Wheelies, stunts and the middle of the road

1Watch

Down the middle, front wheel up

Nothing in that film has gone wrong, and it is not going to. Watch what else is in the frame, because that is what the rest of this lesson is about.

2The idea

Let us be straight about the trick

Riding on one wheel is a real skill, it takes real practice, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise or ask you how you would feel if your mother saw you. Plenty of people who train riders for a living can do it.

What police chiefs in our towns are describing is not the skill. It is the place. Everything in this lesson is about what happens when it goes onto a public road, and about a set of consequences that most riders genuinely have not been told about.

3The idea

Lombard, in the chief's own words

Lombard has taken 89 emergency calls about e-bikes, scooters and motorcycles since 1 April. Chief Joe Grage described what officers are finding: riders “riding the middle of the street, doing wheelies, intentionally interfering with traffic, putting themselves in harm’s way.”

Read that list again slowly, because three of the four items are about traffic rather than about tricks. The chief is not describing a stunt. He is describing a road that has stopped working for everybody else on it.

4Look

What 37 stops looked like

In Lombard, 37 riders were stopped, tickets were issued, and seven machines were impounded. That picture is what the seven look like. Somebody in each of those seven cases went home without their machine.

5The idea

Naperville is describing the same thing

Naperville police list what they are seeing: sidewalk riding, speeding past pedestrians, riding in the middle of the road, weaving in and out of traffic, disregarding traffic laws. Chief Jason Arres put the consequence in plain words: someone driving like that is going to get seriously injured.

The department also says most of these cases involve children. That is not offered here as a telling-off. It is offered because it means the riders in those reports are people your age on machines like yours, on streets that look like yours.

6Decide

Your friends have a phone out and there is a clear empty stretch of your street.

7The idea

What happens at the roadside

Elk Grove Village looked for more than fifteen young riders who were running red lights, weaving through traffic and riding away from officers. Riding away is not a way out of the situation. It is its own offence, and it is its own hazard, on top of whatever the stop was about.

Juveniles found operating e-bikes or off-road vehicles illegally may be ticketed and detained until a parent or guardian is present. That is the sentence worth knowing before it applies to you, because it is not a warning and a ride home. It is a wait, and a phone call somebody else makes.

8The idea

The bit that follows you into being seventeen

Riding an unlicensed electric motorcycle can generate tickets that complicate your future driving privileges. That is the police chiefs’ own framing of it, and it is the consequence almost nobody your age has been told about, because it arrives years later.

Naperville police also offered an explanation rather than a verdict: a lot of these dangerous situations come from a lack of experience with children understanding the rules of the road. Which is fixable, and is more or less what the last five badges have been.

9Find them

Which of these have police in our towns actually done?

Tap the ones that count.

10Say it

The line for the phone that is already up

It is short on purpose. It gives nobody anything to argue with, it does not tell your friends what to do, and it is a great deal easier to say than the conversation that starts with an officer asking for a parent’s phone number.

11Do it

Before you leave this page