NYT gift article expires in 30 days.
We built a country with almost no public transportation, made it extremely car oriented, have actively pushed against bike lanes, and now parents are wondering why e-bikes aren’t very safe. They’re not even the best alternative, it’s just in this weird car-centric society we built they’re the only alternative.
I got hit from behind by a pickup truck on a bike road last September. These oversized emotional support vehicles are the first that need to go.
Oh shit! Are you ok man?
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I’m sorry for you. That’s a really messed up and aggravating story. I was cursing whilst reading it.
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That is one hell of a story! It just burns me that one second of dumbfuckery by a dude with no idea of the responsibility that comes with driving a large vehicle created this life-altering saga for you.
Also this is a bit weird, but my ankle is super problematic.
Keep bitching about this to the doctors or get a second opinion. Maybe they’ll send you for an x-ray or some physio? You have to be your own advocate with this sort of thing. And as they say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
If I can ride a bicycle one day, even just for a short ride.
Last time I was at the ebike dealer, they had a bunch of these 3-wheeler cargo models and I saw several people take off on them. I asked the owner about them. He said he rides one himself in the winter since they are much more stable over snow and ice, and the extra storage in the back between the 2 wheels is handy. He also said the last 2 he sold were to people with mobility issues. One was a husband with some sort of condition that kept him house-bound a lot of the time until his wife figured out he could do this and now they ride everywhere. The other was a 91-year-old cyclist who was saying his balance was not what it once was. I kid you not! Anyway, something to consider.
I’m working on a YouTube video that will recount the story.
Please drop a link here if you do this. I would love to see this.
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oversized emotional support vehicles
perfect
20-mile-per-hour speed limit permitted for riders under 16
So, unmodified, slower than a bicycle where your average cyclist can sprint to over 30 mph without much trouble.
This is just media fear mongering about [new thing]. When I was a kid there were plenty of bicycle wrecks where kids got hurt, sometimes severely, and the media wasn’t pearl-clutching about the “danger” of pedal bikes.
It’s much more difficult to reach and sustain 30 mph on a pedal bike, and if you’re doing that you’re typically quite invested in it. E-bikes on the other hand it’s really easy to get to a very high speed, and I frequently see people doing it while on their phone, without wearing a helmet, and/or with additional passengers.
I think a little bit of education here could go a long way.
I couldn’t agree more. Impact danger roughly scales like velocity^2, so a 30mph crash is about twice as bad as a 21mph one, all else being equal. The easier it is to get up to and maintain 28mph or more, the more likely it is that people will get in dangerous crashes.
Then the worried parents should either properly educate their children about their safety behaviour, not whine about it.
Solutions to systemic problems that rely on personal responsibility tend to have very low efficacy.
I was more focused on the “without helmet, looking at phone” part. As a parent, it should be no surprise for them if their children end up with permanent brain damage if neglecting security completely.
The parent in the article had no idea their child was riding without a helmet, and there is no reason to believe they did not teach their child to ride with a helmet.
If the goal is to actually reduce harm, infrastructure changes will have a far larger impact than education/information campaigns to convince kids and parents to be safer. This has been shown many times over by the NHTSA and the WHO.
Interactions with cars make for many more conflict opportunities during rides. Shared paths with pedestrians in high traffic areas do the same, but with much lower consequences. Dockless electric bike/scooter companies encourage adhoc rides which drastically reduce the chance that a given rider will have proper safety gear, and increases the likelihood of riding under the influence of drugs/alcohol. Having to deal with lots of intersections with stop lights/signs further increases conflict opportunities.
Separate, protected, and streamlined infrastructure for micromobility will go much further to protect people.
I mean this is easy to say about everything. If people are annoyed at car accidents, they should teach their children to drive cars better rather than whine about it!
At some point we do decide it’s society’s collective responsibility to ensure that something is safe, understanding that maybe not all parents will rise to the level of quality we expect. I think we’re there for ebikes.
I was more focused on the “without helmet, looking at phone” part. As a parent, it should be no surprise for them if their children end up with permanent brain damage if neglecting security completely.
