PEDAL ASSIST
Your Monthly Boost
BY SUN AND FUN E-BIKES · ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA
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FROM THE FIRST COAST
Last month we told you Florida's e-bike bill was dead and that the pressure hadn't gone anywhere. It didn't take long to prove out. This month the rules that actually changed weren't written in Tallahassee — they were written at 75 King Street, four blocks from the Bridge of Lions. That's the pattern nationally now: the state stalls, and the city acts. So we lead where we live, then work outward. Our lead this month is sourced primarily to the city's own meeting record — the video archive of the commission is public, searchable, and quoted here directly. Everything else is checked against a primary source or the outlet that reported it first, with citations at the bottom so you can verify any of it yourself.
— The Editors, Pedal Assist
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THE LEAD · ST. AUGUSTINE
St. Augustine Capped Its Tour Industry. The Biggest Operators Were Never Part of the Conversation.
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When the St. Augustine City Commission gave final approval on July 13 to its rewritten vehicles-for-hire and franchise ordinances, most of the debate concerned two questions: how many small tour carts the historic district should allow, and how many pedicabs. Almost none of it concerned the largest operators on the street.5
The new code sorts sightseeing into tiers. Tier 1 — motor vehicles carrying 11 or more passengers — is capped at two franchises, and staff identified them by name in March as the existing two: Old Town Trolley Tours and the Red Train. Each may run up to 16 vehicles, under agreements lasting 20 years. Tier 2, the new category for tours of 11 passengers or fewer, is capped at 15 franchises of two vehicles each, on 10-year terms.3,5 The ordinances took effect July 23. The city is issuing warnings only through October 1, after which the new penalties apply, including impoundment for operating without a license or permit.1,2
Tier 1’s insurance requirement did not change. Tier 1’s franchise fees did not change. “We’ve set the insurance requirements that Tier One will stay the same,” the assistant city manager told commissioners at second reading.5 Tier 2’s moved the other way — cut from $1 million combined to $300,000 — after small operators told the commission in June that the higher figure exceeded anything required in Florida, the closest comparison being Miami at $500,000. One owner testified the proposal would cost him $20,000 to $25,000 a year against $40,000 in projected revenue.4,5
“I have no comments about Tier 1, which nobody, we haven’t even had discussions about Tier 1,” Commissioner Jim Springfield said. The mayor, taking her turn: “No changes there.”5
What did get discussed was everyone else. Ed Swift, part-owner and vice president of operations for Old Town Trolley, addressed the commission at both readings. In March he asked for a moratorium on new licenses. In July he asked the commission to cut Tier 2 operators from three vehicles to two and grandfather those already running three.3,5 Within the hour, commissioners amended the ordinance from the floor to do precisely that — two vehicles per franchise, with a grandfathered third for operators active and compliant at adoption. The same formula was applied to pedicabs, which staff had originally proposed capping at 20 operators running five cabs each, a ceiling of 100. The final number is 15 operators at two cabs, or 30.3,5
The grandfather question is settled, and the answer is the part worth reading twice. Existing operators may apply even if that carries the count past 15. But, staff told the commission, “no new franchises will be allowed until the number of franchises falls under the 15 maximum limit.”5 Sixteen businesses already qualified as of March.3 For anyone not already operating in July 2026, the guided-tour market in America’s oldest city is closed until someone leaves it.
One commissioner named the consequence plainly during the franchise debate: “If there’s less out there, the one you got is worth more value. You restrict the number, you’re going to have a little more value in your medallion.”5
If you just ride or rent here, very little changes today. These ordinances regulate paid passenger transportation and commercial sightseeing. Renting a bike and riding it yourself is not a vehicle for hire. What visitors will notice is downstream: a fixed number of operators eventually means fewer options at peak season, priced accordingly. If you operate anything paid inside the city limits, the adopted text had not yet appeared in the city’s online code as this issue went to press — request it from the City Clerk at 904-825-1007 rather than relying on any summary, including ours.
Our take: A cap is not a safety rule. It is a transfer of value. It takes something that used to be earned by serving customers better and converts it into a fixed asset held by whoever happened to be operating on the day the music stopped. Every capped for-hire market in America — New York, Boston, Chicago — learned the same lesson: the permit becomes worth more than the vehicle, incumbents grow rich holding paper, and the next generation of operators is told to wait for a vacancy.
