The Brief

The 2024 Los Angeles homeless count brought what appeared to be a rare piece of good news: a 10% drop in unsheltered homelessness inside city limits.

The decline was a bright spot after years of growing homelessness across L.A. County. Since 2018, each homeless count for the region — a requirement for seeking federal funding — brought more bad news. Year after year, even as the region spent more and more money on the homelessness crisis, the number of unhoused people kept going up.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and Va Lecia Adams Kellum, the outgoing chief executive of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, have pointed to the drop in 2024 as a sign that major homelessness initiatives are working.

The results of the count surprised some Los Angeles residents and advocates who said the celebrated drop in homelessness doesn’t match what they’ve seen on the streets.

To better understand how LAHSA reached their conclusions, LAist requested the policies and raw data behind the official results announced last June.

We found the 2024 homeless count was complicated by policy changes at LAHSA, shifting guidelines and technical problems — with marked differences in how people were counted in the city of L.A. and in other areas of L.A. County.

How the count works

Volunteers and LAHSA staff canvassed the county across more than 3,000 census tracts covering nearly 4,000 square miles, entering their observations on a phone app and, when the technology didn’t work as intended, on paper forms filled out by hand.

Ultimately, each count is an estimate based on a “point in time,” when homelessness is observed by volunteers throughout the region. The raw data gathered is then reviewed by LAHSA officials for verification. The count’s results typically come out months later.

Marina Flores, left, and Helde Pereira, right, document homeless people seen during LAHSA's annual count earlier this year.

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LAist’s analysis found LAHSA excluded more observations recorded by volunteers looking for people living outside or signs of homelessness in 2024 than the previous year. LAist also found LAHSA excluded significantly more observations from census tracts within the city of L.A. in 2024 than those in the rest of the county.

Let’s take a closer look at what we found.

People and dwellings

The unsheltered homeless count is based on two categories: People observed to be unhoused and temporary dwellings where people appear to be staying, like tents, encampments, RVs and other vehicles. When all of the observations are validated by LAHSA, a separate annual survey conducted by University of Southern California is used to estimate how many people are living in those temporary dwellings.

• In the 2023 count, LAHSA included 87% of all observation data that volunteers across the region had entered through the phone app. The other 13% was removed from the count and not replaced by data from paper backup forms.
• In the 2024 count, just 81% of app data from volunteers was included — in raw numbers that meant about 2,300 more observations of people and dwellings were dropped than the year before.

Inside and outside city limits

LAist also examined observations by jurisdiction and found:

• 87% of observations made on the app outside the Los Angeles city limits were included in the final 2024 count, similar to the inclusion rates for both the city and the rest of the county in the 2023 count.
• In contrast, 78% of observations inside the city of L.A. made it to the final count in 2024. LAist found about 2,300 more observations were dropped from the city’s count, accounting for almost all of the additional observations LAHSA removed countywide.

What we know about the observations LAHSA removed

LAist found nine areas — all inside Los Angeles city limits — where more than 100 observations of homelessness were removed from LAHSA’s preliminary totals of app and paper data by the time the count was finalized.

LAHSA officials said that, in many areas, the final count was higher than what was observed in preliminary data. When they did exclude data, LAHSA officials said it was due to errors in the entries that, in some cases, made the preliminary data “unambiguously invalid.”

“When you’re working with such a large number of volunteers, human error is part of the process,” LAHSA spokesperson Ahmad Chapman said. “LAHSA staff accounts for this and are thoughtful throughout the process as we look at the data.”

We found the agency made decisions about what data to exclude on a case-by-case basis and lacked documentation explaining some of their decisions.

“LAHSA employs the data reconciliation process to improve the accuracy of the Homeless Count, not to fulfill a narrative,” Chapman said in response to our analysis.

Chapman said the count is meant to be an estimate.

“It’s important to note that Homeless Count data is just one measure of our system. Albeit an important one, it plays its own specific and limited role,” Chapman said.

