Pleasant Hill Vice Mayor Andrei Obolenskiy says the machines tearing down suburban bike paths at 40 mph aren't e-bikes at all — and he wants the state to make the companies selling them say so.

Obolenskiy has thrown his support behind Senate Bill 1167, a Blakespear-authored measure that would bar manufacturers and retailers from marketing high-powered electric motorcycles as e-bikes and treat mislabeling as false advertising. The bill reframes a debate that cities have mostly waged against teenage riders as a question of who put the machine on the sales floor in the first place — and it is now one Assembly floor vote away from becoming law.

Pleasant Hill's vice mayor has a personal stake in the e-bike debate: his own teenage son, he told NBC Bay Area, came off one of the heavier machines in a minor crash. That experience is part of why Andrei Obolenskiy is backing a state bill that shifts the enforcement target away from young riders and onto the businesses that sell the bikes.

"This puts the onus on the manufacturers," Obolenskiy told the station. He wants the state to draw bright lines between the e-bike classes so families can tell at a glance which models are actually built for a teenager — and he'd like standardized braking requirements added on top, arguing the heavier bikes take longer to stop.

The bill he's supporting, Senate Bill 1167 (external source, opens in a new tab), comes from Sen. Catherine Blakespear, an Encinitas Democrat. It attacks a labeling problem that has quietly reshaped bike lanes across the Bay Area. Under existing California law, an electric bicycle tops out at 750 watts and is capped at 20 mph on throttle or 28 mph with pedal assist. A wave of imported machines — Sur Ron, Talaria and similar brands — can hit 40 to 50 mph and are, functionally, light off-road motorcycles. Sold online and in shops as "e-bikes," they land in the hands of riders too young to hold a driver's license and on infrastructure never built for motorcycle speeds.

This puts the onus on the manufacturers," Obolenskiy told the station.

SB 1167 would make it a violation of the state's false-advertising laws to market, sell or label those vehicles as e-bikes, and would require sellers to disclose that a motor-driven cycle is subject to registration, licensing, helmet and insurance rules. Amended versions add frame labels identifying an e-bike's class and top speed, and direct law enforcement to record that label information in incident reports.

The measure has drawn an unusually broad coalition. It is co-sponsored (external source, opens in a new tab) by CalBike, PeopleForBikes, Streets For All and Streets Are For Everyone — advocacy groups that normally spend their energy expanding bike access, not restricting it. "SB 1167 brings clarity to the e-bike marketplace, so consumers know if they are buying an e-bike or something else that goes much faster," Blakespear said in a statement posted by her office.

That framing — protect the category by policing the mislabelers — is what has let the bill move without the usual friction. According to the Legislature's own bill history (external source, opens in a new tab), it passed the Senate on a bipartisan 37-0 vote on May 26, cleared the Assembly Transportation Committee 15-0 on June 30, and survived the Assembly Appropriations suspense file. As of Aug. 13, the record shows it had been read a second time and ordered to third reading — the last procedural step before a floor vote by the full Assembly.

For local officials like Obolenskiy, the appeal is that it does something cities can't do alone. Municipalities can ticket a rider or fence off a trail, but they can't rewrite what a manufacturer stamps on a frame. A statewide false-advertising hook does. If the bill becomes law, the burden of proof over what counts as an e-bike would sit, for the first time, with the company that built the machine.