Twelve-year-old Sinjin Ferma enjoys the independence he gets from his e-bike — he no longer needs to depend on his parents to get around. KC Gupta, 18, sees it as a form of mobility: He has long used it to get groceries for his family, and at age 11, rode to pick up medicine when his mom was sick.
Kyran Tandberg, 15, is making friends he might not otherwise have as a home schooler.
“I like riding my bike because it's made me so many friends,” the Carlsbad teenager said. “Since I'm homeschooled, I don't really have a school to go to to make friends, but I've made countless friends just from riding my bike.”
But as these young people relish in their independence, adults around them worry.
The rapid rise in e-bikes has led to serious injuries and even deaths, prompting officials in San Diego County to enact tougher rules on e-bikes. The rules include penalties, like administrative citations, for reckless riding by e-bike riders or their parents if they are minors.
Bike advocates say officials spend too much time penalizing bikers and not enough on fixing bike infrastructure to make riding safer — and they’re not the only ones making that point.
A recent UC San Diego study that examined e-bike injuries and fatalities highlighted the importance of safe bike infrastructure, which is insufficient in San Diego County. “Communities and policymakers need to recognize that safety infrastructure, education and policy have not kept pace” with e-bike adoption, said Dr. Jay Doucet, the study’s lead author.
A San Diego County grand jury report on the city of San Diego’s bike network noted serious deficiencies that keep people from biking safely. “Bike lanes start and disappear,” the report says. “Bike infrastructure disappears, especially where it’s needed most: freeway on-and-off-ramps, giving riders the uneasy feeling, ‘You’re on your own!’”
Ian Hembree with the San Diego Bike Coalition said he doesn’t think the new e-bike laws have improved safety.
“The ordinances are counterproductive to children's safety because they give the impression that cities are addressing e-bike safety, when in reality they are pursuing the lowest-effort, cheapest way of doing something about the problem,” Hembree said.
A ‘piecemeal’ collection of bike lanes
The city of San Diego recently implemented an ordinance regulating e-bikes, with a focus on safety for minors. It joined Carlsbad, Chula Vista, Coronado, La Mesa, Poway, San Marcos and Santee in adopting the provisions of a state law that gave local governments in San Diego County the ability to prohibit riders under 12 from riding e-bikes. The state law also will also provide more data on e-bike accidents and laws — something currently lacking.
Several cities have also enacted additional safety measures aimed at protecting children.
Gupta, the youth transportation lead with climate organization SanDiego350, said that local leaders should prioritize safety by adding more accessible ways to get around without driving.
“There has been a failing of our elected officials to invest in protected cycling infrastructure,” Gupta said. “The evidence is crystal clear that protected infrastructure saves lives. So I think the problem is for the vast majority of commutes in the county, you can't ride in only protected infrastructure.”
But sometimes it’s not as simple as just adding a bike lane. There are five classes of bike lanes, each with varying degrees of safety and cost associated with them.
Class I and IV bike lanes are separated or physically protected from vehicle traffic. Class II and III offer less separation and no physical protection for cyclists. Class V is like a Class III route with added traffic safety features.
Hembree said the state of California hasn’t officially adopted the fifth class of bikeway, so features for these routes can vary greatly depending on the project. But they are better than Class III, he said, and can be useful on local residential streets.
Class II is the most common across the county. According to the San Diego Association of Governments’ interactive regional bike map, 1,216 of the county’s 1,883.5 miles are Class II routes.
City of San Diego public information officer Anthony Santacroce said that there is no single piece of infrastructure that is safest in every situation, but that Class I and Class IV “offer a higher level of protection and comfort.”
Hembree agreed that the physical separation offered by Class I and IV bike lanes make riders feel safe and comfortable.
How safe and comfortable people feel in a bike lane is a good indicator of how many people will choose to ride in it. The San Diego Bike Master Plan Update calls this the cyclists’ “level of traffic stress” when categorizing bike facilities.
Santacroce said it’s one of several tools the city uses to evaluate bike safety.
"When planning and evaluating projects, the City also considers traffic speeds and volumes, roadway and intersection conditions, bicycle demand, network connectivity, collision data, community feedback and other safety factors to determine where improvements are needed and which treatments are most appropriate," he said.
Doucet wrote in the UCSD study that communities with Class I bike paths have fewer bike crashes than those with Class II painted lines and Class III signage. Gupta said he felt the difference in bike lanes on his 13-mile bike ride from his family’s San Diego home to Encinitas the other day.