St. Augustine ran an open process. Two years, a workshop, hours of public comment, and staff who plainly did the work. But openness is not the test. The test is what the rule does, and this rule does three things at once: it locks the two largest operators into 20-year agreements at unchanged cost, it cuts the fleet size of their smaller competitors at those competitors’ expense and at the largest operator’s public request, and it shuts the door behind everyone. Congestion in a street grid laid out in the 1500s is a real problem. But if congestion is the concern, this ordinance is aimed at the wrong end of it — 32 permitted Tier 1 vehicles are not fewer than 30 Tier 2 carts, and nobody at the dais discussed the larger number at all.
Disclosure: Sun And Fun E-Bikes rents e-bikes and offers self-guided rides in St. Augustine. We carry no passengers for hire. We hold no pedicab, carriage, trolley or sightseeing-vehicle permit, we did not speak at any of these hearings, and we take no position on who should hold the fifteen. We are writing about this because we work the same streets under the same commission, because we rent to visitors who might otherwise book a tour and therefore compete for the same customer, and because of a question raised in June that nobody answered.
That question was terminology. A commissioner who rides warned his colleagues they were using one word for two different businesses: a pedicab performing a cab function, and what he called a “peditour” — “a tour that’s being done by a bicycle.” Conflating them, he said, “is going to get us in trouble.” He noted the city’s own mobility plan encourages precisely these trips, and called the cap “kind of a backdoor way to get out.” The ordinance passed with the word undivided.4
In public comment that same evening, an operator urging the commission to address congestion “across the board” said the quiet part: “We got all these rentals that are everywhere.”4
No one has proposed regulating rentals. No draft exists, and we are not predicting one. But the reasoning that produced a fifteen-operator ceiling contains nothing that stops at tours, several commissioners said they want to revisit this in a year, and the category with no cap, no franchise and a lot of vehicles on the same twenty blocks is the obvious next place a commission looks. That category includes us. We’ll be in the room when they get to it.
Nine days before the ordinances took effect, the St. Augustine Amphitheatre — a St. Johns County facility operated by a separate nonprofit, over which the city has no authority — announced Old Town Trolley Tours as its official shuttle service provider.6 We note the sequence because it is a matter of public record. We draw no conclusion from it, and neither should you, absent documents that do not currently exist in public.
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THE LAW TRACKER · AROUND THE COUNTRY
One Deadline Landed, One Date Got Reported Wrong, One Vote Slipped Again
Our running record of e-bike law. Chip colors: magenta = law changed, orange = action needed now, gold = on watch.
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ON WATCH · WHY IT KEEPS STALLING
St. Augustine Beach: The E-Bike Ordinance That Can’t Find Its Footing
Ordinance 26-06, which would regulate electric mobility devices across the city, has now been through the St. Augustine Beach commission more than once and been sent back each time. The city attorney first presented proposed regulations in May; the commission asked for adjustments and a return trip. It came back in July and was pushed again.7,8 As this issue went to press, nothing had been adopted — which means nothing has changed for riders on the island.
The repeated do-overs aren’t indecision. They’re a state law the city has to legislate around. Florida statute bars a municipality or county with jurisdiction over a beach or dune from restricting or prohibiting e-bike operation there, and it exempts e-bikes from registration, licensing and insurance requirements.9 A beach town that wants fewer e-bike conflicts on the sand cannot simply ban them. What it can regulate is conduct — speed, reckless weaving, failure to yield — which is the narrower ground the attorney keeps redrafting onto. That is harder to write and harder to enforce than a flat restriction, and it is why this keeps taking another pass.
This is exactly the local scramble we told you the June state veto would set off: with no statewide rule, every First Coast town now writes its own, and the results diverge block by block. If you ride, rent, or work on bikes over the bridge, the commission meets at City Hall, 2200 A1A South, and public comment stays open — that room is where this one gets settled. We’ll report the outcome the moment the city posts it.
