E-Bikes, Hoons, and the Mess We've Made of Our Streets

There’s a video doing the rounds of a mob of kids on e-bikes and electric dirt bikes blocking Wurundjeri Way at Docklands on Anzac Day. If you haven’t seen it, imagine a swarm of unregistered two-wheelers filling a major road, some pulling wheelies, most wearing balaclavas, and essentially doing whatever they please with zero regard for anyone else around them. The comments online have been… predictably chaotic.

Here’s the thing though — I’ve been sitting with this one for a bit, because my gut reaction pulled me in two directions at once.

On one hand, watching kids on illegal, unregistered motorbikes — and let’s call them what they are, motorbikes, not e-bikes — running red lights, cutting off pedestrians, and doing stunts in heavy traffic makes my blood boil. This isn’t harmless larrikin behaviour. People have been seriously hurt. The incident on Plenty Road recently is a grim reminder that this stuff has real consequences. And wearing a balaclava while doing it suggests these kids know exactly what they’re doing is wrong. You don’t cover your face when you’re doing something you’re proud of.

On the other hand, one commenter made an observation that genuinely stopped me mid-scroll: look at how many people fit into that stretch of road when they’re not in cars. Dozens of riders in a space that, if everyone drove, would be a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam stretching well past the camera’s view. It’s a genuinely striking image, even if the context around it is infuriating.

That tension — between the very real danger these kids pose and the broader conversation about how we use our city’s roads — is what I keep coming back to.

The regulatory situation is a genuine mess. These machines are imported cheaply, marketed loosely, and fall into a legal grey zone that nobody seems keen to properly sort out. Some of them can do 60km/h without any pedalling whatsoever. That’s not a bicycle. That’s a motorbike with a more convenient power source. If you showed up to VicRoads trying to register one, you’d be laughed out of the building — yet somehow thousands of them are on our roads with zero licensing, zero registration, and zero accountability. The enforcement problem is real too. Police can’t safely chase kids on nimble bikes through city streets, and everyone knows it.

There’s a segment of the online discussion that wants to defend these kids purely on the basis that teenagers should be outside doing things. I get the instinct — genuinely. Screen addiction is real, and there’s something to be said for kids getting out of their bedrooms. But there’s a wide open field between “doom-scrolling on TikTok” and “doing wheelies past pedestrians on Bourke Street.” The teens I’ve seen fishing off the Docklands pier? Brilliant. Wholesome as anything. The ones in balaclavas slapping car bonnets and running lights? That’s a different story entirely, and pretending otherwise isn’t progressive, it’s just naive.

What actually needs to happen is pretty straightforward, even if the politics of it are messy. These higher-powered electric bikes need to be reclassified and regulated as motorcycles — full stop. That means licensing, registration, and proper safety standards before they can be legally imported and sold. Legitimate electric mobility — the genuine pedal-assist bikes, the properly regulated e-scooters — shouldn’t be caught up in a moral panic because of what these machines are doing. There are plenty of people who genuinely benefit from e-bikes: older riders, people with longer commutes, workers who can’t afford a car. They shouldn’t be punished because of regulatory failure and a cohort of bored teenagers.

Melbourne’s transport future almost certainly involves more people on bikes and fewer in cars. The infrastructure investment, the zoning reform, the cultural shift — it all points that way eventually. But that future gets harder to build politically every time a group of kids in balaclavas blocks a major road and makes the evening news. They’re not helping the cause. They’re actively setting it back.

So yeah — crack down on the illegal machines and the dangerous behaviour, absolutely. But let’s not throw the entire concept of electric mobility under the bus while we’re at it. We can hold two thoughts in our heads at once. The kids blocking Wurundjeri Way on Anzac Day were being dickheads. And we still need better cycling infrastructure. Both things are true.