While this course was being written, the rules changed in five separate places, one of them by rewriting a whole state’s scheme from the ground up. Anything printed goes out of date. The ability to look does not.

So this is the last thing the badge teaches on purpose. Everything else here has a shelf life. This one is the thing you will still be using when you are twenty-two and moving to a different province with a different word for your machine.

How old do I have to be? That one is written in the state or provincial code, and it is usually the easiest of the four to find.

Helmet? The state or province writes one, and a town will sometimes add its own on top. Two answers to check there, not one.

Which surfaces? The state sets a floor, the town very often decides sidewalks, and each path’s owner decides that path. So this one is three answers, and they are allowed to disagree with each other.

What does my law call this machine? That one comes first in practice, because it is how you search for the other three.

Those four plus the three from your machine — watts, cut-out speed, pedals — are the whole thing. Seven answers, and a rider who has them written down knows more about their own legal position than most adults who sell these machines.

Search for a class number in a place that has never used class numbers and you get nothing, or worse, you get somebody else’s country. The words actually in use include power-assisted bicycle, motor assisted cycle, light e-bike and standard e-bike, power bicycle, pedalcycle with electric assist, electrically assisted bicycle, low-speed electric bicycle and electric kick-scooter — and in one province an e-bike is just called a bicycle.

Every place has its own words for these machines and its own way of sorting them, and your search only works if you use the words your own law uses. Find how the rule is written where you are, then search with that wording. Search with the wrong word and you will conclude there is no law, which is almost never true.

A search box and four results for one question: a retailer’s laws-by-state page, a news article from two years ago, a law firm’s summary, and the code section itself. Open each one and mark what it gives you and what it does not. The card then scores each source on three things: is it the law or somebody describing it, does it carry a date, and does it cover your jurisdiction.

The retailer page is the one that looks best and reads easiest. Check its date before you decide what you think of it.

What is the date on it, and is this the law or somebody’s description of the law. Those two questions applied to anything you find will keep you right almost all of the time. Write both down next to the answer, every time, so the next person can see what you saw.

And there is a third answer you are allowed to give, which is not found. Some places genuinely do not have a rule for this yet — one province has no e-bike definition in its road law at all. Writing could not find it next to a question is honest and useful. Guessing, or borrowing the answer from next door, is neither.

Pick every one that is right, then press Check.

Find all 3.

Three checks in the order you use them: search with the word your own law uses, look for the date before you read the words, and find out who published it. They work on anything, not only on this.

Build the card. Four questions, four answers.

Build the card. Four questions down one side — age, helmet, surfaces, what your law calls this machine — and for each one write the answer, where you got it, and the date on that page. Then read all four out loud to whoever bought the machine, including any where the honest answer was that you could not find it.