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LAW CHANGED · ENFORCED JULY 19
New Jersey: The Deadline We Flagged Last Month Has Landed — and It Bites
The grace period on S4834/A6235 closed July 19, and New Jersey is now, by several accounts, the most restrictive e-bike state in the Northeast.15 Operating an unregistered e-bike or riding without a valid license is prohibited, the Motor Vehicle Commission confirmed, and riding without a valid license, registration certificate or required insurance card carries a fine of up to $50 per violation.10,15 Riders must be at least 15, must wear a helmet, and must hold a driver's license or an e-bike license or permit. Every e-bike must be registered. Throttle-capable bikes need liability insurance; pedal-assist bikes that cut out at 20 mph must be registered but not insured. MVC fees are waived through January 2027.11,12,15
The rollout has been rough. The MVC didn't open registration appointments until late June, citing IT work, new testing procedures and the specialized stickers registered bikes must display.13 The out-of-state question has hardened in practice even though the statute hasn't moved: the law's text still exempts visitors who comply with their home state's rules, but the MVC's site now tells them to register, and coverage aimed at Pennsylvania riders headed to the Shore states flatly that they must register and insure certain e-bikes before riding.14,16 We told you last month nobody knew which reading would win. The answer emerging on the ground — whatever the statute says — is register anyway. If you're bringing your own bike to the Shore, the low-risk move is still renting locally and asking the shop what it has registered.
One detail will stop a St. Augustine reader cold: among the deaths driving this law was Chase Sudano, 16, killed in a collision with a delivery truck. He wrestled for St. Augustine Prep — the one in Richland, New Jersey, not ours.14 The name is a coincidence. The lesson isn't. The same class of crash that wrote New Jersey's law — a young rider, a big truck, a fast bike — is exactly what the ordinances now being drafted across Florida are reacting to.
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ON WATCH · CHECK THE DATE
Illinois: It Is Not July. It Is January 1, 2027.
Illinois' micromobility overhaul now rides on Senate Bill 3484, which absorbed the earlier SB 3336 and passed both chambers on June 1 — the House 84–16, the Senate concurring 48–7.17 Several Illinois newsrooms listed it among laws taking effect July 1, 2026. The enrolled bill sets the effective date at January 1, 2027.17 The substance is better news than the headlines suggested: it creates titling requirements for electric motor-driven cycles rated above 750 watts and up to 8,000 watts, and for gas bicycles capable of exceeding 28 mph, while explicitly excluding electric micromobility devices from titling, registration, licensing and liability-insurance requirements.17 It also lets park, forest preserve, conservation and transit districts set their own rules on their own property, and adds minimum ages of 15 for Class 1 and 2 and 16 for Class 3.17,18 If your bike is a normal Class 1, 2 or 3, Illinois is not coming for your paperwork.
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THE SERVICE BAY
A St. Johns County Garage Caught Fire Twice in Two Days. The Second Fire Is the Lesson.
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At about 2:15 a.m. on July 15, St. Johns County Fire Rescue was called to the 100 block of Killarney Avenue in the Beachwalk neighborhood. Crews found a working garage fire, searched the house, and knocked it down before it spread. No one was hurt. Investigators believe it started with an e-bike that was charging.19
The next afternoon the homeowner got a call from his wife: the house was on fire again. A battery left behind after the first fire had gone up.20 Fire Rescue's public information officer, Chris Naff, described the likely sequence as a charger that kept pushing current into a full pack until it heated into thermal runaway.20 Last month we told you heat ages lithium cells. Here is the sharper version: five things worth doing differently tonight.
1. Treat the charger as the prime suspect. Naff's department has repeatedly pointed at chargers — especially aftermarket replacements — as the component failing in the fires they respond to.21 A charger costs a fraction of a battery and almost nothing next to a garage. Buy the manufacturer's.
2. Unplug when it's full, and charge where you'll notice. Not overnight, not while you're out, not in the only path to the door.
3. A pack that has been through a fire, a hard drop, or a soaking is not "probably fine." Damaged cells hold stranded energy and can reignite hours or days later — which is why New York City crews rake through debris hunting individual cells before they clear a scene.22
4. Retire a suspect battery outside, away from anything that burns — not on a wooden bench, not against drywall, not in dry grass. Never in household trash or curbside recycling, where these packs start truck and transfer-station fires. Use a household hazardous waste program or a battery take-back drop-off.
5. If it's swelling, hissing, smoking, or too hot to touch, leave it. Get everyone out and call 911. Don't cover it, don't move it, don't puncture it. And put a working smoke alarm in the garage — it's the cheapest insurance in this entire newsletter.
