Silent but Deadly: Inside Longboat Key’s Great E-Bike Reckoning

Are they the silent killers — e-bikes and e-scooters whisking quietly over our island, where even the Mennonites race around over the bridge — and there seems to be no stopping them, or at least no hearing them.

I bring this up because that is precisely how it feels at 8:15 on a Tuesday, when you are ambling along the sidewalk on Gulf of Mexico Drive, contemplating nothing more dangerous than whether to risk supermarket Sushi for lunch, and a 70-pound electric machine roughly the size of a Vespa passes eighteen inches off your left hip at the speed of a moving violation. It is piloted by a silent figure in wraparound sunglasses who does not say “on your left,” does not ring a bell, does not brake, and does not appear to register your existence as a fellow mammal.

There is no stopping them. There is definitely no hearing them. By the time you hear anything, it is the Doppler whoosh of a man who is already gone, leaving behind a faint breeze and the lingering scent of moral superiority.

A Brief and Terrifying Physics Lesson

Let’s be real. Longboat voters or not, the bendable young sprite youth of the planet do not live here. We do. Our bodies are calcified, often with osteoporosis, and we are ambling up the walking path with muted reflexes commensurate with our age. This is not an insult; it is an actuarial table wearing orthopedic sandals.

The whole catastrophe comes down to a speed differential. A pedestrian moves at roughly 3 mph. The object overtaking that pedestrian from behind is doing 28. When a sprite youth gets clipped at that speed, the sprite youth tucks, rolls, bounces up, films a TikTok, and is eating a burrito by noon. When one of us gets clipped, we do not bounce. We shatter like a dropped chandelier — and we become a feature in this very newspaper, and not the fun kind with a wine review.

The Tennis-Center Death Run

The danger reaches peak absurdity out at the Longboat Key Tennis Center, where e-bikers are whisking 30 and 40 mph to the courts — or, far worse, away from them.

Picture the gentleman who has just suffered a monumental loss, 6–love, 6–love, to a man he beat easily in 2019 and has privately referred to as “no real threat” ever since. He is filled with a bit of cortisol mixed with sunshine in his eyes, forming a most dangerous glint. He is now astride 750 watts of German engineering — fully charged battery, freshly bruised ego, graphite racquet strapped across his back like a quiver. He is not, in this precise moment, a safe operator of heavy machinery. He is a class-action lawsuit with excellent groundstrokes.

A Field Guide to the Whizzing Menace

For the uninitiated, the island’s e-bikers sort into several distinct subspecies:

•The Silent Assassin. Wears wraparound sunglasses. Owns a bell. Has never once touched the bell. Regards “on your left” as a sign of moral weakness.

• The Smug Pedaler. Radiates the serene calm of a man who is simultaneously rescuing the planet and doing 28 mph past your grandmother. More on him shortly.

•The Post-Match Cortisol Casualty. See above. Lost in straight sets. Should not, at present, be trusted with a toaster, let alone a vehicle.

• The Mennonite. Has, by reliable local report, joined the arms race and now races around over the bridge with the rest of us. When even the Mennonites have gone electric, the moped-era ordinance is officially a museum piece.

Enter Mr. Perlman, Folk Hero of the Sidewalk

One resident did the single bravest thing a Longboat Key citizen can do: he respectfully asked for some help. Richard B. Perlman wrote to Town Commissioner Gary Coffin and opened with a sentence that deserves to be chiseled over the door of Town Hall: “Thank you for giving me your card but you may be sorry you did!”

He was not bluffing. Perlman, a frequent walker like many of us, laid out the case: routine close calls with e-bikes that have neither bells like regular bikes nor any working relationship with the 10 mph speed limit. They are basically silent. They give no warning from behind. And, he warned, until they are prohibited from the sidewalks and restricted to the bike lane on Gulf of Mexico Drive, it is just a matter of time until one of them collides with a pedestrian, with the potential of causing serious bodily harm. “The same goes for scooters!”

Commissioner Coffin replied like a man who has received this exact email roughly nine hundred times. He agreed. He said staff was “on it” and working with the state on a safer solution, thanked Perlman for input “critical to our governmental process,” and forwarded the whole thing to the town manager and police chief “for additional comments and direction.” Perlman, a gentleman to the end, wrote back to say he really appreciated the immediate response.

And that, friends, is the entire functioning Longboat Key e-bike enforcement apparatus as it exists today: one exceptionally polite email thread, now filed.

So What ARE the Rules? (Sit Down First)

Here is where this column is contractually obligated to become real news, so grip the walker firmly.

Under Florida law, an e-bike has the same rights and duties as a regular bicycle. Translation: it may legally operate on the sidewalk, in the bike lane, or on the side of the road. In the eyes of the state, the whizzing menace is simply a bicycle that has been to the gym and started taking supplements.

