A title fit to spawn a hundred Nextdoor or Facebook comments. But I sense the City Council may be ready to take up this issue in earnest next year, so it’s probably time to talk about them. Again.

As a board member of the Costa Mesa Alliance for Better Streets, I’ve written approvingly of e-bikes before. Unfortunately, I have to admit they fall into a category of products that work remarkably well for most people 95% of the time, and spectacularly and visibly work poorly for everyone else 5% of the time. And that 5% — folks doing wheelies in the middle of the street, riding too fast and going the wrong way in bike lanes or on sidewalks, blowing through stop signs or red lights — are so irritating and obvious that further regulation seems inevitable.

So what to do? Well, given that e-bikes move around, we aren’t legislating in a vacuum. So let’s see how our neighbors are dealing with it first.

Irvine, Huntington Beach: Good Ideas and Less Good Ideas

Two of our four neighbors have already moved to regulate e-bikes. In Irvine, e-bikes are generally regulated by its municipal code the same as regular bicycles (including a requirement to ride with the flow of traffic, even on sidewalks, which passed earlier this year). However, starting this school year, Irvine Unified School District rolled out its “e-vehicle safety and registration program” that requires all students planning on using an e-bike to commute to school to register their e-bikes and take a mandatory safety course. Parents are also required to attend. Once the course has been completed, the students get a “parking permit” sticker and can park their e-bike on campus.

On the other side of town, Huntington Beach also recently passed its “e-bike ordinance” and took a bit more of an enforcement-first approach. In addition to violations of the CVC, the HBPD is now also empowered to write tickets for riders operating bicycles in an “unsafe manner”. Although the ordinance gives some examples of “unsafe” riding, it is clear that the rules are intended to give the HBPD broad discretion. And in addition to writing tickets, the HBPD may also impound e-bikes ridden by minors. Huntington Beach also asked its staff to look into e-bike licensing; however, this idea ran squarely into the prohibition on local licensing in AB 1909, and likely cannot be implemented.

So we have two strategies: light-touch regulations focusing on younger riders and education in Irvine, and a get-tough, citation-first in Huntington Beach. For what is worth, here in Costa Mesa the Mayor has spoken approvingly of the citation-first approach last meeting during public comment (skip to the 1:49:15 mark), stating that “sometimes citation is the best education” when to comes to curbing e-bike misbehavior. He also endorsed the idea of the police departments of Newport Beach, Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa “coordinating” to come up with a comprehensive solution.

So should we follow Huntington Beach’s example?

I don’t think so. There are a few problems with HB’s approach:

• We have limited police capacity. My understanding is that, at any one time, we may have as few as six sworn officers doing traffic enforcement in a city of over 110,000. We also have lots of vehicle-related crime: in addition to stolen autos, drug trafficking and reckless driving, we are also (by one measure) one of the worst cities for driving under the influence in the country. Taking the few officers we have off the beat to chase e-bike riders, who likely only pose a danger to themselves, seems like a poor use of our scarce resources.
• Max discretion often leads to uneven enforcement. In Costa Mesa we have already been down this road with bicycle regulations. In fact, the wildly uneven enforcement of our former bike licensing ordinance is what spawned AB 1909 in the first place. When the police have total discretion they tend to use it where they find themselves the most often. And in Costa Mesa, that means we would likely see a lot more e-bike citations on the Westside, even though there are tons of e-bike issues on the Eastside. Westside gets more calls for service, so it just stands to reason we would get more citations there, too. And again, with a limited number of traffic cops to begin with, does it make sense to have one cruise up and down Santa Ana Avenue searching for 12 year olds on e-bikes? Probably not.
• Behavioral change from enforcement alone may be fleeting. The reality is we won’t be able to surge our e-bike citations forever. It is far more likely that we will be able to issue more citations for a few months or maybe even a full year, but then our officers will be redirected to other priorities. Unfortunately, not only does that mean that existing riders may backslide into bad behaviors, new riders are hopping on e-bikes every day. So enforcement without ongoing education or — even better — comprehensive infrastructure reform will be a short term fix.
• Heavy handed enforcement misses the point: e-bikes are good, actually. Ebikes are almost certainly Costa Mesa’s best shot at getting close to the recommended mode share goals in its Circulation Element, which includes 10% of trips by bicycle (see Recommendation C-7.33). Nothing on the market comes close to getting people excited to ride at the same scale as e-bikes. And while they are especially attractive to young people, e-bikes are also revolutionary mobility devices for people who otherwise could not ride bicycles. This includes the very old and, for parents with cargo bikes, the very very young. It would be incredibly shortsighted to pursue enforcement to the point that people were afraid to ride their e-bikes.