Zach Seidl, a spokesperson for Bass, responded to LAist’s findings in a statement, saying that the 2024 homeless count results “were certified by the federal government and there is still more work to be done."

Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who sat on the city’s housing and homelessness committee until the end of 2024, is one local official questioning the results of the annual count.

“ Are we measuring apples to apples?” Rodriguez said in an interview with LAist. “Or are people feeling compelled to manufacture reductions to convey to the public that they're actually garnering some type of progress.”

The data and discrepancies

By the first night of the homeless count, Bass had been in office for a little over a year. Her administration had targeted homelessness with a state of emergency issued on Day One of her term and already spent hundreds of millions tackling the problem.

The 2024 count was the first big test to see if the mayor’s initiatives were working.

Volunteers and LAHSA staff fanned across Los Angeles County starting on Jan. 23, 2024. The count took three days, with most of the work taking place at night.

Volunteers were given a brief training on how to identify signs of homelessness and were told to mark those observations in an app made by Esri, a software company based in Redlands.

The volunteers were instructed to mark observations only in their assigned census tract. GPS from the app would help discard observations made outside the assigned areas to prevent duplication.

Technology problems popped up shortly after volunteers arrived at their designated counting areas and persisted all three nights of the count, according to LAHSA’s reports on the 2024 count and volunteers interviewed by LAist.

Several volunteers told LAist they had trouble logging into the app and had to wait hours to start counting.

Data entry errors were common, according to two volunteers interviewed by LAist.

For example, volunteers in North Hollywood used the app to count more than 50 people living outdoors near a homeless shelter operated by the nonprofit LA Family Housing.

LAHSA officials say the volunteer site coordinator at LA Family Housing checked a box on the app’s review page indicating that no unhoused people were counted. LAHSA deferred to that statement rather than the data gathered by volunteers, even though data was submitted on the app, in this case.

A representative for LA Family Housing confirmed the site coordinator had made an error when they checked the box in the app and recalled computer screen glitches.

Dozens of unhoused people live in the census tract, near the LA Family Housing shelter site.

LAist visited the area and spoke with residents. Timothy Woodhead has been living in a makeshift shelter there for years and is skeptical L.A. is making progress on homelessness.

“Maybe they've gotten a lot more people inside the tiny homes and stuff like that, but there are still plenty of homeless people out here,” Woodhead said. “They kicked me out [of LA Family Housing] like two years ago, and I've just been right here next to them, in the streets. ”

Timothy Woodhead has been living in makeshift shelters in North Hollywood for years. In 2024, LAHSA didn't include Woodhead and his unhoused neighbors in their annual Homeless Count due to an error.

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Two volunteers told LAist there was no easy way to fix app entries made in error, so they relied on paper maps as a backup.

According to count data, LAHSA relied on data from paper backup maps for more than 400 of the 3,249 assigned areas counted in 2024.

But data recorded on the paper wasn’t always included in the final, publicly released count data, even when volunteers intended it to be used in place of app data.

David Hirschman and his wife have regularly volunteered for the homeless count since before LAHSA unveiled its first counting app in 2022.

“ They have made improvements on the app over the years, but my experience was not a great user experience, not a great user interface,” Hirschman said, recalling the 2024 count. “We had to use the paper and highlighters to mark where we went because the app just wasn't good.”

Hirschman was assigned to count a several-block stretch of Chatsworth, where dozens of unhoused Angelenos were living in tents and RVs near a county social services office.

“There's literally blocks and blocks where it's just wall-to-wall homeless folks,” he told LAist. “There’s so many, it’s hard to count accurately.”

Hirschman and other volunteers recorded more than 180 observations of homelessness in the mobile app for this area and 105 on the paper form, but none were recorded in final data from LAHSA.

Chapman, the LAHSA spokesperson, told LAist this was an error caused by the volunteer site coordinator in Chatsworth, who had submitted a note in the app dashboard indicating that the area’s homeless count should come from a paper back-up form instead of the app.

