I attended the special Active Transportation Committee meeting last night and we got an update on the city’s new e-bike ordinances. I now have copies of the updated draft ordinances in hand, so I think it’s fair game to unblind my thoughts about it. You can check those out sans password protection at the bottom of this post. The relevant language I discussed before hasn’t changed, and neither has my view on those provisions.

The big issue with this ordinance is that it proposes a blanket e-bike sidewalk ban, which I wrote about in the linked post. At this meeting, though, the CMPD came armed with a potential alternative: rather than a blanket e-bike ban on all sidewalks, the new proposal would ban e-bikes in “residential districts” (as defined, I kid you not, by the Costa Mesa zoning map) and on any sidewalk abutting at least a class II bike lane. Naturally, CMPD officers on their own e-bikes would be exempt.

In my view this alternative is even worse than the blanket ban. I and several other members of the public — including super-residents Cynthia McDonald, Rick Huffman, FiPAC Chair Tom Arnold, and Robert “Santa Bob” Morse, as well as NMUSD Trustee Ashley Anderson, among others — spoke at the meeting and pointed out a some of the problems, but there are almost too many to count:

• “Residential district” is not a meaningful distinction to road users, such that complying with this rule would be difficult or impossible without excessive signage.
• Most residential districts’ borders are themselves streets, which could lead to confusion when one side of the street is subject to a different set of rules compared to the other side.
• Many schools are located inside residential neighborhoods and official “safe routes to school” snake through residential neighborhoods, meaning the rule would be pushing many kids on e-bikes intentionally into the street.
• Many of our Class II bicycle facilities (those are striped bike lanes, usually in the street gutters) are themselves hazardous or unsafe, or subject to conditions (hello trash day) that routinely make them impassible. Vulnerable road users need a safe alternative, especially children, the elderly and the disabled, many of which may rely on e-bikes.
• The CMPD presently doesn’t have the manpower to be doing routine sweeps of traffic violations inside our “residential districts”, so enforcement would be based solely on deterrence (meaning occasional spot enforcement), which isn’t very fair or effective.
• It sets up a bad dichotomy of “protected” residential neighborhoods (read: wealthy, single family, homeowning) and “unprotected” mixed neighborhoods (read: middle class, multifamily, renting).
• It does nothing to address where conflicts between bicyclists and pedestrians are most likely, namely, our commercial corridors with poor or uncomfortable bicycling infrastructure (W. 19th Street between Wilson and Newport Blvd, all of E. 17th Street, etc.).
• All e-bike enforcement is likely to be regressive if punished with fines, as typically less-economically advantaged residents (in particular, children) rely on e-bikes as opposed to cars for their primary transportation.

These are just off the top of my head, and they’re in addition to the many reasons I think general sidewalk ban is a bad idea that I outlined before. So what gives? Why is the CMPD pursuing what, to me at least, seems like an obviously unworkable approach? I heard two possible reasons last night:

1. The CMPD can’t legally enforce traffic laws on the sidewalk, so they need to move e-bikes into the street in order to be able to enforce those rules. A justification to warm a lawyer’s heart. But this actually doesn’t make sense: while it’s true the California Vehicle Code may apply to the vehicle right of way, the city controls the sidewalks. Make whatever rules you want! The proposal to ban e-bikes on the sidewalk itself proves the city has ample power to regulate. So if the CMPD needs rules to apply to sidewalk usage, they should put them in the CMMC. Problem solved.
2. The CMPD has received substantial “community input” stating that “it” wants a sidewalk ban. Setting aside who gets to represent “the community”, let’s read between the lines here: the CMPD must be getting lots of complaints from people who see people riding e-bikes behaving badly on sidewalks. Ergo, the CMPD may feel the need to act in response to those complaints.

Without more information, reason 2 makes a lot more sense to me. I’ve looked into the vehicle/bicycle crash data and frankly the case for sidewalk use being a major contributor to e-bike crashes is pretty weak. But e-bike sidewalk use being a major contributor to complaints to the CMPD? That I could believe. So are we solving for complaints? Hopefully we’ll get some more information on that, because if we are, I struggle to see why complaint volume (as compared to crash/injury data) is the best metric to guide policy.

But perhaps the most galling suggestion of the night, which got a frightening number of head nods, was that we can experiment with these kinds of bans, see how it goes, and then tweak as necessary after they go into effect. You do not “experiment” with citations that come with irrevocable fines. You do not experiment with citations that come with irrevocable fines. Brazenly declaring your citations are some kind of social experiment is absolutely the fastest way to burn good will in the community, up-end the extremely hard work the city has done to encourage bicycling, and undermine the credibility of both the city and the CMPD. That doesn’t mean that you can’t iterate based on what has worked and what hasn’t. But to take such a flippant stance in advance? Goodness gracious.

When I left, the ATC was going to get one more draft of the revised ordinances to give a final recommendation before the changes go to the City Council. It seemed pretty clear to me the public who attended and the ATC was skeptical at best. Hopefully the CMPD will take that feedback into account when they come back with the final draft.

Here’s the link to what I wrote last time. You’ll see that I’m not against taking regulatory action to address the challenges of e-bikes. Another potential reform that was brought up last night that I think makes sense is limiting e-bike usage in our parks (except on marked bikeways). Resident concerns shouldn’t just be ignored. But as I’ve said on other issues, we hire professional staff, elect public officials and have them appoint competent committees and commissions to translate resident intuition into sound public policy. We’re not there yet.

Costa Mesa’s Draft E-Bike Ordinance is Here