Family members of people killed in e-rideable accidents left disappointed by lack of urgency from authorities

The families of two West Australians killed in e-scooter accidents say they are disappointed the government is not acting sooner to better regulate e-rideable devices.

Brooke Lane's brother Leigh Tagell died in February 2025 after falling off an e-scooter in Kalgoorlie.

She believes he had modified the e-scooter to run at a higher speed than allowed under the state's rules, before hitting an uneven part of a footpath.

More than a year on, she is disappointed rules around e-rideables have yet to be tightened.

"How long do we have to wait?" she said.

"There's no sense of urgency, like, people are dying, people are getting hurt, [it] puts pressure on services.

"It's really disappointing."

The widow of Thanh Phan, who died while walking in the CBD after being struck by a drunk e-scooter rider in May 2025, was also disheartened by the lack of regulation.

"While some ideas have been mentioned, there is still little detail about how or when measures might be introduced to prevent what happened to Thanh and our family from happening to someone else,"  Loan Le told the ABC in a statement.

A total of 12 people have died in e-rideable accidents since 2022, state government figures show.

Time frame on changes unclear

Mr Phan's death sparked a cross-party parliamentary inquiry into e-rideables, which was expanded in July to include electric dirt bikes when a 59-year-old woman died after being hit by one.

The first public submission the inquiry received was from Ms Lane.

The government yesterday announced it supported, or supported in principle, all but one of the committee's 33 recommendations.

That includes working towards banning e-rideables from high foot-traffic areas, introducing a new class of higher-powered devices with potentially stricter licensing requirements, and considering penalising retailers who help customers modify devices.

But Assistant Transport Minister Jessica Stojkovski, who is leading the government's response, refused to say when Western Australians would see any changes take effect.

Instead, she called for action from the Commonwealth to stop higher-powered devices being imported into Australia, and to set nationally consistent rules.

WA would wait to implement the national framework once it was formulated, rather than introducing temporary changes in the interim, she told parliament.

"What we can control in Western Australia, we are already acting on," Stojkovski said.

The national framework would, in part, depend on work being done by Western Australia on behalf of other states and territories to create uniform rules around device standards, classifications, operating rules and licensing requirements.

 "If we are to register vehicles that will go above 25 kilometres [an hour], we need the federal government, from a safety point of view, to do the classification so that we can do the registration here," was one example Ms Stojkovski gave. 

People's lives the 'cost of waiting'

Nationals Deputy Leader Peter Rundle, who chairs the committee, said his team had been asked to investigate the issues urgently, but the government seemed to be moving at a different speed.

His colleague, opposition road safety spokesperson Julie Freeman, said even in the absence of a national framework, more should be done locally.

"The cost of waiting is people's lives," she said.

Ms Stojkovski said the government had started working on changes it could make locally even before the committee's report had been handed down.

"It's a complex piece of legislation dealing with a very new technology, relatively speaking," she said.

"And so we need to make sure that when we make these changes that we don't have adverse effects."

Tampering with devices 'easy'

Bicycle Industries Australia, which represents bicycle importers, manufacturers, retailers and suppliers, has also called for prioritising a national approach.

General manager Peter Bourke said it was critical for the federal government to impose tougher import rules and set standards for anti-tampering mechanisms.

An effective anti-tampering mechanism could have prevented Leigh Tagell from overriding any speed restrictions on his e-scooter. 

"Anti-tampering is not going to be the silver bullet," Mr Bourke said.

"But right now we know it is easy and the information is provided by brands to make it easy for consumers to modify [devices].

Mr Bourke said retailers were prepared to play a bigger role in educating consumers — another recommendation of the review — in addition to state and territory governments improving awareness of the rules more generally.

Karl Stade, operator of LifeCycle Bikes in the south west town of Margaret River, said setting standards for imported devices was key to saving lives.

"We just want to see better quality of devices coming in," he said.

"We see some really scary set-ups of people bringing them to our store wanting to fix them, and we have to turn them away."