Bode Rogers had just learned to ride his bicycle without training wheels.
On a hot June afternoon in Hingham, the 5-year-old boy pedaled down the driveway and turned onto the sidewalk. His mother, Meagan Rogers, heard the collision from the garage.
“It sounded like a car crash,” said Rogers. “That’s how hard the impact was.”
A teenager on an electric-powered bike had collided with Bode. Rogers ran outside and found her son pinned under the heavy e-bike. She called 911.
“Right away, we knew he was hurt. He couldn’t feel his arm,” Rogers said.
Bode’s helmet had cracked and his arm had shattered, requiring several surgeries and a five-inch pin. Another operation is scheduled next month.
Bode’s injury is part of a dramatic spike in children hurt in e-bike and electric scooter crashes across Massachusetts this summer. Doctors say the injuries are often far more severe than pedal bike crashes.
“We’ve seen so many catastrophic TBIs — traumatic brain injuries — in children who are riding or being hit by these things, or being hit by a car because they’re riding in high-speed traffic and they don’t know the rules of the road,” said Dr. Cornelia Griggs, a pediatric surgeon at Mass General Brigham for Children.
As e-bike injuries mount, emergency department doctors, police and town officials are pushing for tougher rules and clearer guidelines from the state on age requirements and speed limits.
Rogers said Bode will recover. But she said something needs to change.
“The kids riding them are younger than the age of having a [driver’s] license, so they haven’t learned all of the road regulations and safety,” she said. “We shouldn’t wait until something really bad happens to do something.”
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ERs sound alarm over kids hurt by e-bikes
Physicians at some of the state’s largest pediatric trauma centers told WBUR they’re alarmed by the sharp increase in serious injuries from electric bikes and scooters.
Dr. Errol Mortimer, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, estimated “close to a tenfold increase” in ER visits for children hurt by e-bikes over last year.
In Springfield, Baystate Health pediatric emergency physician Dr. Kala Frye Bourque said “a good 90% of the trauma pages just in the last week have been e-bikes or e-scooter accidents.”
And in Boston, Griggs at Mass General said “every single time I am on call, there is a trauma activation for a child injured on or by an e-bike.”
Griggs said electric bikes weigh roughly twice what pedal bikes do and go about twice as fast. Regular bike helmets are rated to protect a rider at about 14 to 20 miles per hour.
“A lot of these e-bikes can go 30 miles an hour with a flick of a wrist,” she said. “When they’re just wearing a bike helmet, they can still get a severe brain injury.”
In July, she posted a viral video on TikTok in blue scrubs alerting the public about the injuries that ER doctors and nurses are seeing.
She wants people buying machines for kids to know about the risks.
“What we hear over and over again in the trauma bay is parents and grandparents who say, ‘I had no idea,’ ” she said.
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Altered e-bikes vex police
As e-bikes and scooters rise in popularity, law enforcement officials said they’re also struggling to keep up with the safety problems that come with them.
Milford Police Chief Robert Tusino said his department in central Mass. has seen a spike in crashes, near-misses and 911 calls reporting e-bikers weaving through traffic or riding on sidewalks, which isn’t allowed.
“It’s not the cycling community that is abusing e-bikes,” he said. “It’s this young, juvenile group that knows there’s really not much the police can do.”
Tusino said his officers can’t chase e-bikes because it might lead to even more crashes. He’s also found kids are tampering with the bikes’ factory settings to ride faster than they’re supposed to go.
“Every one of these e-bikes that we have interaction with are usually modified,” Tusino said, “so they go in excess of 40 miles an hour.”
As e-bike crashes and complaints pile up, Milford and nearly a dozen other local police departments have issued public safety warnings about teenagers on e-bikes.
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E-bike rules are uneven, outdated
Public safety experts said a key problem is that the rapidly evolving technology for e-bikes has outpaced regulations.
A Massachusetts statewide commission study released in January found a patchwork of local ordinances that vary town by town for e-bikes and motorized devices. That’s left riders, police and local officials without clear guidance on who can legally operate the devices and where.
Some communities that tried to overhaul their e-bike regulations faced pushback.
In Plymouth, Select Board Chair Deb Iaquinto drafted a bylaw after two serious crashes involving teenagers. The proposal included helmet requirements, age restrictions and fines for reckless riding.
The December 2025 hearing drew a packed crowd of roughly 100 people.
“Most of them, surprisingly, were against the regulations,” Iaquinto said, “because they felt that it unduly penalized people that were using the e-bikes as they were meant to be used.”
The board voted it down 3-2. Iaquinto said a local bylaw wouldn’t have been enough to prevent problems.
“The rules change as soon as you cross a town border,” she said. “I do think the best solution will be for the state to come up with some standards that we can all adopt.”
Lawmakers on Beacon Hill are working to create a statewide safety framework to regulate e-bikes.
In May, Gov. Maura Healey filed the Ride Safe Act, which would classify these machines by top speed rather than device type. Powered devices that exceed 20 miles per hour would be off limits to anyone under 16.
The bill has support from legislative leaders and its provisions were rolled into a broader economic development package that’s pending in the Statehouse.
Meanwhile, crashes keep happening. In June, a 14-year-old e-bike rider in Medway was airlifted to a trauma center after being struck by a car. Weeks later in Haverhill, a 12-year-old girl died when the motorized scooter she was riding collided with a bus.
Some physicians like Mortimer at UMass Memorial said they’re worried about what will happen this fall as kids use e-bikes for commuting to school and practices.
“I’m concerned that there will be even higher numbers of injuries once kids are back at school,” he said.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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