Easing the restrictions too much results in near-motorbike performance in trails and bike lanes shared with human powered riders.
This is a perfectly good lightweight electric motorcycle claiming to be an "e-bike".[2] It doesn't belong on a sidewalk or bike path. That's a motor vehicle.
[1] https://www.electricbike.com/california-ebike-laws/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsoznIpK05s
I wouldn't use a bike to speed but mostly to even efforts so I don't sweat too much uphill, and can enjoy 25kmh at 80% the usual efforts.
Well there we got a easy-to-fix problem. I never turn of the light, and its not like a led bike light is going to A), decrease travel time, B) ruin the environment.
Is there a good reason why the light isn't always on when the ignition (ie key) is turned?
For the market to really take off there should be a maintenance free, complete solution. One of the many things would be that the lights are integrated to the rest of the electrics.
Also one could imagine removing most of the moving parts of a bike: No chain or gears (use a dynamo and a motor). Steering wheel is probably not needed if you have some kind of electronic self-balancing mechanism (like the Segway). You could arrange the wheels side by side instead of front and back to make the whole machine much smaller. Integrate the bike lock into the bike so you don't have to carry a separate lock, with lock/unlock controlled by your cellphone. Integrate the lights into the chassis and make them work automatically. Fewer moving parts => less maintenance => cheaper to buy and operate.
I'm not sure how you'd remove the handlebars and still allow steering, one key piece of bicycle steering is counter steering -- you actually steer left to tilt the bike over so you can go to the right. (for gentler turns you can shift your body weight, but if you need to make a sudden turn to avoid an obstacle, you use countersteering)
Likewise, I don't see how you'd have 2 side by side wheels on a "bike" that's designed to go 30mph+, how would you stop quickly without cartwheeling?
> Likewise, I don't see how you'd have 2 side by side wheels on a "bike" that's designed to go 30mph+, how would you stop quickly without cartwheeling?
I guess you'd stop the motor and the electronic self-balancing would do the rest (in a very hand-waving way, but Segways are an existence proof that something like this is possible, although perhaps not at 30mph).
https://endless-sphere.com/w/index.php/EBike_Efficiency#Dete...
And that's just for the motor, ignoring losses in the generator.
Electric bikes don't need perfect efficiency, the Specialized Turbo S has a 700W-hour battery and gives 30 - 60 miles of range (2 - 4 hours at 15mph). A human pedaling at 15mph puts out around 100W, so even if the motor is only 50% efficient, the bike can still travel for 50 miles at that rate on one charge.
With a Segway, you stand well over the wheels and can shift your butt (and center of gravity) as far to the rear as possible to make an emergency stop. I don't see how you'd do that with anything resembling a seated bicycle.
I want more than 750w of power, not to go faster, but to get up to speed faster after a stop sign/etc. If we could more quickly accelerate up to the limit, we won't be impeding traffic as badly, and it's less of a burden to actually come to a complete stop.
But the real fix for that is bidirectional bike lanes on as many streets as possible, even if they're single-direction for cars.