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My anecdote only but the contraptions being sold as “e-bikes” are actually motorcycles. Like all things a few bad apples ruin it for everyone but in what I have seen it’s more than just a few bad apples. From maintained mountain bike trails, to riding at speed on walking paths. They are far more than just some kids being kids. It is ultimately a lack of parenting these days but I don’t believe the new laws coming into place are out of line. A vehicle that can hit 30mph within a few seconds is a lot different than a kid peddling at 20mph sustained.

Your description is not accurate for my state, California, there are clear tiers of ebikes with regulations on when and where they can go, with very clear explanation at purchase, and no weird marketing like you're talking about. I've tried to go buy them, I have experienced the lectures!

Perhaps we can let the few bad apples killing lots of people with their massive hood height lead to better regulation of such hood heights?

We have literal deaths on one hand, and on the other, fears that are already heavily covered by regulation. I don't know Washington, but the laws around the speed regulators, etc., for e-bikes are extensive. People still demand "laws" because they overreact and get fearful.

I just wish people would be more fearful of killing others with their cars. It's the biggest cause of death of children, yet there's no action. Yet here we are, discussing ebikes rather than the real causes of child deaths.

I'm as anti-car and pro-bike as they come. Cars and trucks are a much bigger danger than e-bikes...

But California's clear tiers of ebike regulations are meaningless without enforcement. Over the past half decade blue states have become unwilling to enforce almost any laws. when they do enforce the laws it is sporadically. This matters for ebikes, it matters more for cars. Running a stop sign is absolutely not enforced any more.

In NJ there was a string of teen ebike deaths, all of which were cars hitting teens riding on the side of the road.

The solution the state came up with was regulating the living hell out of ebikes.

I'm in the SF Bay Area and see small kids pre-adolescent or barely adolescent riding e-bikes with insane acceleration and speeds. The kind of performance, that in my youth, would come from a 250cc four-cycle motorcycle or 125cc 2-cycle motocross bike. And they are riding with absolutely no sense of traffic rules nor that they themselves are part of the same traffic. It's a really bad combination.

It doesn't matter what tiers there are when parents are negligently providing their kids with these kinds of "toys". I don't know if they are totally ignorant and think "it's just a bicycle" or if they know exactly what it can do and just can't see that their kid isn't ready for the responsibility.

> Your description is not accurate for my state, California, there are clear tiers of ebikes with regulations on when and where they can go, with very clear explanation at purchase, and no weird marketing like you're talking about. I've tried to go buy them, I have experienced the lectures!

The people buying the hackable e-bikes aren't walking down to their neighborhood e-bike store and paying full retail.

It's an internet phenomenon. They're ordering them online. There are subreddits where you can go and figure out which ones to buy that can be easily hacked or modified.

There are companies addressing this demand by making bikes that are technically capped to a specific tier of performance when sold, but any kid with the internet can find the instructions to "unlock" it to remove all of the limits and use the full power of the bike, not have to pedal, and so on.

I am not arguing for one over the other but that these e-bikes are motorcycles and I know from experience nobody actually enforces those rules.

Here in San Francisco, there a huge number of "e-bikes" that are designed, built, and sold as de facto illegal motorcycles, with only the paper-thin wink-nudge of a speed limiter that can be easily removed by the user, sometimes with online listings literally advertising the top speed without the limiter up front.

The city's treatment of traffic danger is comically bad, but these "e-bikes" aren't kids gallivanting around, they are traffic danger - usually by way of gig workers without insurance ignoring all traffic laws because they're riding "e-bikes" (with the speed limiter pulled out).

I live in WA (south of seattle) and your description is accurate, there are kids riding around on sidewalks in the area around my house on electric motorcycles that are sold as e-bikes. While I don't personally love it, they kept their distance from my small kids so I figure "let kids be kids". The one instance that frustrated me was they also show up at local mountain bike and skate parks. There they ride up the down trails and destroy a lot of the trail edges, a couple of times I've asked folks to leave.

I was hopeful when I saw the new law that it'll be used as a tool to take action on actual problem usage without punishing those using them safely. Unfortunately I'm aware of the history of laws like this, so I'm worried it'll just be used against lower income / privilege folks. We'll see.

People freak out about non-car transportation in general. Someone on my Nextdoor has been freaking out over temporary bus lanes, because nobody takes the bus but it's going to cause horrible traffic. They posted about rush hour gridlock on that street the other day caused by this grave injustice. The bus lanes haven't been put in yet....

There's constant vitriol about bike lanes, as if it's some huge sacrifice for drivers. And of course heaven forbid you roll a stop sign on a bike. Never mind that drivers do this constantly and are a far greater threat.

A lot of people fear anything that's not what they're used to, and they'll come up with any reason they can find to justify that fear.

There's a few traffic circles / roundabouts near me now. I love them -- they are safer and greatly reduce traffic if I'm headed out that way. The number of people who blame them for serious accidents is nuts, even if the accident is several miles away from the circle.

When the kids decide to take their E-bikes on I-5, you know something is wrong with their decision making skills: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1sjv7ua/teens_on_e...

