Are we giving teens on e-bikes a rough ride?

Scores of children playing outside, spending time with their friends, getting around independently of the taxi of Mum and Dad – surely it’s enough to bring a tear of nostalgic joy to the eye of anyone over the age of 40.

Apparently not, if the community response to kids on e-bikes is anything to go by.

I get it – some of them can go frighteningly fast.

Kids don’t understand road rules and pop out over the curb with lightning speed, with little concern for right of way.

They double-dink, have no mind for their own safety, and there’s no responsible adult there to take the reins.

While I know the outrage comes from a place of love – no one wants to see a young person hurt or killed – I can’t help but think it’s a bit unfair.

We tell kids to get outside, and when they do we say ‘No, not like that’, as if none of us offered our friends a dink or blithely rode across an intersection with a half-second glance both ways.

Helmets were still not quite commonplace when I was growing up, and wearing one meant you copped a bit of teasing, so most kids took them off when they got out of sight of mum and dad.

We didn’t have electric power to get speed up, but I’ll never forget my big cousin popping me on a bike up the top of a hill only to tell me halfway down the brakes were broken, now he came to think of it.

That ride ended in a painful brush with a barbed wire fence. I still have a scar on my finger almost 30 years later, but it could have been much worse.

It was worse for a boy a few years below me at school.

Trent was hit by a car while crossing the road on his scooter.

His death rocked our community.

The loss and pain his family suffered was immeasurable.

This was decades before the idea of an e-scooter.

Our kids and teens are doing their best to learn the skills they’ll need as adults.

They’re trying out their independence.

They want to connect with their friends, and I think most of us would agree it’s fantastic when they can do that in real life and not online.

They also don’t have fully developed brains yet.

They’re wired to push boundaries. They can’t accurately assess risk.

They don’t have an adult’s knowledge of road rules, of driver behavior, of how quickly and disastrously accidents can happen.

They don’t fully realise the way lives can shatter in an instant.

Illicit high-speed e-bikes and scooters compound the consequences of the mistakes they will inevitably make to an unacceptable degree.

But on their own, low-speed e-bikes and scooters aren’t the problem.

The problem is our unwillingness to be patient with our young people, to allow them to take up space, to teach them, and to take extra care – just like we’d take extra care with a child who’s learning to walk.

The NSW Parliamentary Inquiry’s recent recommendations for driver and rider education for over and under 16s, a limit on e-bike and e-scooter speeds, police powers to seize non-compliant devices and compulsory insurance sound like pretty sensible solutions to all of those options.

I’d like to put forward some solutions that can’t be legislated.

Let’s all take a bit of extra care on the road.

Leave a bit earlier so you’re not in a rush.

Take corners, rises and intersections cautiously.

Keep an eye out for kids, and if you can spare a bit of time, teach kids in your orbit how to be safer, more responsible riders.

And cut them a bit of slack – we were all young once.