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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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