In a sadly misguided effort to curb problem e-bike riders, the City of Carlsbad’s Traffic Safety & Mobility Commission voted September 16, 2025, to recommend that the City Council adopt a minimum age of 12 for riding e-bikes and consider additional actions because, you know, e-bikes are the scourge of our peaceful hamlet by the sea.
We are not fans of e-bikes in general (just pedal your bike, you lazy sod), but ebikes are here, they are useful, they are reducing traffic on our streets and smog in our air, and more importantly, they are getting kids to school in a district that doesn’t believe getting kids to school is important enough to fund school buses.
There are problems, however, with those crazy kids wheelieing down the middle of the street or swerving in and out of traffic that’s stopped at a red light. But banning kids under 12 from riding e-bikes is not going to solve that problem because, as the city already knows, the problem kids are not under 12. The City also knows that the way to handle the problem kids is to have the Police Department enforce all the traffic laws we already have. We don’t need more laws for Carlsbad Police Department to enforce.
Why is a ban on under-12 riders bad? Because there are 8- to 11-year-old kids who need to get to school. Who may live too far away to ride pedal bikes in a reasonable time. This City always seems to forget about the kids who actually need to ride e-bikes to school. Not every kid in Carlsbad has a stay-at-home parent with a brand-new, American-flag-dragging, lifted monster golf cart to chauffeur them anywhere they want to go at all hours of the day or night. And making rules that limit the abilities of people who need to ride e-bikes simply because a few bad kids are causing havoc is missing the entire point.
But that’s what we think. For what the Carlsbad Traffic Safety & Mobility Commission thinks, please follow the jump.
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