So if going full boar on enforcement isn’t the answer, what is?

What should Costa Mesa do instead?

First, it should remember that it wants to be a bicycle town. And that means we need to be encouraging people to ride bicycles, including e-bikes, at every step. That starts with infrastructure improvements as a response to the challenge of e-bikes. Dedicated paths, especially grade or vertically separated ones, are the perfect place to start. Maybe dusting off the old plans to turn some of the flood channels into separated bike paths might be worth a look. And of course we should continue to scrutinize our rights-of-way for creative means to squeeze in better bicycle facilities. A huge part of the “problem” of e-bikes is that they make for uncomfortable fellow travelers with pedestrians on sidewalks. By moving all bicycles, including e-bikes, into dedicated facilities, that aspect of the problem can be permanently resolved.

Second, we should target younger riders for education and healthy limits. Honestly, I think Irvine has the right idea here. Imposing a “permit” requirement through the schools seems like a no-brainer. This will help discourage kids from riding if they aren’t committed, and possibly encourage some healthy peer pressure to get the permit and ride together. And I particularly love the fact that Irvine requires *the parents* to participate; frankly, anything that gets adults to do some remedial driver’s ed is a good thing considering what we see out there on a daily basis. So that seems like something that NMUSD could easily copy and paste.

However, I think the City could go further and turn our school zones into “teaching streets”. While my fellow bike advocates are very wary of bike-specific signage, I think there is a place for them along our common routes to school. Signs such as “no wrong way riding” and “all bicycles must stop” at stop signs make sense on these routes precisely because (1) kids use them often and (2) kids don’t know the rules. Given that these routes overlap with common bicycle routes used by adults, it could have a secondary effect of teaching them what they never learned in driver’s ed about bicycles. And best of all, signage is a really easy, very cheap, and and very visible improvement. So from a public policy perspective this seems like a slam dunk.

Third, there is a place for enforcement: we should crack down on illegal bikes. As an e-bike owner myself, nothing frustrates me more than seeing folks riding motorized bikes that either aren’t e-bikes (and therefore would need a license under the CVC) or that are dirt bikes that aren’t even street legal. These bikes often have fixed pedals (if they have pedals at all), are throttle-controlled and go way above 28 mph under motorized power. Some of them started life as an e-bike that was modified, but many are bought off the internet and just rolled onto the street.

And here is where I get comfortable with enforcement. Many of these bikes should not be on the road at all, and the ones that are legal on the streets are often ridden by kids that aren’t qualified for a driver’s license. Luckily, these bikes are easy to spot: they are aggressively styled and really do look like electric motorcycles. San Clemente announced last year that they were cracking down on SurRon “e-bikes” (which are really electric motorcycles under the CVC and not generally street legal) and I think that’s the right approach. By ticketing and/or impounding clearly illegal e-bikes, you can send an enforcement message while tailoring it to getting the most dangerous bikes off the road, without also targeting the much weaker and much safer true e-bikes for tough enforcement. We will still need to address the uneven enforcement problem, of course, but at least recidivism should be addressed. Since the goal here is to pull bad bikes off the road, and not permanently change user behavior, it should be more doable and have a longer term effect.

I think those three steps would be a good start. But who knows. We will see what the city comes up with in 2024.

UPDATE: right on time, the LA Times decided to feature e-bikes in its letters to the editor. The common thread among the letter writers? E-bikes are good, but dangerous illegal “e-bikes” are not. We might be onto something.