photo credit: Mitch Barrie

KRCB NEWS: How did you find that story? Was that story assigned to you or is that something that you pitched to the New York Times Magazine? What was the genesis of that?

DAVID DARLINGTON: It was something I pitched. I am a longtime—lifelong, really—cyclist myself and riding in the East Bay, over the last several years, intensifying during the pandemic, started noticing, a great proliferation of electric bikes and I witnessed a couple of….shall we say close calls or near disasters on bike paths where I saw people on e-bikes apparently not being very familiar with  kind of cycling etiquette and safe practices on bike paths. E-bikes go really fast going faster than the surrounding people and cyclists and pedestrians would warrant. So I just started researching e-bikes as a topic because I'm a freelance journalist and I'm a cyclist. I've written in the past a lot for Bicycling Magazine.

KRCB NEWS: How did you find that specific case in Marin….the gal in Marin?

DAVID DARLINGTON: As I was casting about for just information about e-bike safety, a recent study came up by the surgeons at Marin Health, which is the main trauma facility, the only trauma facility in Marin County. There were some alarming statistics in it that, you know, how much more likely e-bikes were to cause serious injuries than conventional bikes. They're more like motorcycle injuries. Also an alarmingly high fatality rate from e-bike crashes. The lead author on that study was named Dr. John Maa, and so I got in touch with him and he got back to me right away. 'cause he's a, uh, a very energetic activist on this issue and started talking to him, interviewed him at length. And the trajectory of the story was that when the pandemic started, John Maa and his colleagues started noticing more and more e-bike crashes, well, bicycle crashes and then fatalities, which were, are pretty unusual for conventional bike crashes. But then they started putting two and two together and realized I these were e-bikes. And so they started lobbying public officials in Marin County to look into this more closely and, you know, implement new safety practices or rules regulations. And they weren't getting anywhere because, the officials in Marin County needed hard numbers, you know, to affect public policy. But eventually, after this was going on for a couple years, this 15-year-old girl named Amelia Stafford in Tara Linda, she had a crash on the back of an e-bike. She was a passenger, she was not wearing a helmet and she had a traumatic brain injury. And when that happened, it made everybody sit up and take notice because the really bad crashes up until that time, according to John Ma, were older e-bike riders, which was sort of the first wave of e-bike purchases during the pandemic. Uh, you know, older riders who, you know, needed more help with riding a bike in terms of power. And they also had the money to afford these pretty expensive machines. But when Amelia crashed, it was the first instance of a young person having a traumatic injury on an e-bike. And that was what set in motion. Damon Connolly, the assemblyman for Marin, introduced a bill a couple months after Amelia crashed in September, 2023 to restrict the use of what is called Class 2 e-bikes. There are three classes…

KRCB NEWS: I was gonna say, we've reported in the last year about the new laws in Marin County, not in Sonoma County, but about particular classes. So can you very briefly describe what's the difference of that…

DAVID DARLINGTON: Class 1 is pedal assist only up to 20 miles per hour. You know, the bike can go faster than that under human power, but it stops assisting you at 20. Class 2 also stops assisting you at 20, but it has a handlebar throttle option that you can use instead of pedaling, it's like a motorcycle. You just twist the throttle and that powers the bike up to 20 miles an hour. And then Class 3 is also pedal assist only, but it can go up to 28 miles an hour.

KRCB NEWS: Is Dr. Maa continuing his research of getting hard data? I mean, who's studying this besides him?

DAVID DARLINGTON: Well, there is a brand new statewide study. It was mandated by the California State Legislature a couple of years ago, and it was done by the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State. What we're looking at here is, you know, it's a new form of transportation. It's, uh, as Asha Ivo Weinstein, the, uh, author of this San Jose State study said, you know, for a hundred years we just had, uh, cars and conventional bikes. Now there's a whole new category of transport, which is e-bikes and they're somewhere in the middle and it's a whole new kind of technology, which is Matt Willis, the former public health director of Marin County, told me the technology is developing much faster than our ability to regulate it. Which brings to mind certain other things that we're experiencing now with artificial intelligence and social media. Things that are great—potentially great—-boons to civilization, like e-bikes are reducing emissions and getting people out and exercising, replacing cars. But they're developing so fast that they're kind of, shall we say, getting outta control.