SF Chronicle: Teen injury epidemic: powerful e-motos used as legal e-bikes

[Scott Mace]

Teen injury epidemic: powerful e-motos used as legal e-bikes

By Brooke Park, Staff Writer

San Francisco Chronicle, February 14, 2026

Lilia Tideman, 15, crashed on her e-bike last year while riding to school in Los Gatos, breaking her leg. Before the crash, she loved the freedom her e-bike afforded her.

When 14-year-old Lilia Tideman opened her eyes, she was splayed on the asphalt, the wheel of a Chevy Silverado inches from her skull. Her left femur was cracked in half. Nearby lay her scuffed gray e-bike.

Moments earlier, the Los Gatos High freshman had been rushing to campus, her 88-pound Super73 e-bike reaching nearly 40 mph on a twisting downhill stretch of a one-lane, two-way road. As she rounded a corner, she saw the Chevy coming the other way and squeezed the brakes. Her bike wobbled and she tipped, skidding down the roadway and toward the wheel of the pickup that stopped just in time.

Young people like Lilia have embraced e-bikes as a way to shed their reliance on a mom or dad for a ride to school, a pizza place or a friend’s house. But with this new freedom has come a growing number of e-bike crashes involving young riders that is raising deep concern — and confusion — across the Bay Area.

Minors have seen the fastest growth rate for e-bike injuries since 2022, according to federal figures. Data from Marin County shows e-bike crashes are concentrated among 10- to 15-year-olds, with that age group over five times more likely to be in an e-bike crash than any other. Bay Area trauma surgeons say their hospitals are fielding more and more e-bike-related injuries, which are also more severe, often appearing more like the result of a motorcycle wreck than a bicycle crash.

Kacey Hansen, the executive director of trauma at John Muir Health, said the Walnut Creek hospital treated twice as many life-threatening injuries from e-bike crashes in 2025 as the year before, including cases of severe brain injuries, though she declined to provide exact numbers.

“They’re going to critical care,” Hansen said. “They are sometimes altered forever.”

Lilia’s crash last October helps reveal the complicated new frontier that e-bikes have opened up. Parents, educators, police and lawmakers are all grappling with questions of how to balance freedom, safety and punishment. But with the newness of the technology, these groups often operate under very different assumptions about what children are riding, what the rules are and who should enforce them.

“These motorcycles, I’m going to call them, are positioning themselves as e-bikes,” said San Rafael police Lt. Scott Eberle, referring to the more powerful products that have grown in popularity. “They think they’re buying an e-bike when they’re not.”

California puts e-bikes in three categories. Class 1 e-bikes have pedal-assist motors that allow speeds up to 20 mph. Class 2 e-bikes — like Lilia’s — operate with throttles to accelerate up to 20 mph without pedaling. Class 3 e-bikes have pedal-assist motors that top out at 28 mph and no throttles, and are restricted to riders age 16 and older.

But to the untrained eye, it’s nearly impossible to tell which is which. And in practice, these distinctions are blurry. Many e-bikes can go faster, or can be hacked to do so, leading critics and police to call them “e-motos.” Manufacturers have been accused of bending categories, with Super73, one of the most popular brands, sued by parents for selling e-bikes that could be manipulated to go faster than state limits. The lawsuit is ongoing, and Super73 has denied wrongdoing.

Partly as a result, separating legal e-bike crashes from those on e-motos is difficult. The Chronicle reviewed California Highway Patrol crash reports from each Bay Area county from Jan. 1, 2023, through the end of 2025 and found that dozens of children have crashed on what reports describe, though perhaps too broadly, as e-bikes.

In some instances, children are getting hurt on actual electric motorcycles, legally speaking. That was the case this month in Half Moon Bay, where a 16-year-old boy died after colliding with a box truck on a highway shoulder. Police said he was on a vehicle of the type that requires a state motorcycle license, even as an increasing number of teenagers use them as if they are e-bikes.

“We can’t look away from this,” San Mateo County Supervisor Jackie Speier said after the Half Moon Bay death. “This is a public health and safety crisis.”

