Jack Shotbolt was driving through his west Omaha neighborhood in early June when a girl, maybe age 10, shot out in front of him on an electric scooter.
He slammed on the brakes. His wife grabbed the dashboard. If he had been going a few miles per hour faster, Shotbolt thinks, he would have hit the girl.
After several chilling encounters with e-scooters and e-bikes, Shotbolt said he’s now on constant high alert behind the wheel. Every day, he sees at least a dozen kids on e-rides, many without helmets and turning wide “right into anything.”
“I want to see them outside (and) I want to see them safe,” Shotbolt said. “But if you were to hang out here for an afternoon, your jaw would hit the floor.”
“These kids are just on the loose.”
As a parent of five grown children, Shotbolt said he would never be the same if he were to accidentally hit a kid.
Last month, Shotbolt’s nightmare became another driver’s reality. An 11-year-old boy named Logan Rahn died after a pickup truck collided with his electric scooter in Bennington.
The exploding popularity of e-scooters and e-bikes has created a new danger on Omaha’s neighborhood streets — both for the kids riding them and the adult drivers braking and swerving to avoid them.
Local hospitals are treating increasing numbers of e-riders for concussions, fractured skulls and broken legs.
Police and policymakers are scrambling to catch up with a technology that has outpaced regulations and given grade schoolers access to a new level of speed.
Parents hoping to get their kids off screens and into the outdoors aren’t sure what to make of the trendy but potentially unsafe two-wheelers that blur the lines between toy and motor vehicle.
Many agree that something needs to change — whether that be the regulations or the supervision and guidance of children.
“You want to give your kids a little bit of freedom, and you hope and trust that they’re doing all the things you’ve told them to do,” said Sara Dettmer, a Bennington mother of two kids with e-rides. “But sometimes, you can’t be there every moment of every day.”
Behind the craze
Jamie Bowcott recognized the potential danger when he bought his adolescent sons electric scooters last summer. But the Millard father also saw certain benefits: He might save time on transportation, and his boys would get to move around the neighborhood more freely.
Bowcott and his wife talked with their kids about safety before they started riding, including wearing a helmet and staying off major streets. But recent accidents have heightened their awareness.
“I wouldn’t be upset if we got rid of them, but I also recognize that all their friends have one and that seems to be their communal way of getting around,” Bowcott said. “They have bikes, but they’re not as ‘cool’ as riding scooters with their friends.”
Gas-powered dirt bikes and ATVs have been popular with kids in rural areas for decades, but until recently, it was rare to see underage riders on public streets, said Douglas County Sheriff Aaron Hanson.
The advent of charge-at-home electric dirt bikes and e-scooters removed the barrier of fueling up at a gas station that deterred most kids, Hanson said.
The first electric dirt bikes, often called “e-motos,” started showing up in Omaha around 2017, but weren’t widely available at first, said Zach McCauley, an e-bike seller and enthusiast. Their meteoric rise, McCauley said, can be traced to Sur Ronster, a YouTuber known by his four million followers for popping wheelies on e-motos.
Rental e-scooters landed on Omaha sidewalks in 2019 just as lithium-powered scooters hit the shelves at big-box retailers.
Today, e-rides are affordable to the average family and sold at dozens of local stores and online outlets.
Target, for instance, sells one $300 electric dirt bike capable of traveling 16 mph — marketed to riders as young as 3. Several e-ride retailers, including Target, did not respond to requests for comment.
Last year, e-motos “were under so many people’s Christmas trees” in Omaha’s suburbs, McCauley said.
The sudden ubiquity of e-rides this summer feels “like cicadas coming out of the ground,” said Julie Harris, the director of Bike Walk Nebraska.
Bikes, motos and scooters
The public discourse on regulating e-rides is muddied by confusion around the terms used to distinguish different types of vehicles, said Julie Harris, the director of Bike Walk Nebraska.
To Harris, an e-bike is most similar to a bicycle — it has pedals plus a battery that kicks in to assist. An e-moto, by contrast, is more like a dirt bike since it has no pedals, she said.
But some vehicles that Harris would classify as e-motos are marketed as e-bikes. That’s misleading, she said, since many e-motos can top out at much higher speeds than human-propelled e-bikes.
E-scooters are more straightforward, but some are much faster than others. Those designed for elementary school kids often come with a max speed of about 5 mph, but the speediest models can travel upward of 50 mph.
“At the end of the day, we need to be watching out for each other on the road,” Harris said. “It doesn’t matter what the device is at this point.”
Standing in her front yard in Bennington, Dettmer said she sees kids texting, doing wheelies and riding helmetless while on their electric scooters and electric bikes. More often than not, she said, the unsafe behavior seems to outweigh the safe.
Her own kids — ages 6 and 9 — have an electric scooter and an electric pedal bike with top speeds that reach 7 and 10 mph. She said they never ride without parental supervision and helmets.
When news broke of Rahn’s death, Dettmer said it was “heartbreaking” for the community and also served as a wake-up call for many parents. She said her kids are now more wary of their e-rides.
“Seeing some of the things that have happened and seeing how kids are using them, it’s been a complete turn off for our family, where we will not probably entertain ever getting another electric vehicle,” Dettmer said.
Speed is considered the difference that makes new-age e-rides more dangerous than traditional bikes and scooters.
Kids who aren’t trained in the rules of the road can now drive at the speed of car traffic on e-motos that aren’t equipped with basic safety features such as lights and mirrors, Hanson said.
“Essentially, it is the equivalent of handing the keys to a 13-year-old kid to a legitimate motorcycle and just assuming that everything’s going to be OK,” Hanson said.
Data from Nebraska Medicine shows that 68 e-scooter- and e-bike-related trauma injuries were treated between 2021 and 2025. Nearly 80% came in the last two years, and many were kids and young adults without helmets.