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TREND BRIEF
Locks Are Finally Fighting Back Against the Angle Grinder
For most of a decade the honest answer to "which lock should I buy" was grim: a cordless angle grinder beats nearly every U-lock on the market in well under a minute, and thieves know it. The category has finally responded, and the shorthand to look for is Sold Secure Diamond — the top rating in the British testing scheme the industry benchmarks against.23 Kryptonite, which invented the U-lock, built its New York Diamond Standard around a multi-layered, diamond-coated shackle designed to resist battery-powered grinders, and aimed it squarely at e-bike owners and rental fleets.24 This spring Todson announced U.S. distribution of BLACK X's Titan range, led by a Sold Secure Diamond U-lock with app-based, key-free access.23,25 Why it matters: e-bikes are the most valuable thing most riders leave unattended in public, and the tool that defeats ordinary locks now costs less than the lock. Budget roughly ten percent of the bike's value for security, use two different lock types so a thief needs two tools, and photograph your bike and write down its serial number tonight — recovery without a serial is close to impossible, and that part is free.
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SOURCES & NOTES
1. City of St. Augustine, news release on adopted vehicles-for-hire and franchise ordinances, July 2026.
2. News4JAX/WJXT, "St. Augustine makes changes to rules for vehicles for hire, franchises, carriage horses," July 17, 2026.
3. City of St. Augustine, City Commission meeting of March 9, 2026 (first reading, Ordinances 2026-10 and 2026-11) — official video and transcript, city video archive.
4. City of St. Augustine, City Commission meeting of June 8, 2026 (first reading as revised) — official video and transcript.
5. City of St. Augustine, City Commission meeting of July 13, 2026 (second reading and adoption) — official video and transcript.
6. St. Augustine Amphitheatre / SJC Cultural Events, Inc., announcement naming Old Town Trolley Tours official shuttle service provider, July 2026.
7. City of St. Augustine Beach, "Regular Commission Meeting Highlights – July 13, 2026," July 14, 2026.
8. City of St. Augustine Beach, "Regular Commission Meeting Highlights – May 5, 2026."
9. The Florida Senate, Bill Analysis and Fiscal Impact Statement, SB 382 (2026), summarizing Florida law on local authority over electric bicycles, including the beach/dune restriction limitation and licensing/registration/insurance exemptions.
10. NJ.com, "Surprising N.J. e-bike rule could blindside tourists heading to the Jersey Shore this summer," July 17, 2026.
11. O'Toole Scrivo, LLC, client alert on S4834/A6235 compliance requirements, July 6, 2026.
12. NBC10 Philadelphia, "Questions remain as New Jersey e-bike law takes effect in July," June 2026.
13. The Philadelphia Inquirer, "New Jersey's new e-bike law is causing confusion down the Shore," June 21, 2026.
14. Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, "NJ E-Bike Registration and Enforcement is Here," July 16, 2026; The Philadelphia Inquirer coverage of the St. Augustine Prep rider, July 2026.
15. Ebike Oracle, "New Jersey E-Bike Laws 2026: License + Registration," accessed August 2026 (per-violation penalty, fee-waiver window, regional comparison).
16. South Philly Review, "Pennsylvania Riders Heading to the Shore Must Now Register E-Bikes in New Jersey," July 31, 2026.
17. Illinois General Assembly / LegiScan bill record, SB3484 (104th General Assembly): enrolled text, vote history, effective date.
18. Illinois Secretary of State, "Giannoulias Delivers Landmark Micromobility Safety Framework," June 4, 2026.
19. News4JAX/WJXT, "St. Johns County Fire Rescue urges caution after E-bike charging believed to spark home fire," July 15, 2026.
20. Action News Jax, "Man's house catches on fire two days in a row from e-bike battery," July 2026 (SJCFR PIO Chris Naff).
21. WOKV, "St. Johns County firefighters warn of an uptick in battery-related fires," November 2025.
22. NFPA Journal, "The Lithium-Ion Challenge," November 2024; U.S. Fire Administration lithium-ion battery guidance.
23. Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, "Black X to release Titan Smart Bike Lock range," March 19, 2026.
24. Kryptonite (Allegion), New York Diamond Standard U-Lock announcement, February 2025.
25. Todson, Inc., U.S. distribution announcement for BLACK X locks, March 11, 2026.
Quotations from commission meetings are transcribed from the City of St. Augustine’s official video archive and lightly cleaned for readability, without altering meaning. Local ordinances change faster than any newsletter. Where we cite a city rule, verify with the clerk before you rely on it.
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PEDAL ASSIST
Published monthly by Sun And Fun E-Bikes · St. Augustine, Florida
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