What California’s E-Bike Safety Report Gets Right and What It Leaves Out
Anya Dalal
California’s Exploring Electric Bicycle Safety Performance Data and Policy Options for California report by the Mineta Transportation Institute is a comprehensive assessment of how rapidly growing electric bike (e-bike) use is intersecting with safety, regulation, and public infrastructure. Drawing on a broad literature review, original analyses of crash, injury, and fatality data, a review of laws across jurisdictions, and interviews with 44 experts, the report concludes that e-bike injuries and crashes are rising and that existing data systems substantially undercount or misclassify incidents. A central finding is that many safety problems attributed to “e-bikes” are likely driven by higher-powered, out-of-class devices that fall outside current legal definitions but are widely used, particularly by youth. Directed by CA SB 381 (2023), the report recommends updating California’s e-bike classifications (especially with regard to not exceeding 750W max speed), improving the requirements for retailer disclosure, expanding education materials and police enforcement, and investing in better data collection and sharing to support evidence-based policy for the future.
Precisely because the report is so methodical, one omission stands out more sharply the deeper you read it. Youth appear everywhere in the report as outcomes, but nowhere as participants. Teenagers show up in pediatric trauma registries, EMS call data, school parking-lot counts, and age-stratified injury curves. They are central to the safety problem the report is trying to address. However, this review never directly asks young riders what they know, what they believe, or why they behave the way they do. There are no youth interviews, surveys, focus groups, or attempts to capture the youth perspective on risk, speed, legality, or safety equipment.
Our absence matters. Why? Most of the report’s findings are behavioral rather than mechanical. Helmet use is a prime example. The report correctly identifies low helmet use as a major contributor to injury severity and references it repeatedly. However, it never confronts the obvious next question: why do so many teenagers choose not to wear helmets, even when they are recommended or required? Is the issue comfort, appearance, peer norms, inconvenience, perceived invulnerability, or something else entirely?
The same gap appears in the discussion of high-powered, out-of-class devices. The review presents compelling evidence that many youth are riding machines that exceed legal e-bike definitions. The analysis frames this primarily as a regulatory failure: unclear classifications, deceptive marketing, and weak enforcement. But the report never asks why these devices are so attractive to adolescents in the first place. Is speed the dominant motivator, or price, aesthetics, availability, or social status? Do teenagers understand that their bikes are illegal? Why do they tamper with the ebikes to allow for faster speeds? Do they infer legality from widespread use and lack of enforcement? Without answers to those questions, the policy will only address symptoms rather than causes.
This limitation carries through to the report’s education and outreach recommendations. While sensible on paper, the authors rely heavily on traditional, adult-designed mechanisms: handbooks, school curricula, public service announcements, and integration into driver education. Unfortunately, these tools are increasingly disconnected from how teenagers actually absorb information and change.
What is notably absent is any serious engagement with modern communication, such as social media. On TikTok, for example, teenagers can find a plethora of e-bike content: advice on how to convince their parents to get them e-bikes, reasons why e-bikes are good, cool stunts, speeding, crashes, and product reviews. These videos shape perceptions of what e-bikes are, how they can be used, and what risks are worth taking. The report never explores whether that same ecosystem could be harnessed for safety. Creative, peer-facing TikTok content showing the risks and potential consequences of unsafe practices, helmet effectiveness, or the true speeds and stopping distances of “bikes” could shift behavior far more effectively than presentations or posters. However, doing so would require policymakers to think less like regulators and more like creators, and to ask youth directly what content feels authentic rather than preachy or ignorable.
Without youth input, the report is unable to anticipate unintended consequences. If California tightens restrictions on higher-powered e-bikes, what happens next? Do teenagers shift to slower bikes, move to gas scooters, or continue riding illegally? Do teenagers just find more loopholes and evade law enforcement? How will teenagers transport themselves and feel a similar feeling of freedom and independence? Do enforcement actions feel legitimate or arbitrary to them? Do confiscations deter future behavior or simply escalate resentment? These questions are crucial to determining whether policy actually improves or worsens safety. Without hearing from the people whose behavior is at issue, adult experts- no matter how experienced they are- can’t fully and effectively answer these questions.
None of this diminishes the quality of the report. On the contrary, it highlights how close the analysis comes to being even stronger. The authors are aware of missing exposure data and repeatedly call for better measurement of how much e-bikes are ridden. Youth perspectives are a similar missing variable. Even a modest effort, such as structured interviews with teenage riders in high-incidence counties, paired parent-child surveys, or school-based focus groups, could materially sharpen the policy recommendations.
The report successfully diagnoses a complex, evolving safety problem and offers California a credible roadmap for updating laws and data systems. However, e-bike safety among youth not only involves questions surrounding device classification and enforcement, but also a consideration of the perception, norms, and decision-making of youth. If California wants to reduce injuries among young riders, the next phase of this work should keep everything this report did well and add the voices that were missing. Understanding how teenagers think about speed, helmets, rules, and risk may ultimately be as important as rewriting the vehicle code.
One promising path forward is that California already has an institution well-positioned to fill this gap. The California Association of Youth Commissions (CAYC) brings together youth commissions from across the state that are embedded in local governments and directly connected to the teenagers most affected by e-bike policy. These commissions routinely advise city councils and county boards on youth safety, transportation, and public health. They have both the credibility and access needed to engage young riders honestly. This past November, the CAYC 2025 Virtual Fall Youth Summit featured a youth safety panel: “E-Bikes & Youth: Riding Smart, Staying Safe” and included Dr. Asha Weinstein Agrawal, an author of the report, the Office of Assemblymember Diane Papan, as well as youth commissioners from the cities of Hillsborough and Clovis. The CAYC is actively working to study youth perspectives on e-bike use, risk perception, helmet behavior, and enforcement experiences, with the explicit goal of translating those insights into actionable policy guidance. We can do so at scale and across diverse communities. In that sense, youth commissions offer exactly the missing complement to the report’s expert and data-driven approach: a structured way to integrate youth voices into the next phase of California’s e-bike safety work.
Image credit: Griff E-bikes