e-bikes<\/a> can travel up to 28 miles per hour and should be treated like a vehicle. Starting Aug. 16, riders must be at least 16 years old to operate one.\u00a0<\/p>\n“You wouldn’t give a 12-year-old a car so why would you give them an e-bike that can go up to 28 mph?” said Melissa Porro, public information officer for the Sunny Isles Beach Police Department.<\/p>\n
Porro said many of the accidents involving e-bikes in the city were preventable.<\/p>\n
“We see them everywhere throughout South Florida. Unfortunately we have seen a lot of accidents. Some of them fatal,” Porro said.<\/p>\n
Under the new rules, riders must carry a valid government-issued photo ID while operating an e-bike. E-bikes are prohibited from sidewalks and riders must follow all applicable bicycle and traffic laws.<\/p>\n
Porro said pedestrian safety was a key concern behind the changes.<\/p>\n
“The pedestrians walking on our sidewalk they want to feel safe too. Unfortunately, we’ve had incidents where they’ve also have been hit or almost hit,” Porro said.<\/p>\n
Code enforcement officers and police will begin issuing citations on Aug. 16. A first offense carries a $250 fine. Each subsequent violation is $500.<\/p>\n
“It’s very costly, but at the end of the day you cannot put a price on safety and on keeping our families and our visitors well that they can walk on our sidewalks without getting injured by one of these e-bikes or e-scooters,” Porro said.<\/p>\n
The new e-bike rules follow a separate ordinance the city passed for e-scooters. Those regulations went into effect on June 1.<\/p>\n
In:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A South Florida city is rolling out new rules for e-bike riders starting next month, including a minimum…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":348190,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1171,28,30,29,1064,807,32023],"class_list":["post-348189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-e-bikes","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-miami-dade","tag-south-florida","tag-sunny-isles-beach"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/348190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}