ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. — St. Johns County Sheriff Rob Hardwick says there’s a lot more to do to keep kids safe riding e-bikes around St. Johns County.
“We just got to step up and just do the best we can to protect these children,” Hardwick said.
The sheriff told Action News Jax on Wednesday that the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office has received about 50 calls related to e-bike incidents or crashes in the last three weeks, since June 12th.
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Action News Jax got some numbers from the sheriff’s office, saying that, between January 1st and June 11th, the sheriff’s office responded to 20 e-bike crash-related calls. That number is more than double the eight crashes the sheriff’s office says it responded to in all of 2024.
Sheriff Hardwick believes the supposed increase in calls may be because deputies are now focusing more efforts on getting e-bike crash data, but he also believes there are likely many crashes the sheriff’s office hasn’t heard about.
“There’s probably a lot of unreported data out there where maybe, you know, a young child crashes their e-bike or their e-moto and calls their parents as opposed to calling rescue,” said Hardwick.
This week, the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office shared online it is now doing more “e-bike safety checks” in neighborhoods around the county, stopping anyone riding the bikes too fast or too dangerously along the roads and sidewalks.
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But Sheriff Hardwick says enforcing e-bike laws has been somewhat of a challenge between the agency’s priorities of both enforcement and education about staying safe.
“The one thing we do is we don’t want to be that law enforcement entity that, you know, tickets an 11-year-old child for being a kid,” Hardwick said.
Action News Jax told you last month that St. Johns County commissioners were considering passing a set of stricter speed limits for e-bikes on county roads and sidewalks.
Commissioners ended up turning them down and requesting a resolution be put together instead, but Governor Ron DeSantis, at the end of June, signed a measure into law allowing local governments to set age limits and requirements for carrying a photo ID for anyone riding e-bikes.
Sheriff Hardwick believes the state needs to do more to better define which kinds of e-bikes should be allowed to ride on the road, particularly those that can reach speed limits of 35 miles per hour or more.
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“Those sometimes are hard to catch and too dangerous for our deputy sheriffs to give chase per se,” said Hardwick, “We’ve had some children here with serious bodily injury. That can not happen.”
Sheriff Hardwick tells Action News Jax the sheriff’s office is working to set up community meetings and check-ins with neighborhoods around St. Johns County, both to see which areas are reporting the most crashes and to work on encouraging parents to do what they can to keep their kids safe riding e-bikes.
We’re told part of the initiative includes keeping track of which kids are stopped for dangerously driving e-bikes so parents can be made aware if their kids are stopped multiple times by deputies.
The sheriff’s office told Action News Jax it’s also working with the school district to put out e-bike safety information, to reduce the number of kids involved in crashes.
“How are we going to solve this? We’re not. We’re going to try to try our best to fix it and then save that one children or one child from a serious bodily injury or death,” said Hardwick.
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