Issue #16: Rhythms of the road

The right to bear e-bikes

By Miles Cooper

They swarm the multiuse paths, ripping by at speeds well beyond a legal Class 3 e-bike, some doing wheelies. Others weave through traffic, on and off sidewalks, narrowly missing folks and terrifying those less mobile.

They look like e-bikes. But they’re not. They are illegal electric motorcycles, and people want something done about them. And I get it. I ride the same paths and walk the same streets. I’ve had the near-misses. But I’ve learned from years in the legal system and from watching how this country handles things it can’t figure out: when we decide to regulate something we frequently end up with a world of unintended consequences and the problem itself doesn’t get any better. And here I’m going to use an analogy that might make some uncomfortable.

Aiming at solutions

Every time a mass shooting rattles the country (that’d be most days that end in y currently), the cycle begins. Legislators propose new laws. Background check expansions. Magazine capacity limits. Age restrictions. Red flag laws. While the regulations all make sense, it ignores the greater problem. We already have a lot of good laws. We (1) don’t enforce them and (2) have a porous marketplace. When a society can’t (or won’t) address the actual source of a problem, it regulates what it can reach. And what it can reach is the law-abiding majority.

Despite there already being an effective Class 1–3 e-bike regulatory system, the illegal electric motorcycles marketed as “e-bikes” are now drawing regulatory scrutiny on all electric bicycles. This threatens the vast majority of law-abiding everyday parents and commuters who use legal Class 1–3 e-bikes with draconian regulation.

The regulatory cascade

California, as an example of just one state attempting to solve this issue through regulation, has been busy putting out potential bills. Some regulatory proponents want registration, licensing, and insurance — in essence making riding an e-bike identical to driving. Others want to make California’s Class 1–3 e-bike standards different from the national standard, requiring legal e-bike manufacturers to have a different standard just for California. The problem: none of this addresses the thing that actually scares folks swarmed by e-motos. Those e-motos are already illegal. The problem isn’t a lack of laws. The problem is the lack of enforcement of the laws already on the books, and a gray market pipeline of cheap, powerful electric motorcycles flowing in faster than any agency can track. Just search for an e-bike on the internet and you’ll be flooded with options that you can ride to your neighborhood gun show.

Who the rules actually reach

Should California require license plates on e-bikes, who will comply? The commuter riding to BART every morning. The weekend warrior. Delivery workers. Who doesn’t register? The kid on an e-moto bought off the internet. The rider who is already ignoring three other laws. The grey-market operator who sourced the bikes through channels that precede any California statute by a significant margin. This is the gun law trap, replayed on two wheels. New regulation burdens the compliant. It is invisible to the non-compliant.

The speed reduction bills carry the same problem. Drop the assisted top speed on Class 1 and 2 bikes and you’re affecting the legal product. The illegal e-motos doing 40 mph in a bike lane aren’t obeying speed limiters now, and a new statutory cap won’t change that.

The actual problem, stated plainly

The genuine issues are three: vehicles being fraudulently marketed as “e-bikes” when they’re actually motorcycles; inadequate infrastructure that throws fast bikes, slow bikes, pedestrians, and children into the same narrow corridor; and enforcement that is, charitably, inconsistent. None of those problems get solved by a DMV license plate on a law-abiding commuter’s Specialized Turbo. They get solved by cracking down on the importation and sale of misclassified vehicles, by building separated infrastructure, and by having enough officers willing to enforce existing law.

The risk to the globe

Every regulatory overreach makes cycling less accessible. Registration fees and DMV processes create friction. Speed caps below the national Class 1–3 limits already adopted reduce the utility that made legal e-bikes transformative: the ability to flow with traffic, to climb hills, to make the trip to work without arriving drenched. The people most likely to be priced or regulated out are not wealthy weekend riders. They’re the people for whom an e-bike was the first viable car alternative. We fought for decades to normalize cycling as transportation. E-bikes turbo-charged that effort — pun fully intended. Every unnecessary restriction chips away at the gains.

California should enforce the laws it has. Target the fraudulent classification pipeline. Fund the infrastructure. Stop regulating the law-abiding majority because regulating the actual problem is harder. Otherwise, the next generation of cyclists will look back at these years the way gun owners look at the last thirty: lots of legislation solving nothing and a whole lot of people who were never the problem bearing the cost.

___________

Editor’s note: As of May 2026, AB 1557 and AB 1942, the two worst bills on this issue, died in committee. Thanks to everyone who reached out to their legislators and testified at committee hearings. And a special thank you to CalBike’s efforts to help keep access to legal Class 1–3 e-bikes open for commuters, cargo bike parents, and recreational riders everywhere.