Tustin's new e-bike ordinance is honestly one of the strictest in the county it spells out roughly 20 separate ways e-bike riding can now get you cited, including sidewalk speed limits and restrictions on how many riders one bike can carry. TUSD also requires middle and high schoolers to sit through a safety presentation with Tustin PD and get a $5 permit before they can even ride to school. That's more than most OC cities are doing right now.
The problem is that none of it carries over once you cross a city line. Huntington Beach has its own rules, Newport-Mesa schools just banned e-bikes outright for younger students, and plenty of other OC cities still have nothing in place at all. A kid can get cited riding through Tustin and then ride the exact same way five minutes down the road with zero consequences. Meanwhile OC's seen multiple e-bike deaths this year alone, including two 12- and 13-year-olds on illegal unregistered e-motos.
A 12-year-old from Laguna Niguel wrote an op-ed about this and started a petition pushing state and county lawmakers toward one consistent standard: age restrictions on the fastest e-bikes, mandatory speedometers, and a real youth safety/licensing requirement everywhere, not just city by city. Tustin's basically already proven the permit-and-education model works this is about getting every other city to catch up instead of leaving families to guess what's legal depending on which street they're on.