Safety concerns of e-motos / throttle e-bikes have entered the mass media chat

[Scott Mace]

Two links from this weekend:

NY Times: The Shocking Crash That Led One County to Reckon With the
Dangers of E-Bikes

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/magazine/e-bikes-accidents-safety-legislation-california.html

E-bike crash fractured her skull, so teen set course for reform

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99WQMv8tyAE

Scott Mace

[David Whiteman]

Does the New York Times article provide different information about ebikes than the You Tube video of the NBC news report? One is protected by a paywall; the other is not. 

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[Scott Mace]

Yes the information is different.

Here's a link I can provide because I am a subscriber:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/magazine/e-bikes-accidents-safety-legislation-california.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5E8.KKVb.ubnrQGzkUssk&smid=url-share

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[Alan Forkosh]

There’s an interview with the author of the Times Magazine article in the Times’ This Morning newsletter.  I reproduced the interview below. Kushner’s statements and questions are bold-face; the answers from the article author (David Darlington) are in regular type.

By Adam B. Kushner

I’m the editor of this newsletter.

Sometimes I bike to work. It’s a 12-mile workout alongside the Potomac River — a lovely route. I pedal hard. But a few times per ride, I get a shock: An e-bike zooms past me like an angry locomotive, doing almost 30 miles per hour. It’s always another commuter, like me, schlepping his laptop and shoes to work in a backpack. I wonder each time: What happens if you crash at that speed?

The Times Magazine answered that question today. E-bikes are heavy and fast — in some ways closer to a motorcycle than a manual two-wheeler — and they’ve proliferated in the last few years. So have the injuries associated with them, rising by a factor of 10. Policymakers haven’t caught up. I spoke to David Darlington, a freelance journalist who wrote about the issue.

It seems like a good thing that a popular new tech is getting us out of our cars and homes more, no?

E-bikes are awesome. They’re fun to ride, they ease the pain of hills and headwinds, and they’re already cutting demand for oil by a million barrels per day — four times as much as all the world’s electric cars.

But people need to be educated, not just about e-bikes but safe cycling practices in general. The author of one study told me that Americans think of bicycles as toys: They aren’t taken seriously as vehicles, so they don’t require licenses or “driver’s manuals.” But many of the new devices — still defined as “low-speed bicycles” under the law — have powerful motors and travel at speeds that are dangerous for inexperienced riders.

How scared should we be?

Some devices are more menacing than others. The scariest are “e-motos,” which look like mini-motorcycles and aren’t legal e-bikes at all. I profiled a high school student, Amelia Stafford, who went for a short ride on a friend’s e-moto and ended up with a traumatic brain injury. Pedestrians have been killed when speeding riders ran into them.

Is that because riders go so much faster? The top allowed speed is 28 miles per hour.

That class of bike is supposed to stay on the road, though enforcement is practically nonexistent. The ones that go 20 m.p.h. are allowed in bike lanes, but even those are faster than “analog” bikes — and the motor can often be “unlocked” to exceed those speeds, hitting 45 m.p.h. and more. Plus, e-bikes usually weigh more than 50 pounds. That’s a lot of inertia, even at a legal speed. So the result is more gruesome when they get out of control. One hospital in Marin County, Calif., studied the crashes there and found that the chance of dying from a conventional bike crash is less than 1 percent, but for e-bikes it was 11 percent.

What are the rules for e-bikes?

There are few federal laws other than limiting the top speed to 28 m.p.h. (In Europe, it’s 15.5 m.p.h.) Aside from that, states and counties and cities come up with their own rules. You might be required to wear a helmet, or stay out of public parks, or refrain from operating an e-bike with a hand throttle (as opposed to getting a boost only when you pedal) in your town. But if you venture into the next town, none of that may apply.

Safety advocates are pressing for tougher rules. Is this the beginning of the sort of crusade that brought us seatbelts? What does the movement look like?

Matt Willis, who was Marin County’s public health officer at the time of Amelia Stafford’s crash there, told me, “The technology has moved forward way faster than our ability to measure its impact or develop sensible regulation.” Monica Stafford, Amelia’s mom, thinks that management of e-bikes is at an embryonic stage of development — like automobiles 100 years ago. (Although electric bikes were invented before cars!)

Read David’s piece and learn what happened to Amelia Stafford.

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

https://al4kosh.com

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[Scott Mace]

And there's yet one more completely different story in this morning's San Francisco Chronicle. I've pasted it in below.

(When does saturation coverage become moral panic? Put another way, where was the mass media until now? Oh yeah, no one had really gotten hurt yet, at least not publicly.)

