Top 3 Safety Tips When Riding an E Bike: Stay Safe on Your Electric Bicycle

The top three safety tips when riding an e-bike.

Hey everyone, I'm Dustin. I have nearly 20 years of experience in the bike and e-bike industry and today I'm with Jennifer. Jennifer is an expert in e-bike safety and has put together her curriculum to educate children and adults about e-bike safety and the rules of the road. And today she's gonna share with us the top three most important e-bike safety tips. All right, Jennifer, thanks for joining us today. And e-bike safety is a hot topic, which is what inspired you to put together education to keep especially our children safe out there on their e-bikes, and adults, of course. So now, in your opinion, you don't have to give them any specific order or maybe you want to. What's your number three most important e-bike safety tip when out there riding? I would say don't ride with a passenger on the back of your bike. Even if the company has deemed your bike passenger-approved, it is just not safe to balance someone else's weight and your weight on a vehicle. That's a good tip. I think the other thing in correlation with that is a lot of the e-bikes, you want to check the max capacity. And it's probably going to max out at 300 pounds. And if you've got two high school kids on there, they're 160, 170 pounds, they're going to be pushing that weight limit, probably not even paying attention to that.

And it also really affects the steering of a bike and the balance of an e-bike. E-bikes are already heavy, and when you add someone on the back, the stopping becomes more difficult, and the steering becomes more difficult. You could even just put a basket on the back with some weight in it, and you'll still feel the difference and the handlebars pull. All right, so number three tip, ride without a passenger. Number two, what's your tip? Number two, I would stick with being predictable. So you want to make sure that you're predictable. If you're crossing over between edge behavior and pedestrian behavior and then vehicle behavior, a pedestrian is a sidewalk, an edge is a bike lane, and a vehicle is a vehicle lane. If you're switching back and forth, you're jumping from the sidewalk to a crosswalk, you're not predictable. Therefore, the cars around you and other bikes around you aren't going to know what your next move is. That's such a great point. And honestly, I see it all the time. You have an e-bike that comes in front of you, then it goes back to the bike lane, and then kids are popping wheelies. And as a car driver, you're just like wondering, you know, yeah, what is this person gonna do right now? Are they gonna zoom out, or zoom in? So I like that. So be predictable and don't zigzag in and out of the sidewalk to the bike lane. And you called it edge behavior. Where did you come up with that term? Edge behavior is a term that I got from the DMV, So while I was doing all my research and making sure everything I was compiling was going to, number one, make sense to kids, and number two, be completely accurate, in the DMV, I don't know if it's in the handbook, but it's definitely on their website.

It's highlighted yellow, green, and red. That's how they kind of mark it out. Interesting. Yeah. So it made me even a little confused. I'm like, edge? I'm like, why are they calling it Edge? It's just because you're on the edge of the road. Edge of the road? Yeah. Interesting. Exactly. OK. Good to know. OK. So number three tip, don't carry passengers. Number two tip. Don't zig and zag out of pedestrian the bike lane, which edge behavior and in and out of the lane. All right. And what's your number one just e-bike safety tip? Overall, the number one thing to remember mostly is just to plan your route. I can't urge that enough. If you don't know where you're going, you don't know what you're doing, you're going to get hurt and you're going to be in danger. So just plan where you're going and you'll be safe. Cool. And in line with planning your route, you know, if you have a Google map, you can put in a route and it'll keep you in bike lanes. It'll only take you on roads on bike lanes, which is safe. I've ridden an e-bike in New York City before, and it will specifically take you down the one way that has bike lanes. And surprisingly, you can safely even navigate through Manhattan by taking the correct routes. Now, if you get caught without planning your route, you end up on the opposite one-way street with no bike lane. It becomes a little bit hairy so I can completely understand how planning your route is so important. One thing I'm going to chime in as a bonus e-bike safety tip kind of goes in line with the number two tip of don't zig and Zag, which just follows the rules of the road. Jennifer touches on another video we just made, the number one cause of e-bike accidents, or sorry, the number one reason for tickets on e-bikes is running red lights.

And I think you have to remember, like she's mentioned in another video, is e-bikes are vehicles. And you need to follow the rules of the road. So if you're gonna be out there riding an e-bike, get educated, or you can get in touch with Jennifer here and she can educate you about the course she's put together, which combines a lot of the information from the DMV. You can go on the website, download it yourself, or again, get educated by someone like Jennifer. She's got some curriculum from the DMV and also the San Diego Bike Coalition to put together the most important principles to educate children and adults about when it comes to e-bikes. So if you have any other questions at all, again, comment below. You can also email us at theteam@sixthreezero.com or call us at 310-982-2877. And you can check out our e-bikes on our website where we focus on safety because that's important to us. So again, you can check out all of our e-bikes like this one at sixthreezero.com. Lastly, go ahead and join our Facebook group called sixthreezero Pedalers. We have thousands of members. In our pedalers group, you can ask questions, connect with other riders, and talk to them about e-bikes in advance of purchasing. It's a lot of fun. So thanks for sticking around and don't forget, it's your journey, your experience. Enjoy the ride.