It has been a week since my 14-year-old showed me a video of a large group of kids about his age on an e-bike "ride out," and in that week I have remained conflicted about how to feel.
The video was something to see, 20 or more kids, most if not all on the same brand of high-performance e-bike, most, if not all, wearing full-face motorcycle helmets. They roll in a loose pack on what looks like an ordinary East Hampton lane. The bikes swarm across both sides of the road, some darting up onto the grass shoulder. One pops an impossible wheelie, riding on one wheel for an amazing distance. It looks like a scene from "Easy Rider" or a pint-size version of an angry horde in one of the "Mad Max" movies.
E-bikes seemed to get popular here the summer before last, but really took off this year, especially in Montauk. For kids too young to drive cars, e-bikes were a near-perfect way to get around. They would be perfect if there were a guarantee that no one was going to get hurt, which will never be the case. One of my son's more daredevil e-bike buddies wiped out and hit a tree in August, lucky that after an ambulance ride to the hospital he checked out okay. East Hampton has been free from a worse tragedy of that kind so far, but it will not remain that way. Good helmets are a must.
Another teenager I know can talk of little else than taking the earnings from his summer job and buying one. "You can't stop me," he tells his parents. Ellis, my own Easy Rider, wants one too, of course, but with somewhat less urgency. The thing is, Ellis is going to be on an e-bike, whether he has one or not. It seems to me that, at a minimum, he and the others should know what things like yield signs and a double-yellow line mean. To that end, I told Ellis that if he could score a 90 or higher on the New York State learner's permit test, I might think about it.
Frankly, I think that it would be good for parents of the kids who already have e-bikes to require that they, too, pass the state test. Clearly, e-bikes are not going away, and roads are not going to be redesigned to accommodate them any time soon. As parents and as a community, we ought to be certain that our children at least know the rules of the road.