But Chapman said the Chatsworth observations recorded on paper were not included in a separate spreadsheet LAHSA used to record what was written on the paper forms. LAHSA was not able to investigate every instance where contradictory data was provided and relied on the spreadsheet “to complete the job in time as accurately and defensibly as possible,” Chapman told LAist. In this case, that led to none of the area’s observations being included in the final count.

In a 2024 report to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors weeks after the count took place, LAHSA officials said issues with the app “increased doubts and concerns about the technology and reliability of the data.”

Bevin Kuhn, who is responsible for the management of homeless count data as LAHSA’s deputy chief analytics officer, told LAist that the issues they faced in 2024 with the app are now fixed, explaining that they were addressed in a custom app developed with Esri for the 2025 count.

Chapman told LAist in a separate email that all count data was recorded on this app in 2025, which “alleviated the need for a reconciliation process as complex as in 2024.”

What happened after the initial count?

After three days of data entry in January 2024, LAHSA officials moved to the next step: cleaning the data by removing duplicates or mistaken entries.

Chapman told LAist that four to six LAHSA staff have just three weeks to reconcile the data.

Much of the data processing for the 2023 count was automated, using a computer program with a specific set of instructions, according to documents LAHSA provided to LAist after a public records request.

LAHSA didn’t use a similar system in 2024 because the staff member who wrote the program was on leave, according to Bryan Brown, who is associate director of data management at LAHSA and helped lead data processing.

Brown said the remaining staff was “recreating the process to the extent the rest of the team knew” what that program had done.

LAist requested LAHSA’s policies regarding how the 2024 data was processed.

Brown said that while there was no written policy, the process was “understood by the small team that works on this year over year.”

LAHSA invited LAist reporters to their downtown L.A. office to walk through how they collected and cleaned the data of duplicates and errors.

The process was “adjusted” as the LAHSA team worked through the data, Brown said, influenced by unique circumstances in each assigned area.

“It was a nimble process,” Brown said, where they established guidelines that then had to be modified.

The number of observations volunteers submitted on the app could be higher or lower than what LAHSA verified after considering all the data, he told LAist. “It truly varies tract to tract," he said, "situation to situation, times 3,000.”

The agency shared the document below that they created in 2025 in response to LAist questions about how their process in 2024 worked.

LAHSA provided LAist with a flow chart that was made after the count to describe how they processed their data.

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Louis Abramson, an adjunct senior physical scientist at RAND who researches homelessness in L.A., told LAist that transparency, simplicity and consistency from year to year are key when counting such a large number of people. He said he is concerned that changes to how LAHSA conducted the count opened the door to more error.

Apart from his work with RAND, Abramson was a founding board member of the homelessness-focused nonprofit Hollywood 4WRD and volunteered in the LAHSA count in 2024.

Abramson said that the area in Hollywood where he volunteered was recounted by a professional team from LAHSA after Hollywood 4WRD wrote a letter to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors saying that issues with the app compromised their ability to “ensure volunteer safety, data integrity, and to recover physical materials.”

“I think the most damaging thing of 2024 was that confidence was eroded,” Abramson told LAist. “The mechanism that [LAHSA] used to deliver this number became complex enough such that there were lots of ways it could go wrong, and it did go wrong in some of those ways.”

Questions from the community

Two weeks after the count was conducted in January 2024, Jonah Glickman from L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath’s office reached out to LAHSA with questions, according to emails LAist acquired through a public records request to LAHSA.

Horvath’s district includes the L.A. County’s coast from Venice, where homelessness has been the subject of tension, up to the Ventura County line. Glickman asked about beaches that community members believed had gone uncounted in 2024, and whether LAHSA could provide “a detailed breakdown of the data confirmation process that could be shared with the community.”

Through public records requests, LAist uncovered an internal email conversation between Brown and Sally Malone, LAHSA’s director of government affairs, about Glickman’s question.