“On trips like that, you see the difference when you're riding next to traffic that's speeding past you versus when you're riding in a protected bike lane,” he said. “You feel so much safer.”
Tandberg, the 15-year-old, generally sticks to riding on the neighborhood roads near his Carlsbad home. He said his parents set strict boundaries because those are safer.
Gaps in the network outlined by the grand jury report mean riders could be in the safest type of bike lane on one stretch of road, and left in mixed traffic with little protection on the next.
Hembree said this is because cities build their bike paths in a “piecemeal” fashion, which often leaves areas unconnected from another.
“We wish that the city would dedicate funds to building proper bike projects that span miles and would actually serve a regional connection,” Hembree said. “But the cost-effective way that we do it now means that some sections get built before other sections, and then people are left wondering, like, ‘Why is there this bike lane that gets built to nowhere?’”
Adult bike riders like Judy Berlfein have also seen the county’s piecemeal approach firsthand.
“If they built half a bridge over a river, and people said, ‘How come nobody uses that bridge?’, people would laugh,” she said. “When you talk about bike lanes that only take you halfway to where you want to go, no wonder people don’t use them.”
Some elected officials have been advocating for better bike paths for years.
Solana Beach City Councilmember and avid biker David Zito has used his position on the City Council to push to protect bike lanes during other construction.
“The first thing that goes out the door is any consideration of cyclists,” he said. “You’re merrily riding along on your bike, and suddenly there’s nowhere to go.”
San Diego City Councilmember Raul Campillo agreed the approach has been inconsistent. “The whole program as a whole is really — it's really hard to effectuate at all because you kind of go piecemeal by piecemeal a little bit here in this district, a little bit here in that district,” Campillo said. “And what we need is an influx of funding that helps us fix the road at its base, then repave it with fresh asphalt while we design it to be safer for bikes and people walking and cars driving.”
San Diego County has 8,782 miles of roads and 1,883.5 miles of bike lanes, according to the Caltrans and SANDAG’s’ interactive bike map.
But there are even fewer of the safest types of bike lanes that are physically protected or separated from roadways. Only 264 of those 1,883.5 miles of bike lanes are Class I or IV.
The network of roads is of course fully connected — unlike the patchwork network of bike lanes.
SANDAG
SANDAG’s interactive bike map shows that an additional 38.1 miles of bike lanes will be “coming soon” and that 27.5 miles of those will be Classes I and IV. That would be a 2% expansion of the current network, with the majority of new lanes being physically separated or protected from vehicle traffic.
“We say that safety is our No. 1 transportation related priority, but we need to put our money where our mouth is,” Hembree said. “And if we don't do that, we're just going to have the status quo, which is getting people killed.”
At age 18, Gupta hopes that’s true, too.
“We can't stay stuck where we've been for the last 60, 80 years because it's not working for youth anymore,” Gupta said. “It's not working for anyone. Traffic keeps getting worse, gas gets more expensive, cars are expensive, and we need to meet our climate goals.”
Money, money, money
While many council members around the region said they support building safer infrastructure, they also said it is difficult to fund.
“The problem is, where are we going to take this money from to provide infrastructure, to keep our community safer, to keep our kids safer?” Chula Vista Councilmember Michael Inzunza said. “That's the dilemma. If we had an open pot of gold, of course. But the reality is — I'm not going to give you a baloney answer — the reality is, where's the money going to come from?”
SANDAG’s $125 billion 25-year spending plan calls for $1.2 billion over the next decade to expand the regional bike network — roughly 3% of the $41.8 billion the agency plans to spend on transportation improvements in the region in that time frame.
The city of San Diego has retreated from its efforts to install new bike facilities in recent years. KPBS reported a dramatic decrease in the number of miles of new and improved lanes installed per year, falling 60% from its peak in 2021.
Plans for protected lanes on Governor Drive in San Diego’s University City neighborhood have been put on hold due to the city’s “limited capacity” to redesign streets for bike facilities since the latest budget cut funding for a team of traffic engineers dedicated to designing safer streets.
Councilmember Campillo, though, did help restore some funding for this team after Mayor Todd Gloria’s initial budget cut it entirely. “There was a fight over what was called the multimodal team,” Campillo said. “Some people thought it was all about bike lanes. It was actually about redesigning intersections where people are getting hurt. And so fighting for that team was really important.”
Campillo added that the way bike facilities are funded in San Diego creates some confusion among constituents.
