Okay, I'd like to um call orders study session.

Council Member Kenny Bucklin's Council Member Yan Koprowski.

Council Member Monty Lyons.

Council Member Jim Torres.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council.

I'm Mike Angstead with the police department.

Just take us a second here to get the presentation up.

Council, I know you've got a packed agenda today, so I'm if you don't mind, I'll just start talking through the slides that would normally be up on the presentation.

So I'm here today to talk about bikes, help bike helm, bike safety, and potentially an ordinance having to do with bike helmets.

There we go.

Kind of an overview, as many of you probably noticed as you drive around Gilbert, uh, if we were to go out on the roads today, you'd see the use of e-bikes is really surged in recent years.

Uh they're popular alternative mode of transportation, and we're we have a concern or vested interest in these these bikes of all kinds.

Um in terms of enforcing the laws and and regulations and making sure that people are safe as they operate on our roadways and sidewalks.

Um I raised two high school, you know, teenage boys.

Uh they're grown now, but there was a time where we wanted to get them out of the house and off of Xbox and you know go breathe fresh air and ride bikes.

And uh that's happened, but a lot of them ride not only just regular bikes, but nowadays e-bikes.

Um these e-bikes in Gilbert uh have become you know kind of a rising challenge for us in terms of safety, and uh we're committed to uh solving the issue with mayor and council.

It's really not something we can solve overnight, and really the the town has taken a strategy over many decades to try and uh use a combination of engineering, uh education, trying to promote uh bicycle safety, the use of helmets, and then uh lastly enforcement, but any one of those components, um if we don't have all of them working in in conjunction together, uh we were relatively ineffective.

So it's a multifaceted strategy.

The agenda for tonight is to kind of talk about community feedback.

We do a lot of surveys and gather a lot of data from the community in terms of what they were interested in regarding bike safety, and then uh second point we're gonna get into uh a series of slides that talk about bike safety efforts in Gilbert, not only uh from an engineering perspective, but also from an educational perspective.

We'll get into crash and injury data, and then last there will be some ordinance options, and they're not exclusive.

Really, it's it's if you all feel like an ordinance in any way is uh a good idea, then that's great.

I try to stay in my lane being in the executive branch of government, and you being the legislative, um, I won't make a necessarily persuasive argument to you, rather than you know, rather I'll just leave it in your hands in terms of an option.

So, first off, community feedback.

Um, the number one takeaway from our 2022 transportation master plan when we asked the community what they wanted.

Uh overall, it was improving safety for all users.

Number two is reducing travel congestion on roads.

I think we can all get behind number one and two.

70% of our population wanted more separation between bikes and cars.

67% were more likely to bike with uh more green bike lanes, which we're gonna get to later in this presentation.

51% wanted safer and easier crossings, and 48% wanted more connections to bikes and trails, and lastly, 45% of our folks wanted more bike lanes, trails, and paths.

In terms of our current bike safety efforts, um, you know, I think we we listened to the public.

Um not only did we do a lot of engineering uh changes and efforts that we're gonna get into, but one of the education uh efforts we did is this know your ride campaign, the police department launched uh this month, and some of it is just to educate parents on these different devices and the impact that they have in our community.

Um as a parent, uh reading state law can be kind of cumbersome.

But if I was to take all the different variations of e-bikes and bring them in here right now, we would all have a really hard time telling one device from the other, and I would have a hard time, and this is what I do for a living.

The challenge is that when you look at this matrix, it talks about a bicycle, like an old Schwin or Huffy.

And then next to it, it talks about an e-bike class one, class two, and class three.

All of these are born as bicycles.

If there's if the battery isn't charged on them, you can ride them, you can pedal them like a normal bike.

The difference being if a parent was to ask me, well, what's the difference between all of them?

The class one bike is a bike that you can sit on, and when you hit the throttle for the electrical part, uh it won't do anything unless you start to pedal.

And then it kicks in and it assists the rider going down the roadway.

Uh you can go up to 20 miles per hour on that device.

A class two e-bike is different.

When you sit on it and you hit the throttle, it takes off, uh, kind of like a scooter, maybe like a bird scooter kind of thing.

You don't have to pedal.

You can sit there and just keep the pedals level and just use the motor the entire time.

It also goes 20 miles per hour max, and then it shuts off.

Class three e-bike is very similar to the class one in that you have to pedal the pedals to make it go, and then the motor kicks in and it can't it'll go up to 28 miles an hour.

Um, the other difference is a class three e-bike, because it goes 28 miles an hour, you have to be at least 16 years old to uh to ride the device.

The last uh column there is for electric motorcycles and um completely different category than what we're talking about tonight.

And I say that because there not only are those considered a motor vehicle, so they fall into a completely different part of law, but it's already um against the law to operate a motorcycle of any kind and not wear a helmet under the age of 18.

And again, you have to be 16 years old to legally ride a motorcycle.

Speaking of motorcycles, uh another one of the pieces of information that we try to get out to uh parents is that uh when you see this type of device on the screen featured here, it looks a lot like a class one, two, or three e-bike, like an electrical electric bicycle, but it's not.

It doesn't have pedals, you can't ride it like a bike.

It actually doesn't do anything if it's not charged up.

But it in terms of the law, it's exactly like buying your kid a Harley Davidson, whether it's gas powered or electric, hardly makes an electric motorcycle as well.

Uh you can't operate this without all of the things that you would need if you were operating a motor vehicle.

This slide talks about these being modified to go up to 70 miles per hour.