, but their weight and speed can still cause a lot of harm to people. With high-density batteries and motors, e-two-wheelers are significantly heavier than the internal combustion engine (ICE) two-wheelers they replace.  In Vietnam, for instance, e-mopeds are often twice as heavy as traditional ones. While they produce slightly less noise pollution, the heavier e-two-wheelers with faster acceleration will likely increase the frequency and severity of traffic crashes. In other words, an ever-increasing number of e-two-wheelers in cities, just like electric cars, is not the solution. To build robust political support for two-wheeler electrification, we must address these safety concerns.

Two-Wheeler Electrification: An Opportunity

Despite these challenges, the strong momentum worldwide for two-wheelers means electrifying them presents a crucial opportunity. We can use this momentum to improve conditions rather than dwelling on the problems or blaming individual users. Instead of simply replacing high-speed ICE two-wheelers with e-two-wheelers, we have an opportunity to move more towards what is beneficial for cities — smaller, lower-speed vehicles and a shift to more efficient modes, like public transport. In other words, policies should nudge people towards the type of vehicles at the top of the table below, in green.

The proper electrification of two-wheelers needs to entail several policy interventions, such as subsidies, import requirements, vehicle standards, and beyond. The design of each of these presents an opportunity to incentivize people to use lighter, lower-speed vehicles that work better with other modes to create a comprehensive, sustainable urban transport system. For example, if subsidies make electric mobility more affordable, they should also prioritize e-bikes over higher-speed two-wheelers. With new vehicle registration systems, registration fees should be lowest for the lowest-speed vehicles (and further waived for e-bikes). With import controls, low-speed modes should have the lowest barriers to market.

These, in turn, should be supported by better transport policies, such as investing in bicycle lanes for low-speed modes and redesigning urban streets for lower speeds overall, so that most medium-speed two-wheelers can safely mix with other vehicles. Classifying heavy, higher-speed two-wheelers as motor vehicles and low-speed e-bikes as bicycles helps clarify enforcement, especially if users can quickly see the difference between them. Luckily, we are not starting from scratch. Good guidance has already been developed for much of what is needed to improve our approach in every city.