As cities and school districts grapple with how to reduce the number of injuries and deaths related to electric bicycles, one Orange County father developed a program he believes can be part of the solution.
“By nature, I’m a technologist,” Bright told NBC Los Angeles on Friday. “All my career has been solving problems. What I’ve noticed in my neighborhood: lots of e-bike incidents … My mind goes to, ‘How can we solve this problem?'”
Anthony Bright recently launched RidePermit, a platform for parents and children to register their e-bikes into a database and get a scannable decal. To get the decal, riders have to take a safety course, pass a quiz and pay $25.
Bright walked NBCLA through scanning the QR codes on the decals to get information about the permits.
“It tells me the name of the student, the school and if the bike was stolen,” the father of two said.
Bright says school resource officers can utilize the program if there’s ever an incident on campus, such as someone speeding or riding without a helmet.
“The school resource officer can scan it, know who the student is and can write up a warning or incident report that gets sent and communicated to the parents, so the parents are now aware of reckless riding by their student,” he said.
He hopes his pilot program will roll out around the state.
“We hear about incidents, kids running stop signs, we hear about fatalities,” Bright said. “RidePermit is a piece of solving this whole community problem.”