“We don’t have a robust ‘official’ documented process,” Brown wrote to Malone. “In part because the back-end and how the system actually operated during the count has changed so significantly year-over-year.” Brown did share partial documentation of the process with Malone, but the agency did not share that information with Horvath’s office.

LAHSA eventually confirmed in an email to Horvath’s office that “Homeless Count volunteers may not have consistently counted some sandy beach areas.”

A spokesperson for Horvath told LAist that LAHSA never responded to the second question from Glickman about their data validation process.

Questions about the accuracy of the count — again an estimate at a point in time — are far from new.

"My staff and I have led the homeless count in my district for years, and it is hard to remember a time where we felt that we could trust the data 100%,” Councilmember Bob Blumenfield said in an emailed statement. Blumenfield said he has raised concerns about the count accuracy to LAHSA before, but the agency’s responses “lacked the urgency I was hoping for.”

A 2017 Economic Roundtable report found L.A.’s homeless count lacked reliable year-to-year comparability, because of inconsistent methods and data collection across different counts.

Pete White, executive director of L.A. CAN, a nonprofit that does housing advocacy work in Skid Row, said the drop in homelessness observed in the 2024 count didn’t match what he was seeing in the streets.

“We have always known that the homeless count methodology was flawed and resulted in undercounts, year in and year out,” White said. “The naked eye could see the inconsistency of reported decreases and increased visible homelessness.”

Nearly half of LAist readers surveyed last summer reported seeing homelessness increasing in their neighborhoods in 2023 and the first half of 2024, while 28% reported decreases.

Are homeless initiatives working?

Some homelessness experts say they do take L.A.'s 2024 homeless count reduction as a sign that the city’s programs such as Inside Safe, which provides city-funded hotel rooms to bring people off the streets, are showing progress.

Mayor Karen Bass discusses the 2025 homeless count.

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“What we're seeing in other parts of the country, a focus on punitive measures and criminalization, that doesn't work,” said Alex Visotsky, Senior California Policy Fellow at the National Alliance to End Homelessness based in Washington, D.C. “Focusing on getting folks back into housing seems to be bending the curve.”

Others say increased enforcement of anti-camping policies across L.A. County may just be depressing the count.

“Code enforcement, criminalization and sweeps have driven the unhoused deeper into the shadows, and reporting is even more challenging,” said Peter Connery, vice president of Applied Survey Research, a nonprofit research organization that has been contracted to conduct dozens of homeless counts for municipalities in the Western U.S., including L.A.’s first-ever homeless count in 2005.

The homeless count should be considered a “minimum count,” Connery said, because it only reflects what volunteers can see from the street.

Over the past year, LAHSA has been criticized for failing to properly track billions of dollars it spends on services. L.A. County supervisors pulled funding from the agency and a federal judge is currently considering handing control of L.A. city homelessness spending to a court-appointed receiver. The Los Angeles City Council also recently voted to address inconsistent and fragmented data collection in the city’s homeless services system and look for pathways to separate from LAHSA.

Adams Kellum told LAHSA commissioners last month that the L.A. city budget and loss of funding from the county could jeopardize next year’s count.

With this backdrop, LAHSA officials released data from the February 2025 count in March, months earlier than usual. The agency said the data was preliminary and could change, but it once again showed a major drop in unsheltered homelessness that city officials say show their programs are working, despite the mounting criticism of LAHSA from public officials.

In a LAHSA Commission meeting on April 25, Paul Rubenstein, a LAHSA spokesperson, said the reason they released the preliminary estimates was because the agency “felt like this was very important information for stakeholders to have as they were considering significant shifts to the system.”

White, of L.A. CAN, remains skeptical.

LAHSA “released premature data to support City Hall’s narrative of plummeting numbers,” White told LAist. “It has been weaponized for its own political purpose.”

L.A. has been in federal court over allegations the city has not complied with terms of a settlement agreement that laid out milestones to reduce homelessness.

