Q: The law requires registration and license plates “to operate any vehicle on a public highway.” Does this mean that electric bicycles need to be licensed in Washington State? Also, in the quote above I note the word “highway”. Does that include city streets and county roads?
A: Here’s a paradox. A bicycle is both a vehicle and not a vehicle. According to the principles of classical physics, an object cannot be both a specific thing and not that thing at the same time. But this isn’t physics, it’s quantum mechanics. No, wait, it’s traffic law.
The law defines a vehicle as “a device capable of being moved upon a public highway and in, upon, or by which any persons or property is or may be transported or drawn upon a public highway.” You might be thinking that’s awfully broad. By that definition a pogo stick qualifies as a vehicle. Fortunately, the law continues, listing all the exclusions to that definition.
To start with, anything besides a bicycle that’s human-human powered is not a vehicle. (For the curious, traveling by pogo stick makes you a pedestrian.) A bicycle, though, is a vehicle, at least most of the time. Anyone riding a bike on the road has the same rights and duties as a driver, except when the law has no application to a bike. However, there are a few situations where the law states that a bicycle is not a vehicle, and that includes for the purpose of vehicle registration.
But you asked about electric bikes, specifically. The definition of a bicycle in Washington law includes electric bikes, as long as they conform to limits on power (no more than 750 watts) and top speed. Washington sorts electric-assisted bicycles into three classes. Class one and two have a top speed of 20 mph, and class three is limited to 28 mph.
As long as an e-bike fits within those limits, there are no registration requirements for it and no license requirements for the rider. If it exceeds those limits, it’s no longer a bicycle; it’s a motorcycle (or motor-driven cycle if it’s under five horsepower). To ride it on the road it would need to meet all the safety and equipment requirements for a street-legal motorcycle.
Regarding highways: When you hear Tom Cochrane sing “Life is a highway, I wanna ride it all night long,” or when Steppenwolf belts out “Get your motor running, head out on the highway,” no one is imagining a 25-mph neighborhood street. (But after those two song references you’re probably imagining that I’m old.) In the common vernacular, highways have higher speed limits, fewer intersections, and connect cities and towns that are miles apart, while roadways are slower and local. In traffic law though, it’s much broader. A highway is “the entire width between the boundary lines” of every public road.
So why don’t we just call it a roadway? Well, roadway has its own definition. A roadway is the part of the highway that you drive on. The highway is the pavement, the bike lane, the sidewalk, the shoulders, and anything else between the edges of the right-of-way. The roadway is only the area designated for vehicular travel.
(Side note: Just to make things confusing, I’ll mention that the chapter of law on snowmobiles has its own definitions for roadway and highway that are more like our common understanding.)
Applying the traffic law definition of highway to your question about vehicle registration, you couldn’t legally drive an unlicensed over-powered electric bike on the shoulder of the road, as that’s part of the highway.