The Consumer Product Safety Commission defines an e-bike as a two- or three-wheel vehicle that has pedals and an electric motor. Have you ever seen one? Ridden one? If so, what was it like? Where did you ride it? Did you feel safe on it?
With e-bikes soaring in popularity, regulators have been unable to keep up with the quickly evolving market. Safety and law enforcement officials note that many models marketed to children and teenagers exceed legal speed limits and more closely resemble motor vehicles, which require a license and registration to operate.
For the moment, the power to decide what teenagers may or may not ride falls to a nongovernmental authority: parents. Across the country, they are expressing a mix of enthusiasm, contrition and uncertainty about the trendy mode of transportation.
Some parents who initially embraced e-bikes now say their enthusiasm has waned with news of recent crashes involving teenagers.
“Initially, it was a godsend,” said Julie Wood, whose daughter Sawyer, 14, got an e-bike this past spring. “She’s a teen — she wants to go everywhere.”
For Ms. Wood of Boulder, Colo., that meant less time carting Sawyer in the car. But she had a firm rule that Sawyer wear a helmet.
In early August, Sawyer crashed while riding her e-bike without a helmet. She did not tell her mother, fearing disciplinary repercussions, even though she was experiencing headaches and nausea and did not want to get out of bed. Several days after the crash, she had a seizure and underwent emergency brain surgery for a skull fracture and a brain bleed; she is expected to recover.
Her mother is now rethinking how society should handle the technology. “These kids don’t have driver’s licenses,” Ms. Wood said. “As much as you want to believe they are riding a bike, it’s just different. They go really fast.”
After news of Sawyer’s accident spread around town, Scott Weiss, a Boulder resident and parent of two teenagers, decided to sell the family’s two e-bikes. “I want to keep you alive as long as possible,” he told his 14-year-old daughter. He said he would sell the e-bikes only to someone “college-age” or older: “I don’t want to sell it to someone who is not prepared to make the mental judgments you have to make.”
The questions around e-bikes fit squarely into a modern theme in which powerful technologies, like mobile phones and vape pens, enter the market and are sold directly to consumers, without much research available on the impact on behavior and safety.
In the case of e-bikes, some models can be reprogrammed to exceed the 20-mile-per-hour speed limit permitted for riders under 16; they therefore fall into the category of motor vehicles. The federal government has not yet figured out how best to regulate them.
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