Yes, people freak out when they see a kid on an e-bike on a crowded freeway.

Reasonable people freak out when they see that on a freeway

There are also plenty of unreasonable people who freak out when they see that on a not-freeway

Do they really need a new law to prevent bikes on freeways? I think that's already highly illegal.

It's legal in Oregon and Montana as long as you stay in the shoulder. You can walk there too. I can't remember the law in Washington.

In western states with a lot of rural places only serviced by interstate they sometimes never passed blanket prohibition against non-motorized traffic on the interstate property.

It is/was legal on rural interstates in Washington. I've cycled down I90 in roughly the North Bend area (in the late 90's).

Yes, sometimes the interstate is the only reasonable route through a pass in the western US.

You can bike at some places on I-90 in Washington state where better options aren't available. I don't think it applies to E-bikes though, or at least the ones that can go faster than 15 MPH.

> I can't remember the law in Washington.

I'd bet I-5 in Seattle is bicycles prohibited, but there's no blanket prohibition of bicycles on freeways. Like you said, there's a lot of parts of Washington where the freeway is the only reasonable road, so you can't prohibit bicycles or pedestrians.

Bikes that have motors and don't fit the e-bike tiers are motorcycles ... and could potentially be legal to operate on a bicycle prohibited freeway, but they'd need to be registered and it looks like these don't have plates, and the operator would need a DOT motorcycle helmet which was not present, and I'd bet these are also missing out on the lights and stuff you need too.

You know, the law banning kids from driving vehicles that can go over a certain speed is also already on the books. The new law is just a clarification that no, you can't be an 11 year old going 40 MPH with an unlicensed E-bike.

The big problem is just Seattle being incredibly underpoliced and really no laws under homicide are really enforced or punished.

Ok, but riding an ebike on the interstate is already illegal. If the problem you're trying to solve is kids taking ebikes onto the interstate, then you don't need any new laws

Surely this isn't as stupid as an SUV trying to take light rail though right?

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/how...

Maybe Seattle is the problem ;)

I remember hearing about that kind of problem in Europe all the time 20 years ago.

I'll never forget that time my mom accidentally drove straight into a tram tunnel. One of the "we can laugh about it now" stories.

There's kids who go around on ebikes in my neighborhood, and it's only a matter of time until one of them is hit. I don't mind kids on bikes, and encourage it. I do, however, encourage them to stop at stop signs and to actually look for traffic at intersections, and that's something that these kids are not doing.

To be fair, most cars go too fast in residential areas. I drive like a grandma in them and there's a good chance that someone is up my ass and annoyed that I'm not exceeding the speed limit.

> there's a good chance that someone is up my ass and annoyed that I'm not exceeding the speed limit.

Same with not going right on red when it's impossible to see if anybody is coming without pulling way past the crosswalk.

Sometimes the car behind me honks to show their support.

Cars do go too fast through neighborhoods: one ran into a house and killed someone inside.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/1-person-killed-tesla-a...

There's a restaurant in a city near fairly near where I live where I often eat at the sidewalk city in the summer. And the (protected) bike lane is this somewhat horrifying combination of bikes, e-bikes, escooters and things like motorcyles together with pedestrians crossing. And, because many people are on bikes, a lot just blow through red lights at the nearby intersection because it's a bike lane.

There's some of that, a lot of it though is e-dirtbikes that can pretty easily do 35+mph stock and 50+ with light modifications. A friend of mine has one and I've ridden it. It's a motorcycle with mountain bike brakes. I don't think they're bad vehicles, but I do think they should be treated as motorcycles as opposed to bicycles, and 13 year olds shouldn't be riding them on public roads.

> I don't know the particulars, but if what's going on in WA is like what's going on in my California town, I don't think it's reasonable

I was driving on a WA highway going ~47 mph (I made note of it for reasons soon to be clear!) when a group of 3 tweens on ebikes, none wearing helmets, passed me up in the bike lane going at least 10mph faster, and I watched them run through a red light up ahead. They got lucky.

I don't have a problem with kids being kids but this is over the top dangerous. To be clear, it's a few small groups of kids. There have been crashes, and they sent a Bellevue woman to the hospital in a hit and run, but as far as I know there's been no fatalities yet.

We don't need to drop the hammer on kids. We just need some common sense.

Like a lot of these things, it's all fun and games until someone gets injured. This happened the other week in Edinburgh: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/woman-knock...

Previously, there had been a lot of complaints about intentional antisocial riding on pavements etc. Close passes as a form of harassment. If that's tolerated, it's a matter of time before someone gets hit.

As an extra punchline, while the injured woman was surrounded by police and medics, two other idiots on Voi rental bikes ran through the cordon and got arrested.

To be clear, the "e-bikes" in question aren't what you usually think of as e-bikes. Not only do they look different, they're faster and typically don't even require pedaling (and may not have pedals at all). Hence why I said they were kinda like mopeds.

