Bloomfield Township e-bike safety course

And out of this, an e-bike safety class, the first of its kind for Bloomfield Township, happening right now. The class is being hosted by the police department. Fox 2's Scott Wolchek joins us live from the class. And Scott, this is the same township where you had, you know, two young people who were hit and severely hurt on their e-bikes. Yeah, that was a very, very bad crash that happened on Telegraph at Hickory Ridge, gee, maybe a month or two ago. And that was a pretty rough one, but I have heard that those kids are out of the hospital and recovering. And we've done so many stories in many, many different communities, Rup, about e-bikes. That's why I've got the chief here with me. And they've got this class going on behind us through this window here. So you can kind of see what's going on. They've got that class, too, e-bike chief. This is the first of its kind, at least here in Metro Detroit. How big of a deal is this? It's a big deal for us, and we believe it's the first one in our southeast area, at least, that we know of. And this all comes in relation to the moratorium that the township put on to the e-bikes a while ago. Right, because that moratorium is basically, if you're under 16, you can't ride an e-bike on Bluefield Township property. But if you go through this class and you get your bike certified, make sure it's up to snuff. You can. Yeah, so they created a registration certificate that we're registering all these bikes for multiple reasons. One, if they're stolen, we're able to track it or at least have some kind of identifiers. But two, it's an identifier for our officers to know that if they see somebody under 16 years old riding an e-bike, that if the sticker's on the bike, that they've been through this course. What do you think is the biggest thing that parents need to take away from a class like this or just about e-bikes in general? You know, we've gotten so much positive feedback from doing this class. And, you know, obviously today's class is a little low, first one. But we're doing them. Again, we're doing one on the 14th and the 21st. But the feedback from our community has been great. They're excited because they don't necessarily know what they're buying either. But it's the new fad, and they're not going away. Right, yeah, because I was talking to your officer in there a little bit earlier today because I'm thinking, you know, holidays are around the corner. Kids are going to have these. And you don't know if you're buying Class 1, 2, 3, e-moto or what. You may not know. And they correctly will not know. And so we actually have, I think, some of the participants today don't have an e-bike yet. But they want one, and so their parents want them to go through the course. So if we can be proactive, in addition to already providing some kind of safety measures for the school-age kids who have them, then I think we're doing a service to our community. Very, very nice. And you know what? You saw a little bit of the footage there of Officer Murray out there riding on that e-bike. And that's a brand new e-bike, too. So very, very cool stuff going on here in Bloomfield Township. I think you're probably going to see this in other communities. I'm live here, Rup. I'm going to send it back to you. Yeah, and obviously this is important and it's great that they're doing this. But every township seems to have their own path in terms of how they want to roll with this. At some point, some state laws have to come into order to regulate this to make sure that no one else is hurt. I think so, Rup. And that's kind of what I've heard from everybody. Would you agree there's probably going to be some state legislation that happens for e-bikes just to get this stuff regulated? That's what we're hoping. We're hoping now that the elections are over. We were in an election cycle when all these, it seems like these clusters of accidents happened. So we're hoping the legislators, we feel like it'll be a priority for them. So we can only hope. We need their help. Yes. Let's hope it's a bipartisan issue. It kind of sounds like one. Scott, going right to the source on live TV. Scott Wolchek, good stuff. Thank you for that live report tonight.