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your average cyclist can sprint to over 30 mph without much trouble.
I don’t believe that. That’s 50kph!! Your average cyclist will be pedaling 12 to 15 mph (20 to 25 kph) and at that point you’ll be sweating, it’s not “leisure” speed. That would be up to 9mph/15kph.
You are not reaching 30mph unless you are fully sprinting on a descent with a gravel bike (maybe a mountain bike if it’s a long, long, stretch) or have a road bicycle on a flat/slight slope and you are full sending it (even on a flat road I’m assuming, I’ve never ridden one). Not to mention these people will be using protective gear.
I have a gravel bicycle and on a flat road I can get up to 23mph (37 kph) with me going full beans (occasionally fighting the wind). For reference, I’ve only reached 30mph a couple times in 1,100km and it’s been only on a 3km long downward stretch of road. Also because there’s no point to waste that energy when you are transversing double digits distances, and it gets really scary to be at those speeds anyways.
You certainly cannot get those speeds on a city bike or mountain bike on flat asphalt since they are not as aerodynamic, and often more heavier.
I do agree with most of your post, and the whole your average cyclist doing “30 mph without much trouble” is ridiculous. I do think you are underestimating how fast road bikes can be though.
You are not reaching 30mph unless you are fully sprinting on a descent with a gravel bike (maybe a mountain bike if it’s a long, long, stretch) or have a road bicycle on a flat/slight slope and you are full sending it (even on a flat road I’m assuming, I’ve never ridden one). Not to mention these people will be using protective gear
So, on a road bike, it is pretty easy on the flat to keep 20mph/32kmh. 30mph/48kmh is definitely an effort and not one that is sustainable for most people. To give you an idea, I did a charity bike ride in June which was just shy of 100 miles, it was 158.3km with 1667m of climbing as well, so not completely flat. I averaged 31.2kmh. I am in no way fast, I am alright on the flat but gravity is a cruel mistress on an uphill.
Downhill is a different thing as well, I have hit speeds of around 62mph/100kmh, and a hill near me will almost always spit me out doing 55mph/89kmh with 0 effort(roll down the hill and sit on the drops), and that is on both my road and gravel bikes. But that is probably steeper than you are thinking. However, there is also a pretty steady -1% average “downhill”, it is a false flat, but it is really easy to cruise along at 25mph/40kph+.
The key difference is you’re an experienced cyclist. You’re capable of recognising that it’s safe to go 60mph down that particular hill and if it wasn’t you’d be on the brakes. Also you probably know how hard you can pull that front brake lever without going over the handle bars.
Inexperienced cyclists and high speeds are a really bad combination.
Most parents wouldn’t let their teenager ride YZF-R1, and they shouldn’t be letting them ride a high powered eBike either.
I think my biggest issue with this thread is the bikes they are referring too are actually Electric Motorbikes(and should be treated like any other motorbike), not an “ebike” in the typical sense of Pedal Assist Bicycle.
My eFatbike is limited to 25kph/15mph after which it stops assisting. Sometimes when pedaling back home from the trails on the side of the road I meet road bikers and it takes quite a while for them to catch me and even after overtaking I’m following them for a looong time before they get out of sight. You’d think a roadbike would be much faster but it’s the uphills where ebikes shine and it makes a huge difference. On flat or downhill they smoke me tho. No competition there.
Pretty crazy that you can reach 100kph downhill. My tops with the fatbike is about 63kph. That’s on gravel though.
Yeah, I don’t doubt it, I was just trying to be (overly) conservative to show how pedaling up to and keeping 50kph is far from being reachable by the average cyclist.
Not only because of the bike, but you also need a well maintained strech of asphalt to reach and maintain that speed.
In my head I thought I can easily get to 60kph with the sprint output I do with my gravel bike if I had a carbon road bike, but I didn’t want to say something silly. Especially because I’d still be dealig with the same terrible infrastructure and wind around here.
The other point was that once you get in the 40kphs it starts to get scary, but that’s down to where you are and the conditions. So it’s not like the average bro with flipflops and front basket does it on the daily.