Through May of this year, Nebraska Medicine has treated 22 trauma patients that sustained injuries from e-scooters and e-bikes.
Creighton University Medical Center-Bergan Mercy and Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital also have seen an increase in young patients with injuries from e-scooters and e-bikes.
Scott Brown, trauma outreach and injury prevention coordinator at Bergan Mercy, said what used to be toys for kids are now “powerful machines.” Riders, including children, get road rash, broken bones and other orthopedic injuries, but Brown said head injuries are the most concerning because they can “significantly debilitate” people for the rest of their lives.
Nationally, Truveta Research found that emergency room visits related to e-bikes and e-scooters spiked by nearly 700% among children and young adults between 2023 and 2026. More than one-third of all patients had head or neck injuries.
Regulating a moving target
As he headed toward Bellevue City Hall, Councilman Don Preister came across a now-familiar sight on one of the busiest streets in town. A couple of young people were riding through Harrison Street traffic on motorized minibikes without helmets, he later recounted to his colleagues.
“I was scared for their lives,” Preister said.
Riding an off-road motorbike on public streets already is illegal under state law, but Bellevue doubled down last month amid growing public complaints to police. The city banned all off-road recreational vehicles, including minibikes and electric motorcycles, from being ridden on public streets, sidewalks and trails. E-scooters can operate on sidewalks but not streets.
Violators — and parents of kids who break the new law — can be charged with a misdemeanor, but the main emphasis will be on educating the public and protecting kids, Bellevue Police Chief Ken Clary said.
“If anybody thinks we’re heavy-handed, we’re not trying to be heavy-handed. We’re just trying to have their kids be safe,” Clary told the City Council. “This is 95% children, small kids.”
In Nebraska’s biggest county, Douglas County deputies began a crackdown in May on illegal dirt bike riding. The Sheriff’s Office has since cited 12 parents on suspicion of violating state law and impounded 13 vehicles — 11 electric and two gas-powered.
But more enforcement isn’t the whole solution, according to law enforcement and safety advocates: Local and state laws need to catch up with the rapid technological advancements of the e-ride industry.
“The market has outpaced the policy, and we’ve got to figure out how to kind of rebalance that,” said Harris, the Bike Walk director.
E-scooters are classified similarly to bicycles in state law, but that doesn’t reflect how fast some models can go now, said Hanson, the Douglas County sheriff. The Nebraska Legislature will probably have to create new rules of the road for e-scooters, he said.
Some states already have strict e-scooter laws. Pennsylvania prohibits the use of e-scooters on public streets, while North Carolina and Oregon have similar bans applying to kids under 16.
Bike Walk Nebraska recently received funding from the Metropolitan Area Planning Agency to develop state and local policy recommendations for e-bikes, e-motos and e-scooters.
In the last year, Hastings and Grand Island have passed ordinances banning e-bikes and e-scooters from all roads with speed limits above 25 mph. That kind of law is confusing and unenforceable, Harris said.
Before an e-scooter accident cut Logan Rahn’s life short, the 11-year-old was “a best buddy” to a lot of hockey players, said Molly Diamond, house commissioner of the Omaha Hockey Club.
“He was just good people,” Diamond said tearfully. “He was just the kind of kid that you wanted to have on your team because he brought everybody else around him up.”
It’s critical to remind kids to wear helmets and follow traffic rules whether they’re riding regular bikes and scooters or electric ones, Diamond said.
Dettmer, from Bennington, said the time is now to discuss these issues before another kid is harmed on their e-ride.
“If we can even prevent one family from experiencing this unimaginable loss that this family in Bennington experienced this past month,” Dettmer said, “then these conversations are worth having.”
6 Comments
I have two main reactions to this article.
Firstly, I view so-called “E-Bikes” the way I view vapes. They are extremely unbecoming for an adult to be seen using one, and kids really shouldn’t have access to them. So I’m already on the border of opposing them as it is.
On the other hand, this article (like most Flatwater articles) is relying heavily on emotional anecdotes to drive across a point that you should let the government crack down on this because it’s just SO SAD that something bad happened to a kid. The article even tries to close out with the remark that: “If we can even prevent one family from experiencing this unimaginable loss…”
This is the exact same “logic” which is used to justify gun control, vaccine mandates, COVID lockdowns and many other unconstitutional government power grabs. And that being the case I’m just going to say once again, Flatwater would have been much better off arguing the case based on the facts, rather than trying to manipulate our emotions in dishonest way. If the facts support your case, then the pearl clutching emotional appeals shouldn’t be necessary.
Make sure you don’t lump e-bikes in with emotos. There is a difference,’mainly the human power component.
Saw a boy crossing Pacific on an ebike doing wheelies across the busy road. He was followed by a friend on an electric scooter. Neither had helmuts on their heads.
Maybe we should charge the parents/guardians of these riders?
We know NOW, and we knew 1 year ago, and we knew 5 years ago, that these e-bikes/scooters were dangerous…just like leaving your child in a car for “just 5 minutes” is dangerous.
Lecture your kids all you want about safety, make them wear a helmet all you want: it is 100% NEGLIGENT to allow them out of the driveway with these e-killers.
CHARGE THE PARENTS!
I agree about placing more responsibility on parents for the misdeeds and bad judgements kids sometimes make. If you provide your child ANY mode of transportation, it is your responsibility to educate them on safety. If you have weapons in your home, you are responsible for educating your kids about safety. You are responsible to lock away your weapons in a manner a child cannot access them. Supervise your kids. Their lives depend on it.
Still find Omaha’s scooter law confusing. They’re only allowed on streets, not sidewalks — UNLESS you’re a child wearing a helmet, in which case you can use them on sidewalks and streets. But if you’re 18 or over, can never ride them on a sidewalk.