Tasha Boerner is a mother of two. She’s also the Assembly member who proposed banning e-bikes for young kids.
She also wrote the proposed legislation that became California state law in 2022 that required the California Highway Patrol to create e-bike training. Two years later, she said that wasn’t enough.
“We're still seeing injuries, and we're still seeing really unsafe bike behavior, especially by our youth,” Boerner told NBC 7 on Thursday.
E-bikes in San Diego
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Bill Connard works at OB E-bikes on Voltaire in the heart of Ocean Beach. He said that roads would be a hard no for kids in his care who are younger than 12, but he believes that them riding an e-bike in a controlled environment like a park could be OK.
“Expecting an 11-year-old to understand the laws of the road and coincide with cars or co-ride with other vehicles is just a dangerous scenario,” Boerner said.
If California Assembly Bill 2234 passes, once a child turns 12, they can legally ride an e-bike if they’ve taken an online driver safety course and have a state-issued ID. Anybody with a driver's license can still legally ride an e-bike.
Connard questioned how the state ID requirement would play out given minors use about a third of all e-bikes.
“If you take one-third of all the e-bikes that are all kids, and now you're forcing all of them to go get a state-issued I.D., can you imagine what that's going to do to the DMV and what that's going to do to the bureaucracy of getting state IDs and making it easy?” Connard asked.
Tom Bowers commutes on his E-bike just about every day. He thinks the bill will be hard to enforce.
“The kids are going to ride regardless,” Bowers said. “This is going to make it a little bit harder for them to ride, but they are going to go find a way. I mean, kids are intuitive.”
Bowers said he was all for educating riders but pointed out that drivers need to know how to share the road too.
“Sometimes, it's definitely our fault, for sure,” Bowers said. “Bu,t like, what I've heard and what I've seen is usually the drivers weren't looking both ways or their blinkers weren’t on or whatever. It's kind of stuff like that.”
Next month is the soonest any action can be taken on the bill that supporters hope will be signed into law by the end of this year.
If you're looking for e-bike safety training, OB E-bikes will host its next free e-bike safety course on March 2.