My town has public E-bikes with assisted pedalling up to 20/kph. I used to have a normal bike and I ususally went way faster than that, at least 30kph or 35kph, This damn bike’s motor stops working when I reach 20, and if I want to go above 20 I need to pedal with full power on a heavy bike. It’s okayish but damn if that’s not annoying.
It is an absurd statement to argue that the average cyclist on the average bike can sprint to over 30mph “without much trouble.” Maybe with a tailwind going downhill, and even that is, ahem, dangerous.
I hit 20 downhill and that’s already really uncomfortably fast. Pulling hard on my brakes that would take a good 5 seconds to come to a stop (Power modulator Roller Brakes)
Going 30 is asking for trouble, even with good disc brakes I think. At that speed full body motorcycle kit could be something worth considering
Edit: fix typo
Okay, so there is actually a valid reason why children on e-bikes should be limited to a 20mph speed limit: children do genuinely have difficulty with the visual processing of objects moving faster than 20mph. If a kid is on an e-bike going at 30mph (a speed most children can’t do on a regular bike for any serious length of time), they’re likely to have some difficulties perceiving the world around them because of the relative difference in speed between the bike and everything else. Add into that the fact that the danger of a collision increases massively as speed increases, a kid going at 30mph on an e-bike is literally an accident waiting to happen, either to themselves or one of their peers on foot (who won’t be able to see or hear them coming).
That’s primary school children. Not teens.
Visual perception and processing develops over time, and people don’t reach adult development until… adulthood. The brain doesn’t stop developing until 25. A lot of the teens on e-bikes are 13 and 14, children that are only a couple of years outside of primary school, and certainly nowhere near physically adult enough to have adult visual processing or adult perception of danger or adult impulse control. All very good reasons why they shouldn’t be whizzing about on e-bikes at 30mph.
I’m not against e-bikes in general. I think those who can ride should do so more, with infrastructure built around it. I just don’t think children should be on fast ones.
Your welcome to your opinions. I’m just pointing out a study of primary school children is irrelevant to this particular thread. If you have studies on teens, I’d love to read them.
Primary school age runs to age 11/12 (depending on exact birthdate - someone born on 1st September will be 12 when they enter secondary school). A 13 year old is not significantly more developmentally mature than a 12 year old, particularly in the context of how development of the brain continues until 25. Teens are more prone to risky behaviour, due to poor impulse control and poor perception of how dangerous a given activity may be, which is as much of a problem on an e-bike at 30mph as it is with drugs, alcohol, sex, and a wide range of other risky behaviours teens indulge in because they can’t objectively judge what the risks actually are. The younger the teen, the higher the risk because of the lower neurological development.
#1 killer of teens is dangerous driving most often influenced by peer pressure. Removing the peers by putting them ona bike would reduce the teen mortality rate by far more than the mortality rate of teens on bikes going over 30mph. See, stats can be used in many ways. Not always supportive of your opinion. Which is why it is important to choose a source that specifically relates to the topic. If you don’t want it pointed out that your source is irrelevant to the discussion.
13 and 14 year olds shouldn’t be driving cars in the first place, and they’re also the ones most likely to make bad decisions about riding e-bikes without speed limiters.
The media is afraid they’ll have to concede any amount of space, attention, or time to anything that isn’t an automobile.
average cyclist can sprint to over 30 mph
I’m on the fitter end of average cyclists and I certainly can’t reach 30 mph without a gradient or massive tailwind. In normal conditions an average cyclist can reach 20 mph under quite a lot of effort, not much more.
In the EU, ebikes are limited to 16 mph and I think that’s plenty to cause lots of accidents with elderlies not being used to such speeds. 20 mph e-support limit is quite fast, but it’s still fine I guess.
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As someone who grew up around doctors and knew a brain surgeon, I can say with 100% confidence that everybody who rides a bike should wear a helmet. I feel like the average person has very little idea of how fragile we are, how easy it can be to get a traumatic brain injury, and how much of a nightmare your life can become. (This applies even more if you need to ride on the street or if you plan to ride at high speeds.)
