At quarter past seven on the evening of August 4, a BC Highway Patrol officer working Marine Drive at Pemberton Avenue in North Vancouver noticed a small e-scooter moving through heavy traffic, with a small rider on it.
He pulled the rider over on a hunch that he was underage. The boy was 12. He had on shorts, a T-shirt, an oversized helmet and large shoes.
Officers spoke with his father and wrote him a ticket under section 7(2) of the Electronic Kick Scooter Pilot Project Regulation, for allowing someone under 16 to operate an electric kick scooter. The fine is $109.
"Children under 16 are not allowed to operate E Scooters on public roads, bike lanes, or bike paths," said Sergeant Michael McLaughlin of BC Highway Patrol. He added that police are getting an increasing number of complaints about unsafe and illegal e-mobility users, that the point of all this is preventing death and injury, and that it looks like they'll have to write more tickets before the message gets through.
Which is a police officer saying publicly that enforcement isn't working yet.
It wasn't a one-off
Two months earlier, on June 10, a different 12-year-old was riding an e-scooter south on the 3100 block of Colwood Drive in Edgemont Village. Around five in the afternoon he hit a Volkswagen Jetta that was easing out onto the street. Video from the scene showed the windshield caved in.
He got away with superficial injuries. North Vancouver RCMP used the word lucky.
Three tickets came out of that crash: $109 to the boy for riding under 16, $109 to his parents for allowing it, and nothing to the driver of the Jetta. An RCMP spokesperson said police, first responders, hospitals and doctors have all been raising the alarm about this, and that sooner or later somebody is going to have to knock on a door and give a parent the worst news there is.
It isn't only kids. Vancouver Police reported that a 30-year-old woman riding a scooter without a helmet collided with a car, struck her head on the ground, and died of her injuries on July 11.
What the paediatricians actually say
This isn't one of those areas where the medical guidance is contested or vague. The Canadian Paediatric Society publishes a handout for parents titled "Electric scooters and bikes: Not safe for kids," which doesn't leave much room for interpretation.
Its recommendation is that children under 16 shouldn't use e-scooters or e-bikes at all, and shouldn't ride as passengers on them either.
The reasoning is plain enough. These aren't toys and weren't built for children. Kids under 16 generally don't have the strength, coordination or road experience to handle them, and the machines accelerate quickly and travel at 30 to 50 km/h, which takes real skill in traffic. The injuries showing up most often are head injuries, broken bones and cuts. The Society notes that children's hospitals across the country are seeing these injuries arrive both more frequently and more severely than they used to.
The guidance was last updated in October 2025 and reviewed by the CPS Injury Prevention Committee.
For the record, the rules in British Columbia: riders must be 16 or older, speed stays below 25 km/h, safety equipment is required, and sidewalks are off limits.
Why this belongs on a street design site
We're not going to claim that traffic calming barriers cause e-scooter injuries. Nobody has demonstrated that, and we're not about to be the ones who pretend otherwise.
What we will say is that these two conversations are happening in separate rooms, between people who aren't talking to each other, and residents are the ones standing in the hallway.
Cities are actively rebuilding streets around shared and protected space: narrower vehicle lanes, lanes intended for bicycles, diverted traffic, slower speeds by design. At the same time the number of motorized devices moving through those spaces is rising fast, a meaningful share of them ridden by people who aren't legally allowed to ride them, and the officer responsible for enforcement is on the record saying he expects to write a lot more tickets first.
So there are a few questions we'd like answered.
When the city modelled the new street configuration, what did it assume about who would be using the protected lanes? Bicycles at 15 or 20 km/h, or motorized devices at 30 to 50? Those produce very different collision maths.
How are e-mobility injuries being counted in local road safety numbers? If they're folded into a general cycling category, the picture council sees isn't the picture on the street.
What's the enforcement plan, who funds it, and what does success look like? A $109 ticket written because an officer happened to be driving past isn't a plan.
And where are parents supposed to go for straight guidance? Most of the families we've spoken to had no idea the legal age was 16 until they read about somebody getting fined.
None of that is an argument against safe streets. It's an argument for street design built around what's on the road now rather than what was on the road when the plan was drafted.
If you've seen a near miss on a redesigned stretch, if your family has dealt with an e-scooter injury, or if you've put one of those questions to the city and got an answer, we'd like to hear from you.
Join the community
Sources
- BC Highway Patrol news release, August 19, 2026, via CTV News Vancouver: [North Vancouver father fined for allowing underage son to operate e-scooter](https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/north-vancouver-father-fined-for-allowing-underage-son-to-operate-e-scooter/)
- North Shore News, June 11, 2026: [North Vancouver RCMP fine parents after 12-year-old injured in e-scooter crash](https://www.nsnews.com/local-news/north-vancouver-rcmp-fine-parents-after-12-year-old-injured-in-e-scooter-crash-12408800)
- Daily Hive, August 19, 2026: [Dad fined for letting 12-year-old ride e-scooter in North Vancouver](https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/north-vancouver-e-scooter-dad-fined)
- Canadian Paediatric Society: [Electric scooters and bikes: Not safe for kids](https://caringforkids.cps.ca/handouts/safety-and-injury-prevention/electric-scooters-and-bikes)
- Public Health Agency of Canada: [Characteristics of outdoor motorized scooter-related injuries](https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/reports-publications/health-promotion-chronic-disease-prevention-canada-research-policy-practice/vol-42-no-10-2022/characteristics-outdoor-motorized-scooter-injuries-analysis-data-electronic-canadian-hospital)