‘The most painful experience’

Lilia loved her e-bike. After her parents bought it for her last summer — her older brother already had one — she could visit friends or go for calming rides through the park. When school started, she biked to campus, saving her parents a trip. Her friends biked around town and to sleepovers.

Across the country, e-bike sales were booming: up fourfold from 2019 to 2022, surpassing 1 million bikes sold, according to data from the Light Electric Vehicle Association, a trade group.

Looking back, Lilia wishes that she better understood how dangerous it could be to go so fast, and that her friends and peers did, too.

“It was great,” she said, “and then I crashed.”

Lilia remembers little of the crash itself, which was documented in a CHP report. She was so badly hurt that first responders fitted her with a neck brace and gave her morphine before rushing her by ambulance to a hospital.

There, a doctor drilled a hole in Lilia’s shin, slid a metal bar through it, and attached ropes and weights to pull her leg back into alignment. “I think that’s the most painful experience I’ve ever had,” she recalled.

Doctors told her family that a helmet probably spared her from a worse outcome. Still, guilt swept over Lilia’s mother, Angela. When nurses asked whether she would let her daughter ride the bike again, she didn’t know how to answer.

Angela, 53, had been delighted that her daughter was spending time outdoors and staying active rather than looking at screens.

“I’m torn because I understand that these things can be dangerous,” she said recently. On the other hand, she said, “It gave a certain freedom that they were hanging out like we did in the ’80s.”

Angela knew kids were using apps to reprogram e-bikes to go beyond their speed limits; her son had been one of them before his e-bike was stolen. But she was alarmed when Lilia told her she had been traveling close to 40 mph — even without pedaling or using the throttle.

E-bikes are often twice as heavy as traditional bicycles. That means, as in Lilia’s case, they build speed quickly on hills, are harder to suddenly brake and can crash with greater force.

Crashes like these have led some doctors to demand change.

‘Growing epidemic’

John Maa is a trauma surgeon in Marin County, where wealth and enthusiasm for the outdoors have made e-bikes especially popular. He calls the injuries he and others are seeing a “growing epidemic.”

When he and local elected officials realized that patchwork state and federal laws were doing little to track or deter the crashes, they sought to step in, proposing an age requirement for some e-bikes.

Experts worry that children lack the judgement and awareness needed to safely operate heavy e-bikes, and research shows that youths take longer to recognize traffic hazards and are less likely than adults to respond to them in time.

Last July, under a trial program, Marin became the first county in California to ban kids under 16 from riding Class 2 e-bikes. The trial results, which officials plan to outline for state legislators by January 2028, aren’t yet clear.

Reported e-bike crashes rose slightly in Marin County last year, according to county figures, but that could reflect increased usage. In October, a 14-year-old riding an e-motorcycle in Novato crashed into a Ford Transit van and was hospitalized in critical condition.

“It’s tragic,” Maa said. “Despite all of these efforts … the message didn’t get through.”

Bob Mittelstaedt, a retired lawyer turned safety advocate, said Marin County may not be seeing a meaningful reduction in injuries because legislators targeted the wrong problem. “We’ve got an ordinance that’s addressed to Class 2, but most of these aren’t Class 2,” he said. “They’re e-motorcycles.”

Partnering with Safe Routes to School, a Marin program promoting bicycle and pedestrian safety for kids, Mittelstaedt has been auditing school parking lots. Riding his Class 1 electric mountain bike, he visited 12 schools in the county in January 2025, finding 277 e-motos to 37 legal e-bikes.

Mittelstaedt did a similar analysis in San Mateo County, where he found 151 e-motos to 22 e-bikes.

Alan Kalin, a 75-year-old retired Army colonel, has trained his sights on the middle school parking lots and bike corrals of the San Ramon Valley Unified School District. He said he counted 71 e-motos during a count last October at Stone Valley Middle School in Alamo — up from the 52 he counted last February — and asserted that school officials are reluctant to enforce existing laws.