I agree and always wear a helmet, but helmets should not be mandatory. It discourages people from cycling which means they drive instead and make the roads overall more dangerous.
I’m sure people said exactly the same thing when seatbelts became mandatory in cars. “Oh, no, you can’t make safety mandatory. It’ll just discourage people from driving.” Safety measures become normalised very quickly.
Discouraging people from driving is a good thing, although with the amount that’s wasted on pointless expressways some governments haven’t noticed yet.
Anyway, there’s clear evidence from countries with mandatory helmet laws that it discourages people from cycling.
But back when seatbelts became mandatory (which was in the 1980s in the UK, IIRC), cars weren’t seen as a bad thing. They were seen as a good thing, as bikes are now, yet no doubt there were still people complaining that mandatory seatbelts would discourage people from utilising the Good Thing.
Have there been any long-term studies into mandatory helmet laws? Or did they just look at the 3-6 months after the introduction of the laws, when people were still getting used to the change? What was the effect after helmet-wearing became normalised in that country’s society?
I suppose the other solution is to not have mandatory helmets, and natural selection will do its thing. I tend to prefer not having a load of unnecessary deaths, however.
Sure. Australia has had mandatory helmets since 1990, and there’s been endless studies and debates since then, it’s still ongoing. I could find no clear evidence that helmet mandates decreased overall harm over any timeframe.
To quote a review I read from 2007
The following general principles should have widespread support: (1) Any legislation (including helmet laws) should not be enacted unless the benefits can be shown to exceed the costs. Ideally, the benefits should be greater than from equivalent ways of spending similar amounts of money on other road safety initiatives.
And their conclusion did not find a consensus other than
A majority of brain injuries >AIS2 are caused by bike/motor vehicle collisions. Traffic calming, enforcement of drink-driving laws, cyclist and driver education, or other measures to reduce the frequency and severity of bike/motor vehicle collisions, may therefore represent more cost-effective ways of reducing serious head injuries to cyclists than helmet laws. Indeed, countries with the lowest fatality rates per cycle-km also have the lowest helmet wearing rates
Given that, helmet mandates are a bad law that takes away our liberties for no proven benefit.
I disagree. My eFatbike has 250W mid-drive motor and is limited to 15mph and thus is considered a bicycle by law. You can drive faster than that but it stops assisting you at 15mph. In my opinion anything faster than that doesn’t belong to the sidewalks and since you’re now driving in traffic you should be registered and insured.
I quite often see people zooming past pedestrians on sidewalks with their surrons and modified ebikes and these assholes are what’s going to ruin the fun for everyone else too. These are not bicycles - they’re light electric motorbikes.
your average cyclist can sprint to over 30 mph without much trouble
Sprint yeah but unlike ebikes they can’t maintain that speed. I can basically keep up with roadbikers despite my ridicilously fat 4.8" mushy tires. They gain distance on flat and downhill and I catch them in uphill.
15 mph = 24 km/h. Going that fast on a sidewalk seems wild to me (the only bicyles there are children accompanied by their parents on foot), but I guess it’s because we have reasonable bicycle infrastructure instead of stroads where you need a deathwish to cycle
30mph on a pedal bicycle is very very difficult to reach and maintain. Even on a road bike designed to go fast on pavement, breaking 20mph on a flat road requires you to be extremely fit and streamlined.
I don’t think this is in any way comparable to an ebike where anyone can jump on and break 20 with no issues.
Source: bicycle was my primary mode of transport for 5 years; rode about 20 miles a day, with an attached speedometer, on a fancy road bike.
Can I have some of whatever supplements you’ve been taking. 48km/h is really fast. If you have a fast bike and you’re trying hard some cyclists could hit that speed briefly on the flat before they become exhausted. With a tailwind or a downhill it’s easy, but then you don’t need the help from the motor.
But I agree that we need to focus on the real danger, which is cars.
I’m not a fan of healthy young people using e-bikes but the speed argument is in bad faith. To hit 20mph for more than a short moment you have to be a fit, experienced rider unless you have a fancy race bike which is tricky to ride and will massively limit where you can ride, the comfort and safety for anyone who doesn’t basically live on their bike.
