With e-bikes growing in popularity, regulators have failed to keep up with the rapidly evolving market. Safety and law enforcement officials note that many models marketed to children and teens exceed legal speed limits and are more like motor vehicles, requiring a driver’s license and registration to drive.
Currently, the power to decide what teens can or can’t drive rests in the hands of a non-governmental authority: the parents. Across the country, they are expressing a mix of enthusiasm, remorse 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 accidents involving teens.
“At first it was a godsend,” says Julie Wood, whose daughter Sawyer, 14, got an e-bike last spring. “She’s a teenager, she wants to go everywhere.”
For Mrs. Wood of Boulder, Colorado, this meant less time transporting Sawyer in the car. But she had a firm rule that Sawyer had to wear a helmet.
In early August, Sawyer crashed while riding her e-bike without a helmet. She didn’t tell her mother, fearing disciplinary consequences, even though she was suffering from headaches and nausea and wouldn’t get out of bed. Several days after the crash, she suffered a seizure and had emergency brain surgery for a fractured skull and cerebral hemorrhage; She is expected to recover.
Her mother is now rethinking how society should deal with technology. “These kids don’t have a driver’s license,” Ms Wood said. “As much as you’d like to believe they’re cycling, it’s just different. They go very fast.”
After word of Sawyer’s accident spread around town, Scott Weiss, a Boulder resident and parent of two teens, 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 only sell the e-bikes to someone “college age” or older: “I don’t want to sell it to someone who isn’t willing to make the mental trade-offs you have to make.”
The questions surrounding e-bikes fit perfectly into a modern theme where powerful technologies, such as mobile phones and vape pens, are coming to market and sold directly to consumers, with little research available on the impact on behavior and safety.
In the case of e-bikes, some models can be reprogrammed to exceed the 30-mph speed limit allowed 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 it.
That’s fine with some parents who say the decision of whether or not to let a child ride an e-bike should be made by an individual family and based on whether a teen can handle the roads and speeds .
“I know my son and I know his athleticism,” said a Southern California mother, who asked that her name not be used because she felt her views could arouse criticism. Her son has two e-bikes: a Super73 that he got for his 13th birthday and a Talaria that he got for his 14th birthday. “He lives on two wheels,” said his mother, adding that the e-bikes were a source of pleasure for him.
The teen modified each of the bikes to go faster than he is legally allowed to ride them; in fact, the Talaria can reach 70 miles per hour. His mother gave him her blessing, she said, and even helped him cut a wire that removes the speed controller that normally limits the vehicle to 19 mph.
She stated that the companies designed the bikes so that the speed limits could be removed. “They want you in charge,” she said, “because they don’t want to be held accountable for producing a bike that goes 50 miles an hour and a kid goes straight into the concrete.”
Gari Hewitt, a nurse in the area and a friend of the mother, expressed more caution about e-bikes. Not so long ago she saw a 12-year-old boy lying unconscious in the street. He had been riding a Super73 when he hit a rock and “flew over the wheel,” said Ms Hewitt, who works as a nurse in a pediatric trauma unit. She examined the boy before he was sent to hospital; she later learned that he had a punctured lung, among other things.
Mrs. Hewitt has two teenagers of her own, a 15-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy. At Christmas they all got an e-bike. “If they’re that old, how can you impress them?” asked Mrs. Hewitt. “We only have a few years left to amaze them.”
The e-bikes had rules: always wear a helmet, don’t go faster than 30 kilometers per hour and never ride at night. The hospital where she works considers any accident with a speed of 30 kilometers per hour or higher as “a trauma activation,” she said.
“But you can also hurt yourself on the bike,” she said. “Everything comes with responsibility.”
