NSW Police and Transport for NSW seized 36 e-bikes on the Northern Beaches on Friday night — the first joint operation since the state’s new seizure powers became enforceable on 21 August.

In the same council area sit three purpose-built mountain bike parks. For anything with a motor there is nothing outside private and club venues.

NSW Police and Transport for NSW seized 36 e-bikes across the Northern Beaches on Friday night. Sixteen penalty notices. Forty-six cautions for helmet and mobile phone offences. Three machines failed a roadside dynamometer test. Officers used drones to track riders and set checkpoints across Manly, Curl Curl, Dee Why, Warriewood and Avalon Beach.

At Warriewood, a bike allegedly capable of more than 90 km/h was taken off a 14-year-old. Elsewhere, a food delivery rider was found on a modified, non-compliant machine.

If you have spent the winter stepping out of the way of kids doing 50 on a footpath, you have been waiting for this. That frustration is legitimate and we are not going to talk around it. An unregistered, unroadworthy machine ridden through a shopping strip is not riding — it is a crash waiting for someone else to be standing in it. TerraVolt eMoto does not defend it.

But there is a question underneath the crackdown that nobody is asking, and it lands on every rider in the state who is doing the right thing.

Why are there so few government-supported venues for non-road-going e-bikes and eMotos to ride?

This is not an e-bike only law

The amendments to the Road Transport Act 2013, made by the Road Transport Amendment (Non-registrable Motor Vehicles) Bill 2026, let police and Transport authorised officers seize and destroy what NSW Police describe as “illegal, modified or high-powered e-bikes, other non-registerable motor vehicles, and unregistered registerable vehicles, used in public places.”

Transport Minister John Graham, announcing the laws in March: “If it behaves like a motorbike, it’s probably illegal and could end up in the crusher.” Roads Minister Jenny Aitchison was blunter. “This is a no second chances approach. If a bike is seized because it’s being ridden illegally, there is no way for the rider or their immediate family to get it back.”

Transport Secretary Josh Murray set the test on Friday: “E-bikes must behave like bicycles, not motorcycles. If your bike can operate like a motorcycle under throttle or go more than 25 kilometres an hour while being powered, it is not legal to ride in public.”

The law is technology- and fuel-neutral. It is not written around pedals. An unregistered dirt bike ridden in a public place is caught by it — electric or petrol, kid’s 65 or full-size enduro machine. That is what turns a commuter e-bike story into an off-road riding story.

The prohibition runs wider than the new powers. NSW lists mini bikes and monkey bikes among its prohibited vehicles — machines that cannot be registered or insured, and cannot be used “on a road or road-related area like a footpath, car park or park.” A small kids’ electric balance bike has no pedals so, as we understand it, could be caught up in this too. Private property, with the owner’s permission, would be the only place it can lawfully be ridden — and that includes the local park.

“There are currently no other areas in NSW”

NSW has no general recreational registration scheme for off-road motorcycles. Victoria and Western Australia have one. NSW does not.

The only conditional pathway is “recreation vehicle” registration, and Transport for NSW states its own limits aside from Stockton Beach: “There are currently no other areas in NSW available for use by vehicles with recreation registration. Motocross bikes and All Terrain Vehicles can obtain recreation vehicle registration for use on Stockton Beach within the recreation vehicle area only.”

One beach. About 175 kilometres from where those 36 bikes were seized — and it is funded by the riders themselves, at $88 a year for a Recreational Vehicle Area permit, rather than by the state.

Three MTB parks in one council area

Here is the part worth sitting with, because it does not need an Economics degree to see the disparity.

In the same local government area where those bikes were seized, on remediated landfill at Belrose, sits Bare Creek Bike Park. Six hectares. Nine downhill MTB tracks with return trails. A pump track, dirt jumps, a skills area, a 40-space car park, amenities with water, power and sewer. All of it for bicycles. It cost $3.5 million — $2 million to build, $1.5 million set aside to manage it — funded from an Enhancement Fund that put aside $2 for every tonne of waste that went into the site. It opened in 2020.

A few streets away on Wyatt Avenue, Northern Beaches Council built a second park: a junior and beginner bicycle trail loop, designed so that new and young riders can build confidence before moving up to Bare Creek. Council’s own construction team built it, in partnership with a local mountain bike advocacy group. And the Manly Dam Mountain Bike Trail, which Northern Beaches Council is currently upgrading with about $1 million in works, makes three.