I’m not a fan of healthy young people using e-bikes
Why?
Cycling as transportation rather than fitness does require a compromise. A swimming athlete might be able to swim in open waters, but a lifeguard isn’t gonna let you leave the boundaries. However yea this is absolutely fear mongering bs and you are right.
And while 70mph seems excessive by any standard, you can easily achieve 40mph with a normal bike downhill and injure/maim/kill yourself.
As mentioned in other comments, the 70mph figure is wrong. My best guess is the parent misspoke and the journalist didn’t fact check, but the real figure is 70km/h or 45 mph.
“As teens take to cars, parents ask: Is this freedom or danger?”
“As teens wear shoes and leave the house, parents ask: is this freedom or danger?”
“As teens start doing homework, parents ask: is this freedom or danger?”
As teens take to sidewalks…
As teens take to malls…
As teens take to wilderness trails…
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, we live in a society that threatens to take kids away from their parents for letting them walk to the post office.
Danger, clearly. We shouldn’t have encouraged them off the ebikes.
It’s worth noting that the top picture in the article is of a kid on a $4400 Sur-ron X, which is strictly not road legal and is capable of up to 45mph and can accelerate to 30mph in 3.5 seconds.
Anything over a class 2 should be licensed and require insurance. In the US if you are traveling faster than 12mph you are required to follow traffic laws. Some states even require vehicle insurance if there is an incident above 12mph.
99% of the danger on roads is caused by motor vehicles. Once we’ve solved that problem we can have a conversation about whether licensing improves e-bike safety. But until that day, creating barriers to car alternatives directly makes people less safe. If you prevent teenage hooligans from biking, they will drive instead and will be an actual danger to people instead of this imagined one.
You think teenagers care about insurance? Even if they did, they certainly can’t buy any.
I’m pretty sure the teens my neighbourhood that go as fast as they can at night on the wrong side of the road around blind corners with their lights turned off are uninsured. I love my eBike. Not a fan of how I see other people riding them every day though (and not just kids).
States have no licensing/registration infrastructure for bicycles. And any changes must happen state by state (c.f. the chaos that is motorcycle registration).
People on bikes and scooters here just blow through red lights without even looking. Sometimes I won’t even hear the scooters running the reds when I’m on foot because they are so quiet.
People I know have unfortunately died or become vegetables from non-traffic related crashes on bikes and escooters without helmets. :/
I love mountain biking, but I’m super anal retentive about always wearing protective gear, and I never ride with traffic because it’s so dangerous. I feel similarly uneasy about heavy and fast ebikes and emtbs.
And thats without cutting the wire that unlocks it to 45+ mph and without modding it
I think you and the article have this wrong. 45mph is with the speed governor removed. The article doesn’t make it clear whether the parent misspoke and the reporter didn’t fact check or that the reporter just mistyped, but you can’t get anywhere close to 70 mph with a 6kW peak motor. There are people who have modded the hell out of these and poured thousands more dollars into them to get those kinds of speeds, but that’s not possible with a stock bike.
I looked it up… it’s 70kph, not mph. Comes out to be about 45mph.
Thx!
Thx! Sorry I meant 70 kph.
I was going to say, when I was a kid, growing up in the 70s, I had a dirt bike with a spedometer and I regularly pushed that thing to 25mph just with the pedals.
My first thought was “faster than 20? No big deal…”
But then I hit this:
“in fact, the Talaria can hit 70 miles per hour. His mother gave him her blessing, she said, and even helped him clip a wire that removes the speed “governor” that ordinarily limits the vehicle to 20 miles per hour.”
Having an eBike that can go that fast with relatively no modification at all does not seem wise to me, and it’s irresponsible of the parent to assist in that.
1 year after graduation, one of my high school friends got into an argument with his girlfriend, was riding his motorcycle too fast without a helmet, and crashed straight into the back of a garbage truck, killing him instantly.
A bike helmet wouldn’t have helped, maybe a DOT approved motorcycle helmet would have.
Edit I looked up the mod, it brings the bike to 70Kph, not mph. So about 45. Still faster than I’d want my kid going.
