Speed Hacks and Safety Fears: Marin Cracks Down on Kids’ E-Bikes

On a recent sunny afternoon, Dylan Nussbaum and his friends cruised over to a shopping center in Mill Valley, where the parking lot serves as a makeshift bike park. The kids popped wheelies — making the most, as generations of pre-teens before them, of summer weather.

“I started biking a lot more when I got here. It’s a fun way to get around faster,” said Nussbaum, 12, riding a traditional mountain bike, while some of his friends rode electric bicycles, or e-bikes, which had thick tires, wide seats and battery-powered motors.

Nussbaum, whose family moved from Oakland to Mill Valley at the start of his fifth-grade year, noticed that getting around on two wheels is a huge part of the culture, even among his peers.

Marin County is considered the birthplace of modern mountain biking. He said his former school, Mill Valley Middle, was full of shiny new e-bikes.

“[In] sixth grade, I remember right after Christmas, there were so many more,” he said.

Like some adults who customize their cars, many of his middle school peers learned to trick out their e-bikes.

“I jail-broke my Sur-ron. It’s called ‘mudding’ it,” one of Nussbaum’s friends said, referring to overriding the speed limiter on e-bikes to reach speeds of 40 to 50 mph — far above the legal limit in California.

Another kid, sitting atop an e-dirt bike, told me it’s capable of going 55 mph.

“ The cops used to not care, but they’re enforcing the law now,” he said. “So I just avoid main roads.”

Nussbaum wants an e-bike, too. But his parents, worried about his safety, are reluctant to buy him one. As kids head back to school in the Bay Area, more of them are riding e-bikes, which have become more accessible in recent years. But Marin County policymakers have been trying to sound the alarm about one downside to this growth.

According to the county’s Department of Health and Human Services, serious accidents associated with e-bikes, particularly among 10- to 15-year-olds, have been on the rise for years, so the county began closely tracking the problem in 2023.

In response, the county has enacted a pilot program that bans anyone under 16 years old from riding Class II e-bikes, which, in California, are classified as having a motor that boosts riders up to speeds of 20 mph and can be operated using a throttle or pedal-assist.

Kids found in violation can expect a $25 ticket. Several school districts in the area have also moved to prohibit kids under 16 from parking Class II e-bikes on school property, implementing registration programs for the bikes.

Local police officers will enforce the law as a secondary infraction, meaning children will not be stopped based on their perceived age, according to Talia Smith, the director of legislative and intergovernmental affairs for the county.

The pilot also mandates that anyone, regardless of age, wear a helmet on a Class II e-bike.

While the county law, which went into effect in June, applies only to unincorporated areas, copycat ordinances are already in effect in the majority of Marin’s towns, as well. Novato’s ordinance will go into effect on Friday. Ross and San Rafael are expected to have theirs in effect by mid-October, at which point the ban will reach the entire county. Municipalities will only hand out warnings for the first 60 days the law is in effect.

The pilot represents the latest attempt by local governments to regulate e-bikes. The effort has been building at the state level for years, amid concerns about safety risks. However, critics argue that the county law is premature, lacks sufficient data and threatens to hamstring a promising transportation alternative that has been gaining traction around the country.

The crash heard around the county

The COVID-19 pandemic was a boon for the bike industry. Many people, stuck at home and restricted by bans on indoor gatherings, turned to bikes as a way to recreate and socialize safely. Between 2019 and 2020, e-bike sales rose 145% in the United States. E-bikes can be pricier than traditional bikes, with models that cost anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000.

More e-bikes hit the roads, especially in Marin County, where the median household income is $139,643 — 46% higher than the statewide average. Dr. John Maa, a general surgeon at MarinHealth Medical Center, said the rise in e-bike use precipitated two waves of crashes in the county: the first involving mainly people over 50, followed by an increase in injuries among minors.

According to county data on crashes since October 2023, e-bike riders between 10 and 15 years old have had five times the accident rate compared to any other age group on e-bikes.

One e-bike crash, in particular, galvanized the county to act.

In 2023, 15-year-old Amelia Stafford of San Rafael was riding a Class II e-bike when she fell off, suffering a severe head injury. She spent two months in intensive care units all around the Bay Area, undergoing three brain surgeries to save her life.

“ She was actually the first teenage child that I had personally cared for, and she was clearly the most seriously injured of the children,” said Maa, who stressed that e-bike injuries tend to be more serious than those from a conventional bicycle accident.

He and Stafford joined forces and helped advocate for AB 1778, authored by North Bay Assemblymember Damon Connolly, which authorized Marin County to enact the E-bike Safety Pilot until Jan. 1, 2029.

“ I don’t remember anything from my accident or from the first two months I spent in intensive care units. I know my family and friends had doubts I’d ever be back to normal, lift a finger or even survive,” Stafford, testifying before California’s Senate Transportation Committee in May 2024 in support of the bill.

One dangerous aspect of some Class II e-bikes is that they can be easily manipulated to go well over the state-mandated 20 mph speed limit, Marin County’s Smith said.

“ There’s even some manufacturers that sell the bikes with a QR code to download an app to change the maximum speed,” the official said.

