For the riders we have lost

This is the page PEVRA will keep for riders who died on an electric unicycle or another personal electric vehicle. Today it holds no names and no numbers. It holds the rules PEVRA has set for itself before adding either, written down first so that a family can read them and hold us to them.

What this page will be

Riders die on these machines. Most of the time the record of it is a news paragraph that gets the vehicle wrong, a forum thread that argues about the helmet, and a spreadsheet kept by volunteers who did not want the count to be lost. PEVRA wants a better record than that, and a kinder one.

Kinder means the person is not reduced to their crash. A rider who is remembered here is remembered because someone who loved them asked for it, in the words that person chose, and can change their mind. Better means the record of what happened is separated from the record of who it happened to, is sourced, and says how much is known.

Nothing is published yet. The next section is the shape it will take.

Two layers: the record and the person

Every entry has two parts, kept apart on purpose.

The incident is PEVRA’s own record and carries no name. It says when, in which country and region, and roughly where — a city or county, never an address. It says what kind of event it was: a collision with a motor vehicle, a single-vehicle crash, a medical event, something else, or unknown. It carries an evidence tier, the same A, B and C used on every legal page, so a reader can tell a coroner’s report from a news story from a forum post, and it links its sources. It never records what the rider was wearing or what machine they were on, because those two facts are the ones people use to decide the dead had it coming, and this page is not for that.

The person exists only if a family asks. It carries a name, a story in the family’s words, the date consent was given, and nothing PEVRA wrote. A person entry cannot be created without a signed consent on file; the site’s checks will refuse to build it otherwise. There is no “anonymous rider” card and there will not be one: an unnamed person card would be an incident wearing a face.

Counts, never rates. PEVRA will say how many riders are on this page. It will not divide that number by anything — not by riders, not by miles, not by wheels sold — because no denominator exists that would make the result true, and a false rate does more harm than no rate.

  • A name goes on this page only when a family member or the rider’s next of kin asks for it in writing. PEVRA does not approach families. If you are reading this because you lost someone and want them here, write to info@pevra.org and a person, not a form, will answer.
  • The story is in the family’s words. PEVRA edits nothing except at the family’s request, and adds nothing.
  • Consent can be withdrawn at any time, by anyone entitled to give it, for any reason or none. A takedown request is honoured promptly — PEVRA’s target is within a week of the request — and the entry is removed, not struck through and not archived in public.
  • PEVRA never publishes a photograph it was not given for this purpose, and never publishes contact details.
  • The incident record stays after a name comes down, because it never carried the name. If the family asks for the incident to be removed as well, PEVRA will do that too.

What we are trying to learn

When investigators write up a crash they describe what happened; they do not assign blame, because blame is a question for a different room. PEVRA takes the same line. The incident record describes; it never says who was at fault.

What a described record can still teach is where the danger is. Across the records volunteers already keep, one pattern is not subtle: the car is the main threat, and where you ride matters more than how fast the wheel can go. That is the sentence this page exists to carry, and the reason it links to how PEVRA thinks about staying safe and to where riding is and is not allowed. A law that pushes riders off a bike path and onto a road with traffic is not a safety law.

Where the record will come from

Volunteers on the main electric unicycle forum have kept a fatality history for years, and a separate community spreadsheet does the same work with more columns. PEVRA will not copy either. When this page starts carrying records, it will be because their keepers gave written permission, are credited by name, and the lists have been reconciled with each other rather than forked into a third. Until that permission exists, this page carries nothing, and says so.

If you keep such a list and want to talk about it, info@pevra.org.

Nothing on this page is a legal claim and nothing here is a rate. How PEVRA handles evidence.

Page built