FWIW, I used to have an ebike that went up to 70, as an adult, that I used to commute to work and do shopping. New regulations came in restricting all new ebikes to 25 km/h, and now a shopping run takes an hour one-way.
How long did it take before?
I never actually timed it but I can work it out. Back of the hand maths says 25 is a third of 70, roughly, so the journey used to take a third of the time, twenty minutes.
I think the pros outweigh the cons? Anything that steers us away from car culture is desperately needed at this point, and this is one of the only practical alternatives in suburbia.
I would be for bike safety being taught at schools, though I feel licensing for minors would be a quagmire? Let’s not go there. I would be for speed limiters that are harder to bypass. For example, I can disable mine by phone app. If I had any trouble I could ask, well, a teenager? lol
But perhaps most importantly, cycling infrastructure, at least in North America, is a joke and there is so much that can be done on the safety front it’s not funny. I wish the decision makers were all bike commuters. Then they would understand the level of impracticality in their well-meaning but futile attempts to improve the situation.
This basically sounds like the regulation in Germany. Bike safety is being taught at schools, and there is a discrete distinction between e-bikes and Pedelecs. Pedelecs, which only support while pedalling, are legally bicycles with a speed limit of 25 km/h (15 mp/h). Everything above this limit or with the capability to drive without pedalling are called E-Bikes and need insurance and some sort of license.
There is a lot NA could learn from Germany and, well, Europe in general. I’m in Canada and read an article recently about how some Scandinavian communities keep their bike trails serviceable all winter long. I wish! They pack down the snow kind of like a cross-country ski trail here but over a broader width.
Since North America is poorly designed, it isn’t a good thing. If North America was better designed then biking and walking would be safer. #NotJustBikes
Even better is that you wouldn’t need an e-bike either, as frankly the high speed ones are incredibly dangerous especially when there’s good infrastructure for bicycling.
Sure, they’re incredibly dangerous. But they’re still way less dangerous than cars. I’d rather be complaining about ebikes injuring people than the countless deaths caused by motor vehicles.
Ebikes will need some regulation to limit speeds, of course.
I’m lucky to live in a country where e-bikes and electric scooters and such are a bigger talking point than cars.
At that point, wouldn’t they be in the road with cars barreling down like they are on a crochrocket?
Bike roads are pretty safe so better than metal coffins going 130km/h… ohh right this is america there arent any bike paths.
Very true.
However I wouldn’t want to share a bike path with individuals riding carelessly at 40kmh/30mph. At least here where there is some semblance of ‘bike culture’, unrestricteds do ride slowly on paths and walkable areas, and usually only let it rip in the road.
Teens might not necessarily abide by that, or understand the risks. They tend to prefer escooters here anyway, and those top out at a much slower 20kmh/15mph… could be worse I guess 🤷♂️
I think electric scooters are a curse for everyone. They dont wear protection and a lot of them are reckless.
Parents said the same things about rollerblades, skateboards, and regular bikes.
The difference here is we already have motor vehicles, and already have 2 wheeled motor vehicles, they’re called motorcycles and they’re highly regulated and require a special license. Just because the motor is electric doesn’t make it not a motor vehicle.
There was literally a mother in the article that helped her son remove the speed governor on the bike and allowed it to go 70mph and even admitted that she thinks these companies make them easy to remove for better sales and no liability. She said she got him the bike when he was 14.
Rollerblades, skateboards, and bikes only go so fast. Even at the regulated limit of 20 mph that is a speed kids are not hitting on their own. Have you ever tried to ride your bicycle at a sign that detects your speed? It is REALLY hard to hit 20mph let alone sustain that speed. And that’s the speed these kids are going all the time if they haven’t messed with the bike to make it go even faster. There needs to be better regulation with these.
20 mph (32 km/h) on a regular bike is doable, but yeah, usually that involves a very “flat” road or even a road that has a slight decline. And as you’ve said, maintaining it (e.g. for more than 10 seconds) is a whole different story.
