Deputies Have Stopped Riders as Young as 10. Here's the E-Bike Law St. Johns Parents Need Before Monday.

St. Johns County's 51,000-plus students head back to class Monday, Aug. 10, and the Sheriff's Office is telling parents something many of them will not want to hear: the machine sitting in the garage may not be a legal e-bike, and putting a kid on it that morning can end in a criminal citation. Under Florida law, a bike without pedals is treated as a motorcycle. That means registration, a plate, proper lighting and a motorcycle endorsement for whoever is riding it. It applies even when a parent bought the thing for a child.

Cpl. Michael Ettel of the St. Johns County Sheriff's Office says he sees children on e-motos constantly. He has stopped riders as young as 10, including one child on a mini motorcycle clocked at 37 to 40 mph on State Road 16. That stop ended with a phone call, a ride home, a conversation with the parents and educational material, not a charge.

Sgt. Justin Cash was blunt about where the line sits. The agency does not want to put criminal charges on 10, 11 and 12 year olds, he said, but parents and kids need to understand that riders on illegal devices can receive criminal citations.

E-bike or e-moto? The difference is the pedals

Florida sorts legal e-bikes into three classes. Classes 1 and 2 top out at 20 mph. Class 3 goes to 28 mph. Helmets are required for every rider 16 and under, in all three classes. The Sheriff's Office has a pamphlet laying out the classifications and the legal speeds for each.

The devices causing the most trouble are not on that list at all. E-motos, the pedal-less machines that look like electric dirt bikes, are not street legal and cannot be ridden on roads, sidewalks or crosswalks unless they are licensed as motorcycles.

Device	What Florida law requires
Class 1 & 2 e-bike (20 mph)	Helmet for riders 16 and under; rules of the road apply
Class 3 e-bike (28 mph)	Helmet for riders 16 and under; rules of the road apply
E-moto (no pedals)	Treated as a motorcycle: registration, plate, lights, motorcycle endorsement

On campus, the rule is simpler. Students are expected to get off and walk their bikes onto school grounds.

The numbers behind the warning

Enforcement has climbed sharply. The Sheriff's Office logged 451 encounters last year between citations and warnings. This year the count is already at 355, roughly halfway through. Calls for service tied to e-bikes have topped 1,900 so far this year, against 2,200 for all of last year.

The hospital data is worse. Wolfson Children's Hospital treated three e-bike-related injuries in 2022. In 2025 it treated 115. It has already seen 97 this year.

And the worst of it is not statistical. A child died outside Patriot Oaks Academy this year while riding a dirt bike. Other children have been airlifted after e-bike crashes.

What the county has been doing about it

County commissioners passed a resolution in August 2025 that formally tied St. Johns County, Sheriff Rob Hardwick's office and the school district together on e-bike education and enforcement. Superintendent Brennan Asplen said at the time that safety assemblies would go to sixth through eighth graders at all 17 middle schools and K-8 academies. Deputies finished that first round before the 2025 winter break.

Behind the assemblies is a lot of unglamorous groundwork. The Sheriff's Office added a dispatch code specifically for e-bike violations and crashes so it could actually find the incidents in its own data instead of digging through call notes. Youth resource deputies were retrained on the classifications and given flyers with a QR code to the materials. Some carry spare helmets and hand them to students who show up without one.

An e-bike task force puts bicycle and motor units into the neighborhoods generating the most calls, among them Fruit Cove, Durbin Crossing, Rivertown, Aberdeen, Nocatee and World Golf Village. Deputies trained on e-motos themselves after riders learned they could outrun patrol cars. Word travels fast in a neighborhood when that changes.

Agency leadership has been careful to say tickets alone will not fix this. The ask to parents is to look honestly at a child's age, judgment and experience before handing over a device that does 28 mph, and to check whether the machine is street legal at all. Details of the county's e-bike safety partnership and its S.A.F.E.T.Y. guidelines are posted on the county's website.

School-year assemblies pick back up this fall for sixth through eighth graders, and the task force will be working the same subdivisions as students settle into morning and afternoon routines. Between now and Monday, the cheapest thing a parent can do is walk out to the garage and count the pedals.

For more from around the county, visit St. Johns Community Website and follow us on Facebook. Riding to school this year? Tell us what you are seeing on your street and join the conversation in our Community Forum. You can read more public safety stories and back-to-school coverage in education.