“My view is that they’re in a political battle for their lives right now,” Federal Judge David O. Carter said during a court hearing about the settlement in March. Carter, the judge considering pulling control of homeless spending from the city, said LAHSA’s release of preliminary data could be “political gamesmanship.”

A new law will require local agencies to publicly disclose audio recordings and written records of 911 calls originating from privately run immigration detention facilities. The bill was prompted by CalMatters reporting on alleged sexual assaults at the Otay Mesa Detention Center.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 423, called the Detention Facility Transparency Act, on Tuesday. It was one of 21 immigration-related bills in a package his office announced the same day.

The law will require local agencies to turn over recordings and written records of 911 calls from privately run detention facilities, if a member of the public requests them. It includes an exception if an active investigation is underway and requires redacting the names of affected individuals.

“Well, it goes without saying, these past two years, Donald Trump has brought fear and has brought anxiety, disruption and stress to our immigrant communities,” Newsom said in a recorded video statement on his website.

“So, today, I sign a number of bills to strengthen transparency and to strengthen accountability and oversight over federal immigration enforcement and civil detention in our state,” the governor said.

State Sen. Lena Gonzalez, a Democrat from Long Beach, introduced SB 423 as state investigations and courts found serious gaps in essential medical care within the facilities. She said the aim was to stop private operators, and the agencies that work alongside them, from keeping what happens behind detention walls from the public's view.

In February, L.A. Taco reported that detainees inside Otay Mesa were throwing lotion bottles wrapped with notes about conditions inside over the wall of the facility to organizers standing outside.

“For 280 days we haven’t eaten a single piece of fruit, banana, apple, orange, or anything fresh," an Otay Mesa detainee wrote, the news outlet reported. "We are all in one big room with no doors or windows. We can’t see any grass or trees. We are all constantly sick.”

Gonzalez, who is chair of the Legislative Latino Caucus, said no person “should have to resort to throwing notes over the walls of a detention facility to have their needs met and their voices heard.”

Earlier this year, CalMatters sought information, including 911 audio records and other reports, about alleged serious incidents at detention facilities through a California Public Records Act request. While a San Diego County sheriff’s spokesperson said the agency was not investigating those cases, he said he was unable to turn over additional records because they were part of “a law enforcement investigation.”

“When journalists and reporters attempted to obtain records about reported incidents at these facilities through the Public Records Act, they faced severe pushback from law enforcement, citing vague investigatory records exemptions, despite there being no active investigation,” said Gonzalez.

Immigrant Defense Advocates and the First Amendment Coalition co-sponsored the bill.

“The governor has sent a powerful message: No more secrecy. SB 423 makes clear that 911 calls and related records about events in detention must be released upon request. This will shed more light on a notoriously opaque system, leading to stronger oversight and accountability,” Ginny LaRoe, Advocacy Director, First Amendment Coalition, said in a written statement.

Gonzalez’s bill was one of several detention oversight bills Newsom signed Tuesday. Others impose a new 25% tax on private detention facilities, expand health, safety and oversight requirements for the centers, and add to the state attorney general’s oversight role.

The new laws take effect Jan. 1.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Six Flags Magic Mountain is retiring its famous X2 roller coaster amid lawsuits alleging serious brain injury caused by the ride.

The Southern California theme park said Tuesday that it is permanently shuttering the ride after nearly 20 years. Six Flags recently settled a wrongful-death lawsuit from the family of a 22-year-old man who died after riding the coaster in 2022, and three more lawsuits alleging traumatic brain injuries were filed last week.

“While X2 consistently passed a multitude of safety tests, we have decided to close the ride because we believe it’s the right thing to do,” park President Brian Oerding said in an online announcement. “Ride safety is a cornerstone of our business, and when we see guest confidence affected, we take it seriously.”

The ride has been closed since the evening of July 12, after two women who rode the coaster less than a week apart both needed to be rushed to the hospital after they exited.