Furthermore, it also requires a certain fitness level and “bodily involvement”. The thing that still catches me off guard at times is how relaxed some people on ebikes look while going that fast. Whatever kind of judgement I could make in the past on how fast someone is approaching based on how much they “visually excert themselves” (e.g. hunching forward or even standing up) kind of has become meaningless with ebikes.
The most hilarious example is that 80s video about snowboards… ah, here it is:
E-bikes are great. I’ve got one I built from a kit. That said, you don’t want kids riding more powerful e-bikes than they can handle. If you wouldn’t let your kid loose with a gas-powered dirt bike that can go 30+ mph, you shouldn’t let them loose with an equivalent e-bike.
I’m against licensing e-bikes or requiring insurance. While they can potentially be dangerous to the rider if misused, danger to other people or property is pretty minimal. The risk isn’t enough to justify requiring liability insurance, like with cars. Licensing will only discourage ridership.
That said, there should be an age requirement for certain classes. In lieu of that, parents are just going to have to exercise common sense. The kids will do what they want, rules be damned.
I love e-bikes but also think that many of those are motorbikes in disguise. a 250w motor is enough for most people (excluding cargo bikes, of course). I totally agree with you with the rest of points. In general measures that harms adoption of bicycling are a bad idea
I’ve got a 1000w motor on mine. Is it a motor bike in disguise? Yeah, maybe, since it has a throttle control. Where I live, though, there’s no regulations specific to ebikes. I obey traffic laws and stay off of sidewalks and have a drivers license, so as far as I’m concerned it’s fine. It does go about 25-30 mph, but in my mind it’s a commuter vehicle. I’m not riding on bike trails that share pedestrians and have low speed limits.
If necessary, I could modify it to make it a class three e-bike. The governor, currently off, cuts it to 750w and I could change it from a throttle control to a pedal assist with parts that were part of the kit but are still sitting in the box.
It’s in a legal gray area, as my state’s definition of what constitutes a “motorized bicycle” was written with gasoline engines in mind. There’s lots of unlicensed, uninsured 49cc scooters running around that fall into the same gray area, so it fits right in.
No they don’t
No they don’t what?
I swear these technology subs really are anti-technology, it’s all old-man-yells-at-cloud whining and complaining. What a joke.
Who’s complaining in here?
Parents!
They’re the worst.
Please kindly point to the whining and complaining.
This article is obviously from an American perspective, in which case e-bikes are probably a necessary evil to give kids more freedom. But from the Dutch perspective I’m certainly a bit scared about them. I see more and more kids racing through the streets on those things. These kids often used to go by bike anyway, but their speed was still limited by their physical ability. Now they have to put in less energy, meaning they’ll gain weight, and they’re also going way too fast with a heavier bike that they don’t fuly control. It’s led to plenty of dangerous situations already. People obviously aren’t forced to buy an e-bike, but the kids without one often have a bit of a problem when they have to cycle 10km every day with friends who do have one. So it becomes a domino effect where we end up in a worse situation than before.
Especially in the Netherlands, better to have those escooters than to have actual scooters which make tons of noise and blow exhaust fumes to any biker that drives behind them.
Oh yeah for scooters it’s better. But for bikes it’s only better if it leads to someone using a bike where they otherwise could not. Otherwise it makes stuff more dangerous and expensive and less healthy.
Middle schoolers (age 11-14) just rip around on 2-stroke dirt bikes where I’m at. Even a 100cc dirt bike will hit 50mph at WOT.
At least e-bikes aren’t noisy like the awful buzz of a 2-stroke a half-mile away.
Here electric dirtbikes are a problem. They rip around with no lights in the dark, and you can’t hear them coming. Things like that make me understand why places like Paris have bike gates to restrict the handlebar width and tyre size of bikes that can pass through
The riders wear no helmets whatsoever, so I’m just currently waiting on that problem to sort itself out 👍
Still infinitely better than hearing a two stroke from half a mile away though
Freedom is inherently dangerous, so, yes. We accept the risk of course because not being free is fucking terrible.
Freedom is inherently dangerous
Only to a degree. Letting your child run free on a playground is significantly less dangerous than letting them run free in a hazardous waste landfill. We can absolutely design safe and free places. We just need to stop designing our cities for the sole use of hazardous waste (cars).
