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Cities in Orange County have been creating new regulations for e-bikes for years, but a county grand jury investigation found that push for more rules has led to 34 different sets of rules across the county’s 34 cities.
“There is an urgent need to have consistent ordinances for the regulation and enforcement of safe E-Bike use in all cities, school districts, parks, and unincorporated areas,”OC Grand Jurors wrote in a report published last week. “There are significant differences in policy across cities.”
Individual cities have been writing up new rules for e-bikes for years, with the county jumping in last month to direct sheriffs to stop people operating them unsafely, with county Supervisor Katrina Foley noting e-bike accidents have gone up 500% in recent years.
[Read: Orange County Supervisors Crack Down on E-Bikes]
Foley said she “fully agreed,” with the grand jury on trying to introduce consistent rules on e-bikes.
“We need to have consistent e-bike regulations across the county,” Foley said in an interview. “We are working on all those issues they identified in the report and I think we are moving in the right direction.”
While many cities have expanded e-bike regulations, nearly half the county’s cities haven’t done anything, according to a poll from the grand jury.
The report also noted 15 of the county’s cities don’t have any e-bike regulations.
Despite those concerns around e-bike accidents, most cities aren’t tracking those incidents according to the grand jury report, with only 11 of the county’s 34 cities confirming they tracked the issue.
“To properly track trends in E-bike operation, a robust incident and accident tracking mechanism must be in place,” jurors wrote. “In the process of accident reporting, most police agencies do not distinguish whether the bicycle involved was a conventional bike or an E-bike.”
Different cities also had contrasting rules over where e-bikes are allowed to be used, with the 22 cities that responded to the grand jury’s poll saying some of them allowed bikes on sidewalks or park trails, while others banned them.
Only eight cities confirmed they offered any training for e-bike riders, with no city requiring mandatory training or licenses.
“An (OC Grand Jury) visit to a local retailer of E-bikes found there was no formal training for E-bike purchasers or riders, and the only information to purchasers of E-bikes was a pamphlet,” jurors wrote.
The report also highlighted how it’s difficult to tell the difference between street legal and illegal e-bikes, highlighting how some function roughly the same as regular bikes while others are more along the lines of electric motorcycles.
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @NBiesiada.
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