New Jersey’s e-bike crackdown is aimed at the wrong place

New Jersey just passed the most restrictive e-bike law in the country. License. Registration. Insurance. Compliance deadline of July 19. The MVC hasn't even built the system to register them yet, but the law is on the books.

I have thoughts. Some of them might surprise you.

The boardwalk is not a road

Let me start where I actually agree with the instinct behind the crackdown — just not the execution.

Boardwalks and paved walking trails should be for non-motorized everything. Full stop. That means no e-bikes, no e-scooters, no throttle-powered anything. You go to the boardwalk to walk. To run. To ride a regular bike in the early morning before the crowds arrive. To push a stroller. To let a kid wobble along on a two-wheeler for the first time. You go there specifically to get away from motorized vehicles.

An e-bike buzzing past you at 20 miles per hour on a crowded boardwalk is not a cycling experience. It is a near-miss waiting to happen. Ocean City has been fighting this battle for two years. Atlantic City already bans them outright. They are right to. The Wildwood Tram Car gets a grandfather clause — that thing has been running since 1949 and is part of the DNA of that boardwalk — but everything else with a motor should stay off the boards.

Same goes for paved walking and biking trails. We build those spaces specifically so people can get away from traffic. Introducing motorized vehicles defeats the entire purpose.

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But on the road? That's a different conversation

Here is where I part ways with Trenton.

An e-bike on the right side of the road, moving with traffic, obeying the same laws every cyclist follows — I have no problem with that. That is where e-bikes belong. If a rider wants to take on the risk of sharing the road with cars and trucks, that is their call to make. E-bikes give seniors and people with mobility issues a way to stay active and get around independently. They give commuters a realistic car alternative. They give Shore towns a way to move people around without adding to the parking nightmare that defines every July weekend from Seaside to Cape May.

Ask Niclas Elmer

Niclas Elmer owns Tuckahoe Bike Shop, with locations spread across Atlantic and Cape May counties. He has been in the retail business for more than twenty years and watched e-bikes go from a curiosity to a significant part of his operation — sales, rentals, the works.

When this law was looming, he could not give customers straight answers. Parents asking about e-bikes for their kids had to be told to wait and see. Rental businesses — a core part of what a Shore bike shop does every summer — are now facing the possibility that a tourist from Pennsylvania or Delaware, whose e-bike is perfectly legal at home, suddenly needs a New Jersey driver's license and insurance card to ride at the Jersey Shore.

He put it plainly: this law could tip the scales between a family choosing a week in Ocean City, New Jersey versus Ocean City, Maryland or the Delaware beaches. That is not a hypothetical. That is a real conversation Shore families are going to have at kitchen tables this spring as they plan their summers.

Requiring a driver's license, registration, and insurance for a 20 mph pedal-assist bike is overreach. It treats a bicycle with a small motor the same as a moped. It punishes the responsible rider for the behavior of the reckless one. And it puts small Shore businesses directly in the crossfire of a policy that was aimed at a different problem entirely.

What should actually be required

Here is my proposal. Skip the DMV. Skip the insurance card. Do this instead.

Every e-bike rider should complete a basic safety education course before getting on a public road. A few hours. Rules of the road. How to share space with cars and pedestrians. What to do at intersections. Hand signals. When to yield. Keep a card in your wallet showing you completed it — the same way a boater carries a boating safety card. Simple, inexpensive, and actually connected to the real problem.

The problem was never that e-bikes exist. The problem was always that too many people were riding them with no idea what they were doing and no accountability when things went wrong.

Education fixes that. Bureaucracy just creates a new mess for honest people to navigate while the reckless ones ignore it anyway.

The boardwalk is for walkers and pedal bikes. So are paved trails that plainly say "no motorized vehicles." The road is for everyone willing to follow the rules.

That is not a complicated policy. Trenton managed to make it one anyway.