Longboat’s town code does set a sidewalk speed limit of 10 mph and — I am not making this up — requires every bicycle to carry a working bell or other audible signal and to yield to pedestrians. That 10 mph limit is currently enforced with all the ferocity of a laminated suggestion. Officers point out that radar is useless at those speeds and the department has no manpower to put cops on bicycles, which conjures the magnificent image of a Longboat officer pedaling grimly after a fleeing 71-year-old, the two of them topping out around 9 mph in the most leisurely pursuit in the annals of law enforcement — a chase you could comfortably watch while eating a sandwich, because it would last the entire sandwich.

The Ordinance That Time Forgot

Part of the problem is practically geological. Longboat’s biking rules were written back when mopeds were the menace — the 1980s and early ‘90s, the golden age of teenagers buzzing around on low-powered Yamahas and Motobecanes. The town code contains, to this day, exactly zero mentions of e-bikes. As Town Manager Howard Tipton has conceded, the old rule “might have been more for mini-bikes.”

He is being generous. We are policing 30-mph electric machinery with a law drafted to handle a 15-year-old named Kevin doing wheelies on a Honda Spree outside the Dairy Queen. Kevin is now 58 and has a hip replacement. The ordinance, somehow, has not aged a day.

The Smug Factor

We must also address the cultural dimension, because a meaningful percentage of e-bikers ride with what can only be described as a “we don’t pay taxes, but we are ecologically sound and superior” countenance and attitude — which is, in its own way, deeply intimidating.

There is no helmet on earth rated for that level of moral certainty. You cannot win an argument with a man who is, at this very moment, rescuing the planet at 28 mph with your grandmother’s hip hanging in the balance. He has the high ground. He has the throttle. He has an electrolyte beverage in the cupholder and a cause in his heart. And should you object — should you suggest, meekly, that he perhaps ring the bell — he will look at you the way a Tesla looks at a horse.

Rules on the Horizon (No, Really)

There is, mercifully, motion — proceeding at the stately pace of all things governmental.

The Florida Legislature recently handed towns the power to regulate e-bikes, golf carts, scooters and the like on their sidewalks. But there is a catch worthy of a Coen brothers film: the enabling law says any such ordinance “must restrict such vehicles or devices to a maximum speed of 15 miles per hour” — a full five miles per hour faster than the 10 mph limit Longboat already wants. Read that again. The state has graciously authorized us to set a speed limit that is higher than our speed limit. We asked for a leash; the state handed us a slightly longer leash and called it reform.

Town staff, to their credit, are drafting something. Police Chief Russ Mager — who takes pains to stress he is “not anti e-bike” — favors some form of speed-governing on the sidewalk and notes, accurately, that no injuries or collisions have been reported here yet. The operative and quietly terrifying word being “yet.” Public Works Director Charlie Mopps puts a finger on the inconvenient fact at the center of everything: “we don’t have a real true multi-modal trail.” What we have is one six-to-eight-foot sidewalk asked to serve as a bike lane, a jogging path, a dog-walking route, a stroller highway, and a senior speedway all at once — a ribbon of concrete doing the job of a six-lane interchange.

Meanwhile, the cavalry may be riding in from Tallahassee. A bill that has cleared both chambers and is, as of this writing, awaiting the Governor’s signature would require any cyclist to slow to 10 mph whenever a pedestrian is within 50 feet, with violations treated as a roughly $30 nonmoving infraction and penalties set to begin in July. Thirty dollars. For nearly liquefying a retiree. On Longboat Key, $30 is the tip you leave the valet for not scratching the Lexus. It is not, let us say, a fine that keeps anyone awake at night.

Our neighbors in Manatee County have already acted, barring kids under 16 from the fastest class of e-bike on public paths after residents complained of teenagers — and I am faithfully conveying the spirit of it — taunting them. Taunting. We have not reached the taunting stage on Longboat Key, because taunting takes the energy of youth, and we are a more passive-aggressive people. We do not taunt. We write strongly worded letters, and then we thank one another warmly for the prompt reply.

What Can Actually Be Done

The honest menu is short, and most of it the town already has the power to do tomorrow:

• Pass the ordinance, cap sidewalk speed at the lowest number the state will allow, and — radical concept — actually enforce the bells the law has required all along.

• Post real speed-limit signs. Several have gone up; the machines keep blowing past them as though the signs were a charming local art installation.

• Pick a lane, literally. Decide once and for all whether this army of e-bikes belongs in the bike path, on the sidewalk, or relegated to the roadway — where, let’s be honest, they can’t quite keep up with traffic and nobody, in any lane, is happy.

• Enforce something. Occasionally. Ideally before the first headline none of us ever wants to write — the one that begins, “A Longboat Key woman, 74…”

Will any of this happen quickly? It cannot. By law, a Longboat ordinance must pass at two separate commission meetings before it becomes real — a stately, dignified, double-locked process scientifically engineered to guarantee that nothing on this island is ever accomplished in fewer than two attempts.

So for now, we walk defensively. We listen for a sound that never comes. And somewhere out there, even as you read this, a man who just lost in straight sets is swinging a leg over his e-bike. He has cortisol in his veins, sunshine in his eyes, and a kombucha in the cupholder. He cannot hear me. He cannot hear you. He certainly cannot hear the 10 mph speed limit.

On your left.

He won’t say it. So I will.