Scott Mace

This has turned into e-moto day in California. Here's this morning's San Francisco Chronicle story, entirely different than the others.

Kids on superfast e-bikes are alarming California. One Bay Area school district is cracking down

By Brooke Park, Staff Writer

Nov 30, 2025

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/ebikes-ban-california-21213548.php




Photo caption: A teenager gives a friend a ride on a throttle-assisted e-bike near White Hill Middle School, in Fairfax, Calif., in April. School districts in California have begun banning versions of these bikes.

Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle

Menlo Park’s school district will soon begin enforcing a sweeping ban on ultra-fast e-bikes, citing recent crashes and concerns that a more serious collision is inevitable, the latest move by authorities across California to address what they view as a growing safety hazard.

Starting this week, the Menlo Park City School District will ban students under 16 from bringing e-bikes capable of exceeding 20 miles per hour or operating without pedaling onto campus. The ban includes two classes of legal e-bikes as well as those that have been illegally modified to go faster.

Many law enforcement authorities say these modified electric motorcycles are masquerading as e-bikes, and are capable of blasting past the speed limit rating they were sold under.

“These kids are taking these bikes and hacking them,” Atherton police school resource officer Dimitri Andruha told the school board on Oct.9. “They get rid of rev limiters, get rid of speed limiters. These kids are doing 50, 60 miles an hour.”

With five schools serving roughly 2,700 students through eighth grade, Menlo Park is likely the first district in the South Bay to enact such a ban after the measure unanimously cleared its school board earlier this month. The Portola Valley School District enacted a similar ban this month.

Jed Scolnick, the school board’s vice president, expressed hope that in addition to Menlo Park, “Atherton, Los Alamitos and Portola Valley and all the schools will look at this policy.”

At Hillview — the district’s only middle school — officials said there have already been a “handful” of collisions involving e-bikes, cars and pedestrians during arrival and dismissal times. One September crash sent a Menlo-Atherton High School teen to the hospital with moderate injuries. Across Menlo Park and Atherton, police have recorded 10 crashes involving e-bikes in the past year. It wasn’t disclosed how many of these involved legal e-bikes vs. modified ones.

“Accidents already happen, but it’s just a matter of time till a really bad one happens,” school board member Scott Saywell said. “And then everyone’s gonna be like, why did we not do something about it?”

The district’s action follows new e-bike restrictions in Marin and San Diego counties. Across Marin County cities, towns and unincorporated areas, children under the age of 16 cannot ride class 2 e-bikes, which are throttle-assisted electric bicycles that do not require the user to pedal. Jurisdictions in San Diego County can ban kids under the age of 12 from riding class 1 e-bikes, which provide peddle-assisted power capped at 20 mph, as well as restrict class 2 models. At least four San Diego cities have implemented such bans.

The state already requires riders to be over the age of 16 to operate the third category, class 3, which has pedal assist, throttle, and a top speed of up to 28 mph — the top speed before a bike is considered a motor vehicle. 

State laws passed in 2024 authorized the restrictions in Marin and San Diego counties on a pilot basis. Because the state has jurisdiction over vehicles on roadways, authorization must come from the state level. (Menlo Park’s school district can act without state authorization because it is only a ban on the vehicles on campus, not on public roads.)

Marin County law enforcement can cite minors for riding class 2 e-bikes only if they’re already writing another ticket, a restriction some critics say limits the rule’s effectiveness but proponents say encourage education first.

Local leaders across a growing number of California communities are concerned about the dangers of e-bikes, including the modified e-motos. Bob Mittelstaedt, an e-bike advocate based in Marin County, said greater resources should be poured into cracking down on the modified electric motorcycles kids are whipping through neighborhoods on.

“For most of these, no hacking is required,” he said. “It’s simply taking the bike as you find it, and using the app that is provided by the manufacturer.”

CalBike and 30 other bicycle and active transportation groups are also campaigning for a distinction between e-bikes and e-motorcycles.

“Most public concern about e-bikes is actually concern about electric motorcycles that are not e-bikes,” the organizations said in a letter. “Many local ‘e-bike’ laws appear to be in response to an increase in the use of unlicensed motorcycles that can operate above 28 mph.”

Operating an electric motorcycle requires a license from the state.

In an October survey of four Menlo Park and San Mateo area schools, Mittelstaedt said he saw 70 so-called e-bikes — but believes that 62 of them did not meet the legal definition. Instead, he said, they functioned as electric motorcycles because they lacked class labels, exceeded the 750-watt power limit or could surpass 20 mph on throttle alone, he told the school board.

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