These are great facilities for mountain-bikers and the contrast with e-bike and eMoto riders is stark. One council area found the land, the money and the will to build great facilities for one kind of wheeled recreation — while the other group gets a dynamometer and a crusher.

The state picture

The Northern Beaches is not an outlier. Transport for NSW says of its Get NSW Active program that “since 2011, over $720 million has been invested in more than 1160 projects.” This financial year, $60 million is available, with $10 million ring-fenced for Get Kids Active.

Mountain bike trail networks have drawn serious money on top of that: $12.3 million at Tenterfield, $8 million at Mogo, more than $4.5 million at Eden, $4.1 million at Narooma. And still cycling advocates argue the active transport program is itself underfunded: of 320 applications to the 2025/26 round, only 76 succeeded.

What the riders’ body says

The Motorcycle Council of NSW has argued for a Victorian-style scheme for more than a decade. Its position: “For the vast majority of motorcycles in urban areas, there is nowhere to ride legally,” and “relentless urban housing development in NSW has proceeded with no allocation of space for motorcycle riding.” Enforcement without somewhere to go, the Council says, becomes “a game of cat and mouse.”

The MCC estimates around 75,000 NSW residents regularly ride trail or adventure.

The public options are also shrinking for registered riders. In 2021 Forestry Corporation confirmed that Newnes State Forest, Wolgan State Forest and parts of Ben Bullen State Forest near Lithgow would be transferred to the Gardens of Stone Reserves, managed by National Parks and Wildlife Service. State forest roads carry trail bike access under Forestry Corporation’s rules. National park and conservation reserve tenure does not.

A 2013–14 parliamentary inquiry heard submissions urging a recreational registration scheme. It was not adopted. The 2024–25 inquiry that produced the powers used on Friday night was an inquiry into urban e-mobility — footpaths, speed limits, shared-scheme regulation, insurance. Legal riding space for off-road machines was never what it was looking at. The powers it produced reach a long way past the problem it examined.

Two sides of the argument

Many argue that petrol dirt bikes make noise that mountain bikes do not, and that genuinely constrains where a facility can sit near housing. Of course, this does not apply to eMoto. But perhaps the biggest driver of the policy imbalance to date has been the chase for an economic benefit. Mountain biking has built an economic evidence base that off-road motorcycling has not and cannot — Narooma’s trails alone drew more than 63,000 riders in their first year, with $69.5 million in visitor spend recorded across the area in 2024.

Public facilities are not built only where they turn a profit. Skate parks, netball courts and swimming pools are not tourism plays — they exist because somewhere safe to do the thing is worth having.

The Australian Electric Dirt Bike Community can’t compete on those numbers, but nor is it asking for the same level of funding. Surely it deserves more than zero. And enforcement itself comes at significant cost. The absence of legal provision is what produces the illegal, unsupervised riding in the first place — that provision is a safety measure, not a concession.

We looked for evidence of NSW Government investment in dedicated legal off-road motorcycle facilities and could find nothing significant.

Our view

Few would argue against some penalty for a 14-year-old riding a 90 km/h machine on a public street. Enforcement as part of a balanced strategy is not a problem.

The problem is that enforcement is the entire policy. Belrose has a beginner park so a young mountain biker can learn safely and progress. There is no equivalent first rung for anything with a motor — not in that council area, not in Sydney, not in the state.

Three things would change our assessment. A recreational registration scheme along Victorian or Western Australian lines. Even one funded, dedicated metropolitan off-road facility — just one. And seizure and penalty revenue ring-fenced to build new e-bike and eMoto riding areas rather than absorbed into consolidated revenue.

Until one of those exists, NSW is not managing off-road riding. It is prohibiting it.

Got a correction, or information on NSW off-road facility funding we have missed? Email us direct at editor@terravoltemoto.com.au.

Sources: Northern Beaches Advocate, “Northern Beaches e-bike blitz”; The Leader, “NSW Police: 90 km/h e-bike seized after new road laws”; NSW Government, “E-bike seizure and crushing powers to become law”; Transport for NSW, recreation vehicle registration and Get NSW Active; Forestry Corporation of NSW, “Trail bike riding in NSW State forests” and “Update on Newnes, Wolgan and Ben Bullen State Forests”; Property and Development NSW, “Bare Creek Bike Park”; Northern Beaches Council, “It’s official: Wyatt Avenue bike park now open”; Motorcycle Council of NSW; NSW Government, “Prohibited vehicles”; Legal Aid NSW, “E-bikes, e-scooters and e-skateboards”.