It’s all relative, yeah.
I love the idea of e-bikes, but I think people are acting dangerously on them. I think a modest amount of training and licensure – at least to tell people to obey traffic laws, wear helmets, and not go 30 miles per hour on sidewalks or pedestrian zones – would respect freedom while removing a lot of danger.
We are at a point in time in which we can’t afford to wait any longer to switch away from fossil fuels, and e-bikes are one of the ways to do so. The barriers to entry should be minimal.
The majority of e-bike injuries are to the rider themselves, and due to inattention/falling off. That’s not something that training or a license will really help with. Speeding and not wearing a helmet on the other hand, those are things easier to catch/deal with.
I don’t think safety courses and licensing are a huge barrier to entry though, unless we let them be. And on the other hand the safety benefits seem to be enormous.
And yes, training and a license would indeed make a difference with how riders conduct themselves. Including wearing a helmet or paying attention.
I don’t think safety courses and licensing are a huge barrier to entry though, unless we let them be.
Training and licenses generally aren’t free, and e-bikes are already pretty expensive. It would add quite enough of a barrier to entry to dissuade more people from switching to them, which is something the environment cannot afford. We honestly need to be doing everything in our power as quickly as possible.
And yes, training and a license would indeed make a difference with how riders conduct themselves. Including wearing a helmet or paying attention.
I’ve seen plenty of car drivers on the road who presumably have a license, yet they don’t wear seat-belts, don’t pay attention, turn in places they shouldn’t, speed, etc. The first step should be infrastructure changes to increase the number of protected/dedicated bike trails (which in turn allow accidents to happen safely), built in speed limiters, rules on helmets and speed, mixed use zoning to reduce trip count/speed/cars, etc. Such changes don’t have an impact on barrier to entry or and only a negligible effect on our freedom.
Traveling by bike is one of the few ways you can travel without having the government involved in some way, or at least minimally involved. I’d like it to stay that way.
And like I said earlier, most of these injuries are to the rider themselves, which means they were probably doing something stupid in the first place. People are going to be stupid even with a license and training, so we may as well design around it as a first step.
I have a cat. It likes to get into things I don’t want it to. I could theoretically teach it not to do so, but the far simpler option is to keep the layout of my house and my things such that it can’t get into things in the first place. If I keep the closet doors shut, it isn’t getting in. People are stupid, and similarly, we should design our infrastructure to account for that. It’s why speed bumps exist after all.
We need more infrastructure dedicated to micro-mobility options like ebikes and escooters so that they don’t have to mix with pedestrian traffic as often. We need to allow more mixed zoning so that we don’t have to travel 20 minutes by bike to get to the store, alleviating the drive to ride as fast as possible.
We need to allow more mixed zoning so that we don’t have to travel 20 minutes by bike to get to the store, alleviating the drive to ride as fast as possible.
Not only would that eliminate the need for speed, but it would also reduce the overall number of trips taken by bike. Less trips means less crashes. Same goes for cars.
Add it to the never ending list of benefits to mixed use zoning.
It’s a culture issue, too.
Cyclist etiquette is not a problem whatsoever in cities built for them.
But when they are introduced into a city without cycling infrastructure, or existing riders setting an example, there will be idiots testing the limits.
I think they would be a lot less issue if people wore gear more like motorcyclists, the only wearing a half helmet approach that most bicyclists go with only makes sense because pedaling a bike in full motorcycle gear is hell. People should be encouraged to wear much more extensive gear on an ebike.
100%. For reference, Virginia Tech rigorously tests bicycle helmets and rates them…based on 16mph impacts, and the recent NTA 8776 certification for ebike helmets has safety ratings based on 28mph impacts.
When I built a class 4 ebike years ago to replace the need for a car in an area with no bike infrastructure, limited public transit, and extremely limited pedestrian infrastructure, I used a full-face motorcycle helmet rated to ECE R22.05 spec. It saved me when a car cut me off and sent me flying. Proper safety gear is very important.