One of them, 25-year-old Naomi Greer-Wilkinson, collapsed shortly after the ride ended and was found to have massive brain bleeding inside the skull that required emergency brain surgery. She remains in a vegetative state in the hospital, unable to speak or move and dependent on a ventilator. Her family filed a lawsuit against Six Flags on her behalf.

Her attorneys said more than 100 people claimed they suffered brain injuries from the roller coaster in the past two years, and more lawsuits would be filed in the coming weeks.

According to the Six Flags Magic Mountain website, the X2 roller coaster reaches a top speed of 76 mph (122 kph) and has a total length of 3,610 feet (1,100 meters). The seats rotate 360 degrees “so your body will be flipping around the entire time,” and the ride features two “raven turns” — half loops that turn into sheer drops midway.

It debuted at the park in 2002 under the name X as the world’s first “fourth-dimension” roller coaster and reopened in 2008 as X2 with new trains and special effects. The uniqueness of the ride drew thrill-seekers from around the world and garnered a fervent fanbase.

The park settled a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the family of Christopher Hawley, a 22-year-old who died the day after he rode X2. He was taken to the hospital after the ride with severe brain bleeding. The medical examiner’s office said his death was from blunt head trauma. The case was settled at the end of August, a few days before the trial was scheduled to start.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the administration to resume, for now, deportations of migrants to countries that are not identified in their removal orders, handing President Donald Trump another victory in his aggressive immigration agenda.

The court also said it would take up the case for full oral argument in December.

The court's brief order granting the petition did not outline a reason for staying a lower-court order that blocked the third-country deportations. It noted the court's three liberal justices objected to staying the order.

Solicitor General John Sauer told the justices the third-country deportation policy amounted to "an essential tool to remove certain aliens, including some of the worst criminal aliens" in court papers earlier this month. The administration said it has used the policy to deport tens of thousands of noncitizens to Mexico and countries in Africa and Latin America after the migrants' home countries refused to accept them.

"While certain aliens may benefit from stalling their removal, the Nation does not," Sauer wrote in an emergency application Sept. 24.

The action by the high court marks the third time the justices have rejected efforts by U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston to pause the deportations, which the judge said violate due process rights and fail to give detainees meaningful notice to raise arguments that they have credible fears of torture or abuse in the countries where they could be sent.

The National Immigration Litigation Alliance, which is representing migrants facing deportation, said in court papers that their clients are facing significant harms.

"The record shows that class members removed without meaningful notice or an opportunity to present country-specific protection claims have faced prolonged and arbitrary detention, beatings and sexual assault, disappearance, and chain refoulement to countries from which the United States had already granted them protection," wrote lawyer Trina Realmuto. "These harms cannot be undone."

The Department of Homeland Security said Murphy's rulings have created a logistical nightmare, including canceled flights, potential diplomatic clashes, and a lag in removing people convicted of assault and drug crimes.

The administration argued that if a country has assured Secretary of State Marco Rubio that it will not engage in persecution or torture, that should be enough to deport a noncitizen to a country that's not their own.

The Supreme Court's conservative supermajority has recognized the president has substantial authority over the border. Last summer, in a 6-to-3 decision, the court ruled President Trump has sweeping power to end the temporary protected status program for people who can't return to their home countries because of wars and natural disasters.

Copyright 2026 NPR

The bell had already rung on a recent morning at Newport Beach’s Ensign Intermediate School. But two of the school’s students hadn’t made it to class. Instead, they were sitting on a sidewalk across from campus, detained by a police officer for parking their e-bikes on the street.

The situation at Ensign has gotten messy since the school district, Newport-Mesa Unified, voted to ban e-bikes from middle and elementary school campuses, citing safety concerns. Many students kept riding their e-bikes to school anyway, parking them in swarms in the surrounding neighborhood.

The neighbors did not like this. Shouting matches ensued between students and homeowners. At least one student returned from class to find her tires deflated.

The city responded to the tension by putting up “No e-bike parking” signs on several streets.