District Superintendent CJ Cammack disputed this, saying middle school students are only permitted to ride Class 1 and Class 2 e-bikes to school. When staff members discover Class 3 e-bikes or electric motorcycles, he said, school officials work with parents to “remove” the bikes.

One reason for the proliferation is that e-bikes, legal and otherwise, are getting less expensive. In 2022, consumers spent an average of $2,600 for commuter and leisure e-bikes, according to a white paper by researchers from Portland (Ore.) State University. But those costs went down as cheaper versions of e-bikes flooded Amazon. One best-selling electric bicycle with a 1,500-watt motor, and a vaunted top speed of 28 mph was selling recently for $800.

“This used to be a rich kids problem,” Mittelstaedt said, “and now it’s not.”

‘Not the gestapo’

Advocates like Mittelstaedt lament that, in their view, there’s little appetite for a crackdown on kids pushing the limits on e-bikes. He shared an email exchange with Thomas Bertrand, the Central Marin Police Department’s lawyer. “Parents are not enthusiastic about us going after their children,” Bertrand wrote. “Nor are schools. We are not the gestapo.”

Bertrand told the Chronicle that police have worked collaboratively on the issue with schools, parents and students.

Public safety officials acknowledge that enforcement is fraught. From his motorcycle in San Mateo, police officer Julio Jolivette has watched as more and more children ride e-bikes, sometimes rolling on sidewalks and weaving through traffic — and often without helmets.

He first heard of an e-bike crash involving a minor in San Mateo two years ago. Now, he said, upward of 10% of his traffic stops involve kids as young as 11 on illegal bikes or unsafely riding legal bikes and scooters. While most youngsters riding e-bikes aren’t reckless, what concerns him is how many of the vehicles are “flat-out motorcycles.”

If Jolivette pulls over a kid, it’s generally because he recognizes an illegal e-bike. His department has launched a campaign to help parents distinguish between legal e-bikes and e-motos.

Officers often avoid ticketing children at first, Jolivette said, instead giving warnings. Recently, he stopped four children — ages roughly 12 to 14 — doubled up on a pair of electric dirt bikes. He said enforcement can be uncomfortable.

“It’s an icky feeling,” he said. “I know people see that and they think, oh, man, the police are out there, you know, they’re hassling these juveniles.”

And enforcement doesn’t always go according to plan. In early January, Petaluma police reported that a minor on an e-motorcycle was trying to evade police when he narrowly avoided an oncoming car, then crashed after hitting a speed bump. The minor was ticketed, and the e-motorcycle was towed.

In December, the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University issued a report, commissioned by the state Legislature, analyzing the e-bike problem with a focus on children. Its central finding was that “illegal, over-powered devices” were the “key problem.”

But Maa, the surgeon, disagrees: “Playing this game of saying it’s just the illegal ones that are the problem and all the legal ones are safe,” he said, “is a way of continuing their sales and not educating the public about the inherent features.”

He pointed to the European Union, which limits e-bike motors to 250 watts, compared with the 750-watt restriction for American e-bikes. In a loophole one Bay Area member of the Assembly is trying to close, many bikes use that wattage as a baseline, rather than a peak.

Others, like Mittelstaedt, believe all throttle-powered e-bikes should be considered motor vehicles, leaving only pedal-assist e-bikes free from licensing and training requirements.

Lilia doesn’t believe kids should be banned from riding e-bikes outright. But she said she worries when she sees young people ride too fast. Nearly four months after her crash, her leg has healed with the help of a titanium rod. She sometimes misses the freedom her e-bike gave her, but she hasn’t gotten back on since. These days, her mom drives her down that same twisting road to school.

Now 15, she’s looking forward to next year, when she can get her driver’s license.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/e-bike-crash-injury-21331489.php

[Alan Forkosh]

Here’s a gift link (no paywall) from the SF Chronicle. The article is also available in Apple News.

Alan Forkosh                    Oakland, CA
afor...@mac.com

https://al4kosh.com

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