> I see teens going around on ebikes, and people freak out over them in ways that seem completely inappropriate to the kids scooting around. I think it's mostly a reaction to seeing young people being young people, as far as I can tell.

I thought it was all fun at first, but they've since invaded the bike paths and parks near my house. It seems like more common they become, the more emboldened the riders are to drive 40mph down the bike path and weave around people.

It's so bad now that I have to be on high alert on the mixed-use path to grab my kids and pull them in when I hear the unmistakable sound of a Sur-Ron coming at us from behind at high speed. Usually a group of several kids.

They've also taken to riding through the parks and fields we go to, treating the little hills as jumps. The grass is getting destroyed. Parks have to put up temporary fences and gates to keep the electric motorcycles from destroying the fields.

It's not just kids, either. I've had several close calls this year while I'm riding my (pedal) bike and middle-aged people riding modified e-bikes (not pedaling, just zooming along at high speed) have zoomed around corners and almost hit me. They jump from the road to the sidewalk to the bike path as convenient and everyone else has to avoid them.

It's bad. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not a problem. I spend a lot of time outside with my kids and the problem is getting worse by the year.

I'm tempted to say nothing some baseball bats won't help. But the real problem is that you have bicycles increasingly morphing into things that look more like motorcycles and, if they can't be legally sold that way, someone will sell them or they can be modded.

Stepped out of a coffee shop, got text from wife, grabbed my phone and got missed by inches by a kid on a scooter easily doing 25mph on the sidewalk. The text possibly saved my ability to walk in future by having me to pause just for a moment.

I was 3-4 feet from a building corner when someone raced around it on a scooter. Amazing to me the complete lack of both self-preservation and respect for others.

On the other hand, kids have always been stupid. We've just given them new, more powerful ways to abuse that lack of awareness.

Okay, now do the times when some reckless driver nearly got you killed...

I don't disagree cars are more dangerous. But I can manage to be concerned about two things simultaneously.

I'm way more concerned about getting run over or T-boned by a distracted driver in a huge pickup, and literally nothing is getting done about that.

But this post is about SUVs and somehow the biggest thread is about the danger of ebikes and scooters. It sure does make you think...

on the sidewalk? Never.

The rate of people running stop signs and red lights is way higher on e-bikes. And cars usually aren't driving on sidewalks.

> We've just given them new, more powerful ways to abuse that lack of awareness.

Automobiles for 16-year olds have been around for a very long time.

Anyways, it's quintessentially American to be talking about oversized landship SUVs and trucks killing people, only to have someone derail it into kvetching about kids and bicycles.

The problem is with bicycles being relegated to either the sidewalk or the main road with cars. I'm really not a fan of how cities create bikelanes by putting a line through the sidewalk and then nobody respects it.

I see the appeal in trying to ride fast, but it gets kind of scary. When I rode a bike I went fast outside the city specifically to avoid pedestrians.

And the main road with cars wouldn't be an issue if people had a little common sense and respect. I was descending down a mountain road on my bicycle once, definitely speeding (enough so that I caught up to the traffic ahead of me -- really just trying to get off the mountain quickly though since I know people like the following exist), and some giant truck decided it was up to them to show me a lesson for riding in the road -- tailgated me the entire way down the bloody mountain, and there was no safe way for me to pull over (no shoulder, trees and steep drop), to speed up (I was already booking it, and there was a car in front of me anyway and no safe way to pass), or slow down (IME, slowing down when in a car sends people like that into a rage, so I wasn't comfortable bleeding off any speed with this guy a few feet behind me). If I had any equipment failures or had to slow down for any reason it would've been a nasty accident.

I had never heard of NextDoor until I read this post. UK based. I just spent 20 minutes reading Wikipedia and associated articles. They are really old too... Wow

As a teenager in 00s suburban Texas, all you had to do is gather in a playground or stripmall parking lot for someone to call the cops.

I mean are you in the hood or not?

Easy for you to say this if you're from Happysville, CA, USA, but if you're near Oakland or SF you know these kids DO form "gang"-like groups and block traffic, the bridge, swerve through traffic.

It's chill if the kids near you are respectful but the reason Gen Z as a whole ride these bikes is because they actively want to ride fast like motorcycles without license or registration.

>I see teens going around on ebikes, and people freak out over them in ways that seem completely inappropriate to the kids scooting around. I think it's mostly a reaction to seeing young people being young people, as far as I can tell.

It's kind of a hilarious yardstick for societal decline if you think about it.

70yr ago the boomers were drunk crashing sports cars so frequently that laws got passed.

Now late teenagers can barely afford an e-bike and mostly aren't causing problem, but laws still get passed, by the literal same cohort who were drunk crashing muscle cars back in the day.

In my area kids are doing street takeovers and assaulting people in cars and pedestrians. Laws have been passed to deal with it but there is very little on the enforcement side. Plus kids are riding around in effectively what are electric motorcycles that can hit highway speeds which would normally require licensing and registration like any other motor vehicle. Recently I know of a 15 year old who crashed on one of these bikes and died. Having said that, 15 year old me would have absolutely loved having one of these kick ass ebikes.