The city of Newport Beach prohibited e-bikes on some streets around Ensign Intermediate School after neighbors complained.

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“I wouldn't want it in my neighborhood either, like, I get it,” said Corey Gulbranson, who got a $100 parking ticket on behalf of his daughter, one of the Ensign students detained for allegedly illegally parking her e-bike. “But at the end of the day, we're just trying to get our kids to school on a legal mode of transportation.”

Crucial teen commuting tools? Or dangerous devices?

E-bikes and significantly more powerful e-motorcycles have become very popular in many Orange County suburbs, where the streets are wide, public transit is spotty, and distances are longer than some are willing to pedal on a regular bike. For teens and tweens, e-bikes provide a taste of independence. They also relieve parents of some of their driving duties. Plus, e-bikes can replace polluting cars.

But their popularity has brought an alarming increase in serious injuries, especially among young riders.

At Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, e-bike crashes are now sending more kids to the ER than any other cause, according to Dr. Tetsuya Takeuchi, the hospital’s trauma medical director. More than 70% of those patients had some level of head injury, from minor concussions to devastating brain damage, he said, often because they were not wearing a helmet.

But even Takeuchi recognizes the nearly irresistible draw of e-bikes.

“If you ride one, you realize how easy it is to go everywhere with it,” he said.  “I am not by any means surprised at how popular this is, especially amongst kids.”

‘Bicycle-shaped devices’

Not all e-bikes are equally fast, or equally dangerous. California uses a three-tier system, developed by the bike industry, to classify e-bikes depending on:

• engine power
• max speed
• whether the bike has pedals 
• whether a cyclist has to use those pedals before the engine kicks in 

California law prohibits children under age 16 from riding Class 3 e-bikes with engines capable of reaching 28 miles per hour. In reality, though, many kids are riding e-vehicles that go faster — in some cases, much faster.

“There are lots of what I will call 'bicycle-shaped devices' being ridden,” said Asha Weinstein Agrawal, a research associate at the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University. “Some of them are legal e-bikes. Some of them are not.”

Agrawal recently co-authored a 210-page report on e-bike safety. It includes data collected from middle and high schools in Marin and San Mateo counties, which showed that only 12% of students’ e-bikes fit into the legal classification system. The other 88% were more powerful than legally allowed under California law.

A Newport Beach Police officer tickets a middle schooler for parking her e-bike on the street across from Ensign Middle School on Sept. 4, 2026.

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Any bicycle-shaped device that goes faster than 30 miles per hour is technically an e-motorcycle, which requires a special driver’s license and, if ridden on public roads, insurance and registration.

Agrawal said it’s hard for parents, and even police officers, to figure out what’s legal and what’s not.

“Nobody understands this,” she said. “It’s very hard to enforce.”

The crackdown

Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer has taken some unusual approaches to addressing the e-bike dilemma. To date, he has pressed criminal charges — including for child endangerment — against four parents after their children were involved in collisions, all of them on e-motorcycles, not e-bikes.

One of those parents, a woman from Aliso Viejo, was charged with three felonies, including involuntary manslaughter, after her 14-year-old son allegedly struck and killed an 81-year-old man while doing wheelies in the street in Lake Forest on an e-motorcycle souped up to reach 60 miles per hour.

People with e-bikes, e-scooters and e-motos move through the long line at the Orange County District Attorney's buyback event at Angel Stadium, Sept. 13, 2026.

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The DA’s office said it has also sent letters to retailers reminding them of a ban on selling products used to modify e-bikes to go faster than legally allowed.

Spitzer recently tried another novel approach: buybacks. On a recent Sunday, hundreds of people brought their e-bikes, e-scooters and e-motos to an event at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, hoping to turn them in for up to a thousand dollars in gift cards. The county event was paid for with $100,000 in asset forfeiture funds.

One man near the front of the line said he had arrived at 1 a.m. By the time the event started at 10 a.m., sheriff’s deputies were turning people away.

