Illegal bikes are a rational response to payment model used by large food delivery apps, says head of London-based delivery firm.Deliveroo, the app-based food delivery service, said it plans to monitor its delivery riders to assess how quickly they travel and compare the data with the legal speeds of e-bikes in the UK, but the company did not respond to repeated requests on whether it will implement the same technology in Ireland. As IrishCycle.com has reported several times, including earlier this week, a legal e-bike in Ireland is a pedal-assisted electric bicycle with a maximum continuous rated power output of 250 watts and a maximum speed of 25km/h before the motor stops helping. This is the basic rule across the EU and basically the same as the UK, where the limit is 15.5mph. Above these thresholds, or if the bike can move without pedalling (besides freewheeling) using a throttle, then it is legally considered a moped or even a motorcycle depending on speed and power.Deliveroo and Just Eat delivery riders are regularly seen moving without pedalling and at higher-than-normal e-bike speeds on streets in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, and Galway. Both Deliveroo and Just Eat were also contacted three times since last Friday, and both did not respond at the time of publication of this article on Wednesday after 6pm.Last week, The Times in London reported that Deliveroo would be implementing systems to crackdown on riders registering as having a bicycle or e-bike and actually using a moped or motorcycle. The speed technology is helping us better detect the use of illegal e-bikes by looking at sustained speeds. Where we see sustained speeds that are illegal, we will disable a riders account, Paul Bedford, policy and sustainability director at Deliveroo, told The Times newspaper. He said that GPS data showing a rider at higher speeds would have to be checked to see if they were going downhill at the time or if they were in an area known for poor GPS signal where an inaccurate speed might be recorded. He added: We are designing our approach to identify sustained patterns and avoid penalising riders who are following the rules.Bedford also said that Deliveroo were calling on the UK government to ban the sale of conversion kits which make it easier for non-electric bikes and e-bikes to be souped up, allowing for speeds far higher than allowed under the law. These kits and many types of imported overpowered bikes are also associated with fires. An illegal e-bike is the rational response to that pay modelIrishCycle.com also asked Deliveroo to respond to comments made by Ben Knowles, CEO and Co-Founder of Pedal Me, a cargo bike delivery company based in London. Knowles responded to The Times article last week, saying everyone could have seen the issue long before Deliveroo admitted it was a problem, and that the payment model to the food delivery companies to staff its service is a large part of the problem, as it incentivises poor behaviour.Huge congratulations to Deliveroo, who this week became the last people in London to notice the 30mph delivery bikes, said Knowles. And credit where its due: theyve now said it out loud. Their policy director has told The Times that some of their riders are on illegal e-bikes, and that theyre piloting technology to catch them using their own delivery data. Groundbreaking stuff.Who else had already spotted them? Everyone on the pavement. Everyone behind the wheel. The London Fire Brigade, putting out the battery fires. The Met, who seized more than 2,500 illegal e-bikes and e-scooters in the first seven months of this year. Basically anyone with eyes, said Knowles in a post on LinkedIn. Knowles said that The riders arent doing this for fun and pointed to the paid-per-delivery model pushes riders towards using faster bikes to make more money. He said: An illegal e-bike is the rational response to that pay model.Deliveroos solution? Ban the riders. Ask the government to ban the kits. The pay model that put them on those bikes stays exactly where it is. Meanwhile, the costs land on everyone else: fires in peoples homes, danger on our streets, police time, and a legitimate e-bike industry tarred by association, he said. Knowles company, Pedal Me, has prided itself on hiring staff directly rather than as contractors or self-employed. He said that solving issues that the gig economy creates feels like a game of whack-a-mole.He added: Every fix works around the same fact: the model depends on classifying riders as self-employed contractors, and that comes first. Ahead of common sense. Ahead of public safety. Ahead of the risk of modern slavery in the supply chain. The problem is the model. It will stay the problem until these riders are employees, so they can be paid fairly, kept safe, and the companies that profit from their work contribute to society like every other employer does.EU law edging toward viewing workers as staffIreland must transpose the EUs Platform Workers Directive into law by December 2nd of this year. During the summer, reports suggested this legislative change may force delivery companies to reclassify riders as employees, but its unclear how they will react.A Supreme Court judgment (The Revenue Commissioners v. Karshan (Midlands) Ltd. t/a Dominos Pizza) already ruled against delivery staff being counted as contractors, and after that, Revenue asked businesses to review the status of their workers.That Irish case, in October 2023, followed another in the Netherlands earlier that year, in which the Dutch Supreme Court upheld a Court of Appeal ruling that Deliveroo riders were legally employees, citing similar tests and reasoning on who is and isnt an employee or a contractor.The Dutch Court of Appeal ruling was made in February 2021, but in October 2022, before the Supreme Court ruling, Deliveroo announced it was ending its services in the Netherlands, although the company did not directly mention the judgment and said it was after it had determined that achieving and sustaining a top-tier market position in the Netherlands would require a disproportionate level of investment with highly uncertain long-term potential returns.The situation is different in the UK, where the courts ruled in Deliveroos favour in 2021 and said delivery workers are contractors. Deliverooalso did not respond to a request for comment on Knowles criticisms of their model.