More and more children are being injured in "e-bike" accidents. Cops keep encountering 40-mph e-motorcycles.
It's really just as simple as holding the parents responsible. E-bikes are a fantastic form of transportation and should be encouraged. Unlicensed teens and pre-teens hooning them through busy city streets isn't legal, and their parents should be reminded with a ticket.
"The kids riding them are younger than the age of having a [driver's] license, so they haven't learned all of the road regulations and safety," she said. "We shouldn't wait until something really bad happens to do something."
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"What we hear over and over again in the trauma bay is parents and grandparents who say, 'I had no idea,' " she said.
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Tusino said his officers can't chase e-bikes because it might lead to even more crashes. He's also found kids are tampering with the bikes' factory settings to ride faster than they're supposed to go.
"Every one of these e-bikes that we have interaction with are usually modified," Tusino said, "so they go in excess of 40 miles an hour."
The problem isn't the bikes; it is a generation of Apache helicopter parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids but are suddenly willing to let them play in traffic if it's on a Surron. Massachusetts has already set the distinction: 750 watts and 20 mph is an e-bike. The 8,000-watt machine doing 50 needs a class M license.
"I had no idea" is a strange thing to say about a motor vehicle you bought for your child.
# ... kids are tampering with the bikes' factory settings to ride faster than they're supposed to go.
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Ah. Evolution in action.
# ...parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids but are suddenly willing to let them play in traffic....
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Couldn't kill 'em off via COVID, so they are trying a different method this time... plausible deniability, and all that.
# ...parents and grandparents who say, 'I had no idea,'...
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Yeah, plain ol' Stupidity is part of it, too.
Malicious Stupidity is *rampant* in the world. Can't decide if it is worse than usual, or just getting more publicity nowadays.
It's a bad combination, either way.
And as an hooning aside: parents, please do what you can to get them to wear helmets. It really makes the statistical difference between a heal-able injury and a life of disabled care. (velocity is squared in the kinetic energy equation, so 20mph is a whole lot more injurious than 10mph "why... nearly four times as much")