The problem isn't that kids ride e-bikes. It's that a fourteen-year-old can be handed a machine that does twenty miles an hour with no license, no training, and often no helmet.

In a few short years e-bikes went from novelty to the default way a lot of Irvine students get to school. That's genuinely good for the city: fewer car trips, shorter pickup lines, and real independence for kids who are still years away from a driver's license. I don't want to take that away.

But the speed came without the schooling. A teenager on an e-bike is moving at traffic speed while being treated, legally and socially, like a kid on a bicycle. Most have never been taught right-of-way, how much longer it takes to stop at twenty miles an hour than at ten, or that a helmet only works if it actually fits.

Where it goes wrong

Across the research, the same failure modes come up again and again: riders traveling at unsafe speeds for the space they're in; helmet use that's inconsistent at best; almost no working knowledge of traffic law; trails and sidewalks built for walking pace absorbing bikes moving three times that fast; and parents buying high-powered bikes without knowing what they've bought.

It isn't a one-year blip either. Across the last three years, roughly 70% of Irvine's bicycle collisions involved a juvenile rider, and about 65% of those involved an e-bike.1

Underneath all of it is a practical problem: this is genuinely hard to enforce. You cannot station an officer at every school gate, and nobody wants a city that tries.

I'm not here to undo that work. Setting speed limits and holding parents accountable was the right call.

The Council took this seriously and acted. The ordinance put real speed limits on sidewalks and trails, and it made parents answerable for how their children ride — which matters, because parents are the ones buying the bikes.

It wasn't unanimous. Councilmember Mike Carroll cast the lone no vote, objecting to the sidewalk speed limits. That objection is worth taking seriously rather than waving away: rules aimed at minors can slide into over-policing kids, and a speed limit on a sidewalk is only as good as the judgment of whoever enforces it. It's part of why the proposal on this page asks for a classroom rather than a citation.

What it doesn't do

Ordinance 26-05 is enforcement. Nearly all of it takes effect after something has already gone wrong — after the speeding, after the crash, after the citation. That is one necessary half of a safety program. It is not the whole of one.

Enforcement is the half of the problem you can write into municipal code. The other half is everything that happens before a citation: whether a kid was ever taught the traffic laws, whether the intersection outside their school has a protected crossing, and whether the city knows which corridors are actually dangerous.

None of that is funded. It isn't opposed either — it just hasn't been anybody's job. That's the gap this project is about, and it's a gap you close with a curriculum and a map, not with more rules.

Two asks, both small enough to say yes to.

Why a workshop, and what's in it

One school, one term, taught in a slot that already exists rather than a new program built from nothing: right-of-way, stopping distance at speed, where you can and can't ride, and how to fit a helmet so it does something. Under AB 544, a minor cited for riding without a helmet can now satisfy the safety-course requirement with the CHP's online e-bike training program.5 That rule is sound — it just arrives after the citation. This is the same content, delivered before one.

Why a map

The city is making road-safety decisions without knowing where the near-misses happen, because near-misses don't generate police reports. A reporting map fixes that cheaply, and it doesn't need to be built from scratch — it can pilot on a platform the city already uses. It also gives residents somewhere to put what they see, which is worth something on its own.

Why so small

Because small things get funded. A council can approve one school and one map inside a single budget cycle; a five-part citywide program goes to committee and dies there. Run the pilot, measure it honestly, and let the results make the case for anything bigger.

This is the long version — where the pilot leads if it works, not what I'm asking for in three minutes. I'm listing it because the Council should know the destination before approving the first step, and because the pilot is deliberately the cheapest piece of it.

I started with seven options and cut five. The test was simple: does it address a cause rather than a symptom, can a council actually approve it, and is it something Irvine isn't already doing?

A petition drive came closest to making the cut. It's cheap and it shows support, but councils have seen petitions before and can absorb one without doing anything. It works as a way to arrive with numbers behind a specific ask — not as the ask itself.

Irvine has already shown it's willing to lead on e-bike safety. The ordinance proved that. The next step costs a fraction of what's already been spent, and it reaches kids before the crash instead of after it.