There are YouTube videos that explain how to “jailbreak” some of the e-bikes that many kids are commonly riding across Marin.

Is Marin pedaling policy too fast?

Robin Pam, the San Francisco director for Streets For All, a nonprofit advocacy group, is among the critics who opposed AB 1778. She called the pilot “premature” and characterized the county’s data as incomplete.

Pam said it’s not clear from the county’s data which kind of e-bike is involved in a collision.

“We don’t have any evidence that kids on Class II e-bikes are sustaining injuries at a higher rate than any other group,” she said.

Pam said kids and families need clear statewide standards rather than patchwork policies that vary by jurisdiction. California has already commissioned a report, expected in November, which is charged with recommending best practices to promote the safe use of e-bikes.

The report is a result of a 2023 bill authored by Rep. Dave Min, D-Orange County, that directed the Mineta Transportation Institute at San José State University to analyze data on injuries, crashes, emergency room visits and deaths related to bicycles and e-bikes.

Asha Weinstein Agrawal, the principal investigator on the study, said some draft findings of the report contradict Marin County’s data: Drawing on a sample of emergency room patients nationwide between 2020 and 2022, e-bike patients were less likely to be children, and more likely to be older than 50, as compared to patients who rode bicycles or scooters.

According to Agrawal, an analysis of 2023 California hospital patient data found that 4,757 patients were injured in incidents involving e-bikes, but nine times more were injured with conventional bicycles. (Patient-specific information, such as age, is not included in that publicly available data.)

“ [Worldwide] there’s very poor quality data on even just how many people use bicycles or e-bikes, let alone [whether they are] traveling one mile a week or 30 miles a day,” Agrawal said.

Without knowing the number of people who ride conventional bikes or e-bikes in Marin, it’s difficult to ascertain the exact cause for the rise in e-bike crashes, Agrawal said.

“ It’s possible that the number of e-bike injuries has gone up over three years, but there’s been an explosion 20 times greater of people using e-bikes,” she said. “It doesn’t tell us anything about how risky riding an e-bike is to a pedal-bike, comparatively. We just don’t have the data.”

In defining “rate of accidents,” Marin used the total number of bike accidents per 100,000 people in a given age category, which doesn’t indicate how many of those people use e-bikes specifically.

Since October 2023, 44 children aged 10 to 15 have had an e-bike accident that sent them to the hospital, according to county data. For the 60 and older age group, that number is only slightly lower — at 40.

Marin County also does not currently list which class of e-bike is involved in a crash.

“Our public health team has started working with first responders this past year, though, to collect e-bike class data, and while there is not enough data to publish yet, they’ve noted the vast majority of 911 accidents involved throttle e-bikes,” Smith said.

Agrawal said one way to address the problem would be to modify the e-bike classification system in California from three classes, based on motor speed and operation, to a two-class system, like in some European countries.

One category would be for e-bikes that are only pedal-assist, and travel at a slower rate of speed — basically, similar to a conventional bicycle. These slower e-bikes would have similar regulations to conventional bicycles.

The other category would be for e-bikes that are operated by a throttle and operate like motorcycles or mopeds. To operate these faster e-bikes, riders would need to follow similar rules, like a minimum age, insurance requirements and a licensing test.

The canary in the coal mine

Smith admits the issue of children riding souped-up e-bikes, with price tags in the thousands of dollars, is more of a “wealthy, resourced community issue.” She warned, however, that as the technology becomes more widespread and affordable, more local governments could face the issue.

In recent years, a rise in e-bike collisions has led Encinitas and Carlsbad in Southern California to declare states of emergency.

“ I just keep calling us the canary in the coal mine,” Smith said.

The E-bike Safety Pilot is set to expire on Jan. 1, 2029. A year before that, Marin County must submit a report to the state Legislature detailing the total number of traffic stops initiated for violations, among other metrics.

For parents like Todd Fitzgerald of San Anselmo, the county’s pilot ban means his 14-year-old son, Brooks, is stuck with a bike he can’t ride.

“ He’s pretty bummed,” Fitzgerald said, adding that Brooks saved his own money to purchase the bike, which he used to ride around with his friends or get to lacrosse practice.

Fitzgerald said he believes whether a bike is appropriate for a child is ultimately up to parents.

But he admits he is surprised by how often he has seen packs of kids doing wheelies in the middle of busy roads in San Anselmo, traveling what he estimates could be 50 miles per hour.

“It stinks for my kid, because he rides his bike appropriately. But if kids are getting really hurt, something has to be done,” said Fitzgerald, who suggests a licensing test or a training course for youth to ride e-bikes might be an alternative to the countywide ban.

Over the summer, Dylan Nussbaum and his family left Marin and moved farther north to Petaluma. His father, Aron, said his son faced a lot of peer pressure to get faster e-bikes. He said he didn’t feel safe putting his 12-year-old on one, despite Dylan’s pleas.

Aron Nussbaum hopes that Marin County’s law gets traction and expands to his new home and across the Bay.

“ Now that conversation comes back and we have to deal with it again,” Nussbaum said. “You can just say we’re not going to talk about this.”