“Holy smokes,” Spitzer said from behind a podium mounted in the parking lot. “Look at the participation. … And you can see why, because we have a serious problem here in Orange County and across the nation with individuals who have e-bikes and e-motorcycles.”

Spitzer spoke about the dangers, but also the attractiveness of a high-powered personal vehicle, especially for teen boys.

 “We're not gonna change our internal DNA about who we are as young people and the fact we wanna go places, and we wanna experiment, and quite frankly, we like fast things,” he said. “ But the fact of the matter is when you have a machine, and you don't understand its capabilities, you can find yourself in harm's way very quickly before you can control that mechanism.”

Orange County District Attorney is testing out a range of strategies to crack down on illegal e-bikes and e-motos, including a buyback event at Angel Stadium on Sept. 13, 2026.

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Are unsafe riders ‘ruining it for other people’?

Paul Dumont drove to the buyback event all the way from Chatsworth in hopes of exchanging five e-bikes he had bought for his kids and grandkids.

“They got injured on them when we first got them, so they've been sitting in storage,” he said of the bikes.

Dumont said he wished he had bought less powerful e-bikes. “But I bought them the best ones,” he said. “I thought they'd be better.”

Denise Mills and her 17-year-old son Nathanael came from Torrance to turn in three e-motorcycles that he had been riding to and from his high school last year. He stopped after the school told him it was illegal. A new state law defining e-motorcycles took effect in January.

A student at Ensign Middle School runs to campus after parking his e-bike at a nearby park, Sept. 4, 2026.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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“That was very unfortunate because it's his primary source of transportation,” Mills said. “Now it's his dad and I.”

Nathanael said he had logged several thousand miles without an accident.

“ Partially it's, like, people ruining it for other people,” he said of efforts to tighten the rules for young riders.

Local leaders grapple with the flood of e-bikes

Cities and school districts are testing a variety of approaches to decrease e-bike crashes and injuries, from prohibiting riding on sidewalks to outright bans for young riders. The Brea City Council has even discussed using police drones to follow unsafe youth riders home in order to inform their parents.

In a more typical approach, the Huntington Beach City School District requires all student e-bike commuters to pass a safety course in order to get a permit to park their bike on campus. Newport-Mesa has a similar program for high schoolers.

Marin County limits youth under age 16 to riding Class 1 “pedal-assist” e-bikes, which have motors that kick in only while pedaling, and shut off once the bike reaches 20 miles per hour. The ban on more powerful e-bikes for young riders is part of a pilot program approved by the state legislature that sunsets in 2029.

At the federal level, O.C. Congressman Dave Min, D-Irvine, co-authored a bill earlier this year, the Safe SPEEDS Act, that would develop nationwide safety standards for e-bikes, including minimum age recommendations.

A dilemma for parents

Parents of student e-bike commuters have said they do not oppose regulating the vehicles, and they want authorities to crack down on dangerous and illegal riding. But an outright ban goes too far, they’ve said.

“ I know there are kids that are a little wild,” said Kellie Newcombe, whose 13-year-old daughter is still riding her pedal-assist bike from their home in Costa Mesa to Ensign Intermediate School in Newport Beach.

“That is not my child. That is not her friends. They are so ridiculously safe and by the book,” she said. “It's just super frustrating that they would say every kid cannot ride an e-bike.”

A spokesperson for Newport-Mesa Unified told LAist in an email that the school district’s new e-bike restrictions have gone smoothly and are helping to reinforce safety. But that is not how Gulbranson and Newcombe see it.

“We've had my daughter intimidated by multiple neighbors now,” Gulbranson said. “This whole guise of doing it under safety is totally misguided.”

Newcombe said she worries about her daughter’s safety more now that an increasing number of parents are driving their kids to school.

“They're in a rush because the traffic is insane,” she said. Plus, her daughter now has to cross a busy street to get to campus.

Newcombe said she wishes the school district would work with local leaders and police to enforce e-bike rules and to create safer paths to school for responsible riders.