I personally think we need to ban e-bikes. Okay, regulate e-bikes. If you drove in Southern California with the skate or die culture, you'd know about fourteen and fifteen year-olds piling on the back of these. One double-seated kid I was following completely jumped off his bike like a cat on those cat cards and went face first into a bunch full of hedges. On purpose.
Funny? Yes. Dangerous. Even more hell yes. The worst were the kids that came flying up behind me while I was doing about thirty in a traffic jam just whizzing on by without a helmet. That made me realize they had to be clipping 35 or 40. That's a serious vehicle at that point.
I don't care if I sound old. You sometimes can't get your child back after a head injury. My brother has two or three severely altered friends who have either passed or are permanently messed up.
:(
They've really begun to crack down here for exactly this kind of thing. Class 2 ebikes (the kind with a throttle aswell as pedals) have been banned from all the bike paths and they do ticket often. It was necessary since kids on these were becoming a danger, but it's a real bummer since a ton of elderly people use these same bikes on the same paths and now their bikes are illegal. It's hard to have nice things sometimes.
Here in troll land, the rules on trails are really poorly defined - basically every trail is different and none of them have signs. If you see someone on any class of e-bike, you have no idea whether they're breaking the rules or not since we all ride 10 trails and can't find the rules for any of them.
We’re finding similar difficulties here (I’m on the board of a local mountain biking club, as well as local parks and recreation department). Each trail is different because of the type of trail it is (simple flat connector trail, or very technical mountain bike only trail - paved, gravel, dirt, mixed - possibly shared by equestrians or hikers, or even mothers with strollers). Moreover, each e-bike is potentially different. Some are really just a high speed scooter with pedals (like the type my parents got to have a joy ride on local paved walking trails), others (like the one I got for my wife) are just “pedal assist” to give you a few extra watts to get up hills on trails. My local bike shop primarily carries Trek bikes - and they (along with brands they own) now have like 25 different models of “e-bike” - from townie, to beach cruiser, to road bike, to full out full suspension downhill mountain bike. You can’t have one set of rules for all (moreover you could be walking a fine line with ADA rules).