“We’ve got members who are in their 70s and 80s, and so without access to an e-bike they’ll probably drop off and not continue to ride.”

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Beurle said members of her group had bought reputable e-bike brands, which often cost thousands of dollars and met European safety standards, whereas the string of house fires on record involved bikes with DIY conversion kits or low-quality imports, including those used in the food delivery industry.

“So just to have a blanket ban, I think it’s a knee-jerk reaction,” Beurle said.

Hussein Dia, a professor of future urban mobility at Swinburne University, said many commuters used e-scooters to get to and from train stations, which closed gaps in the public transport network.

“If you think about the outer suburbs, where the bus comes around every 30 minutes, they can be a really helpful solution,” he said of the scooters. “If they’re not available, they’ll use their polluting vehicles.”

Dia said a lithium battery fire on a train was a serious but unlikely event, and should be managed by enforcing quality standards on imported batteries and devices.

Elliot Fishman, a director at consultancy firm Institute for Sensible Transport, said everyone was paying the price for the state and federal governments allowing the e-bike market to become a “wild west”, with no quality control on imports or police enforcement against riders using illegal high-powered models.

Fishman said the state government had not collected enough data on how many people take e-bikes and e-scooters on trains to understand what the likelihood of a fire actually was, nor what impact the ban would have on Victorians’ mobility.

“There is a public consultation process [where] the answer is already known and they’re merely going through the process, but not in a genuine way,” he said.

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Public consultation on the ban closes on August 18, just six weeks before it is set to come into effect.

A summary paper on the new regulations says a train fire is “a serious safety issue because it may be difficult to evacuate passengers on a crowded service or where trains are in between stations”.

“Electrical fires from these devices can start without warning, are extremely difficult to extinguish and quickly spread toxic smoke,” the paper says.

Bicycle industry bodies say poor quality and dangerous e-bikes flooded into Australia in 2021 after the Morrison government revoked a permit system that forced importers to prove their e-bikes met world-leading European safety standards, did not exceed speeds of 25km/h and didn’t have a battery more powerful than 250 watts.

Victoria and NSW last month asked the federal government to reintroduce national safety standards for electronic mobility devices, including rules around speed capability and battery safety.

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