A student e-bike ban in Newport Beach continues to trickle into the neighborhood, with new street signs posted in the residential area around Ensign Intermediate School banning e-bike parking.
Since Newport-Mesa Unified School District trustees voted this year to ban younger students from riding e-bikes on campus, students are riding and parking them in the neighborhood instead.
“They would park in the walkway, and then they’d fall in the grass,” homeowner Nancy Barfield said, noting the bikes take up street parking.New street signs have been posted in the residential area around Ensign Intermediate School,
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In August, long lines of e-bikes were chained together in front of walkways and mailboxes near Ensign Intermediate.
On Thursday, about 75 e-bikes were near a couple of bike racks at John Wayne Park down the street from the campus.
Barfield has complained to the city council and would rather have the students park on campus.
“They ride through here all the time but don’t take up and block people’s front doors. Don’t block their ingress and egress,” she said.
Newport Beach City Councilman Erik Weigand, whose wife is a school board trustee, says he’s been receiving many complaints.
“We support the school district’s ban on the e-bikes, and the school district specifically said you cannot take your bikes to school and we agree with them, but there’s a lot of students that still want to bring their e-bikes, their parents somehow allow them to – and we have a couple of locations nearby that they can lock their bikes up to,” Weigand said.
The city hopes the new measures will encourage students to park at the bike racks at John Wayne Park and down the hill on Avon Street, which was empty on Thursday.
“We’ve been sending enforcement out there. We have police volunteers. We have police themselves. We’re out there trying to say, hey, there’s better places for you to put these bikes than in front of the neighbors,” Weigand said.
Kids heading home on their e-bikes gave the new parking signs a thumbs-down. “Boooo,” they said.
Newport Mesa Unified is the first school district in the state to prohibit e-bikes except on high school campuses. With rising numbers of accidents and injuries, school board members say student safety is their top concern.