Badge Kids › Road Badge › Section 6 › Lesson 6.5
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How to find your own rule, which is a skill
Find and cite your own four answers with a source and a date for each, and say honestly which ones you could not find.
1Look
Three places an answer lives
Three different owners, three different answers, and all three of them can be true at once about the same fifty metres of your ride.
2The idea
Why this is a skill and not a page at the back
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 Anything printed goes out of date.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.
3The idea
Four questions, and where each one lives
How old do I have to be? The state or provincial code. Where you live: set by your state or province.
Helmet? The state or province, and sometimes a town on top of it. Where you live: set by your state or province, and sometimes stricter in your own town.
Which surfaces? The state sets a floor, the town very often decides sidewalks, and each path’s owner decides that path. Where you live: set by your town, not your state and set by whoever owns the path.
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.
4The idea
The word problem, which is what actually stops people
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.
Where you live, the words your own law and your own police actually use are set by your own state or province, and the way your law sorts machines is set by your state or province. Search with those words and the answers appear. Search with the wrong word and you will conclude there is no law, which is almost never true.
5Your turn
Find one, properly
Find the rule
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.
6Decide
You find a page that answers your question perfectly and in plain English.
Pick one to carry on.
7The idea
The two checks, and the answer you are allowed to write down
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.
8Find them
Which of these are sources you can actually rely on?
Tap the ones that count.
Find all 3.
9Say it
Three checks on anything you find
Say it out loud while you are looking
“Which words, which date, whose page.”
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.
10Do it
Before you leave this page
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.
Tick it when you have done it.
Lesson done.
Which words, which date, whose page. An answer with no date on it is not an answer.
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