The grand jury report says city bike infrastructure is often bundled with other projects for efficiency and cost savings. But this approach means stand-alone projects for bike facilities in places that need them most are uncommon.
Inzunza said asking the state to invest more dollars into safe bike projects might also be a dead end.
“Should they? Well, the answer is absolutely and that goes without saying,” Inzunza said. “But will the state invest billions of dollars when ... we're right now in budget cuts?”
Here’s a look at the situation in three cities.
It also has the most bike lane miles, with about 693.
Some 143 miles of those bike lanes are Classes I and IV, the safest type. Yet, as detailed in the grand jury report, few of them connect to each other to create a complete network.
“The infrastructure component is very important,” Campillo said. “It's very important to me. I've advocated in the budget process to make sure that we have paved roads that are also safe, have the correct types of intersections, have the stop signs, have the street lights that are really important for creating, making it safer.”
Many of San Diego’s safest bike lanes are clustered around downtown and the urban core, including North Park and Hillcrest. SANDAG is also building new bike facilities on University Avenue in the El Cerrito neighborhood area and has several other bike infrastructure projects under construction and in the design phase.
And the city of San Diego lists several bikeway projects in the works for different streets.
Where safety infrastructure does exist, ridership is increasing. Class IV protected bike lanes on 30th Street saw record ridership in 2025.
Hembree, with the San Diego Bike Coalition, said the Pershing Drive Class IV bike lanes through Balboa Park are great examples of the best type of bike infrastructure. Those lanes were installed after two people were killed riding bikes along that route. But while there are some Class I paths and Class IV protected lanes in neighborhoods outside the urban core, the gaps between them prevent riders from connecting to the whole network.
SANDAG
Chula Vista has about 557 roadway miles and about 169 miles of bike lanes. Only 16 of those bike lane miles, however, are Class I or Class IV.
Most of Chula Vista’s Class I paths are along the city’s bayfront and in the Otay Ranch neighborhood, including a cluster of Class I paths near several schools in the East Chula Vista area.
“The newest parts of Chula Vista are geared, designed and engineered to cater to students, to cater to pedestrians, to cater to cyclists,” Inzunza said. “That includes e-bike riders.”
But several other schools in the area lack protected or separated bike routes to and from campus, leaving teenagers navigating Class II painted lanes on busy roads like Telegraph Canyon Road and Otay Lakes Road.
“If you're asking me, is it safe for a 12- or 13-year-old to ride next to a car going 70 miles an hour? The answer will always be no,” Councilmember Inzunza said. “Is our infrastructure set up in place to encourage that, or to ensure that if they are going to make those decisions, that we have ample room for the safety of those bike lanes to operate? The answer is yes. But I would discourage my own child from pedaling 15, 20 miles an hour next to a car going 70 miles an hour.”
Many of the more suburban neighborhoods east of Interstate 805 lack safe connections to the more commercial central Chula Vista area west of the freeway.
As the San Diego grand jury report said, in Chula Vista, some bike lanes disappear when they’re needed most — at freeway crossings like on Telegraph Canyon Road, for example.
Where they do exist, like on the Orange Avenue-Olympic Parkway overpass, they’re Class II lanes. Hembree from the bike coalition says this type of bike lane offers “no true protection” and isn’t appropriate for high speed, high volume roads.
Chula Vista’s Active Transportation Plan, approved in 2020, calls for a much larger network of protected lanes, including miles of new Class I and IV bike facilities.
When asked for updates on the plan, Chula Vista’s Development Services Department said any information would require a public records request. But the city’s open data portal shows virtually the same bike network as the SANDAG bike map.
SANDAG
Oceanside updated that ordinance with stricter passenger prohibitions and a provision allowing police to impound the e-bikes of reckless riders.
The city’s bike infrastructure is disjointed. The San Luis Rey River trail and a couple of sections of the Coastal Rail Trail are its only Class I or Class IV bike routes.
Overall, the city has about 134 miles of bike lanes, but it has only 16 miles of Class I paths and zero miles of Class IV protected lanes.
Oceanside traffic engineer Teala Cotter said space limits what can be built, and Active Transportation Coordinator Kristopher Martinez said another challenge is the consideration of different types of riders from kids to commuters and experienced cyclists.
The city of Oceanside’s bike map hasn’t been updated since 2017, when the city last updated its bike master plan. It’s unclear if any additional bike lanes or facilities have been completed in the years since that last update.
SANDAG
