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Comment by clarry | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking of electric bikes recently. The problem is, I would like to have some extra speed (thus range) with less sweat, in exchange for the price & weight & need to charge batteries. In fact, it sounds just amazing. But in Finland, electric assist is legally limited to operate at no more than 25 km/h. That's slower than my normal cycling pace. What a way to ruin a great idea.

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S pedelecs are limited to assisting up to 45km/h https://www.emotion-technologies.de/e-bike-typen/s-pedelec/ but fall within 'light moped' categories and as such cannot officially be used on cycle paths in the UK (but can be in Netherlands although there are moves afoot to remove them due to the speed differentials).

Another 'dodgy' option is to 'chip' your ebike and this will usually enable a assist limited 25km/h bike help you up to 45km/h.

What you do find is that people that are regular cyclists find eBikes too slow however on flat roads. Get a hill, and suddenly they come into their own. If you live in a hilly city/town, they really come into their own.

Prior to owning an eBike I would consider avoiding the most direct routes seeking out the flatter shallower gradient routes or finding myself pushing the bike up the steeper direct routes. These days I get to where I'm going at 25km/h and saves me a lot of time.

I still go out on my cyclocross bike when I want to really enjoy a long leisure ride. Ebikes are very boring as leisure rides.

Most of Finland is pretty flat, and the fastest & most direct routes often involve cycle paths already (although in the less well planned cities you might have to randomly move from one side of the road to the other because).

If your bicycle turns into a moped because it has a motor that isn't artificially restricted to operating at under 25 kph, you'll end up having to take the long way and ride among the cars in heavy traffic. My experience is that Finnish drivers are not particularly used to cyclists on these larger roads, because we have shared cycle & pedestrian paths everywhere. These facts would pretty much encourage me to go by car instead.

I think banning an entire category of vehicles because it "can go fast" is the wrong approach, and horribly inconsistent. I mean I can sprint at 45 kph on a cycle path on meat power if I want to, as long as I do not endanger anybody. And we don't ban cars on small city streets even if they can break 200 kph. Why not, say, speed limits?

Not quite. The 25 km/h limit is just for the bike's classification as a "bicycle"; electric bikes that go faster than that just need to get registered and are effectively treated as mopeds under traffic laws.

Yes, and that's bad. Suddenly you're bound by a lot more regulations, and access to many a path is cut off. It's not a great trade off.

If you're going a speeds significantly above what most cyclists are doing you should be bound by more regulations than cyclists and you probably should stick to the roads and not be allowed to use bike paths.

Why?

We already have large speed differences on (bidirectional!) shared paths and it works out just fine. We have kids and elderly walking at 5 kph, same kids and elderly cycling at 15 kph, and more fit adult cyclists going anywhere between that and >30 kph. Other people stand still. Dogs can be problematic but overall I think it really does work just fine, and I don't think anybody needs to fear for their life. We can adjust our speed.

If anything, forcing cyclists on the roads results in even larger differences in speed. But also mass, and awareness.

Doesn't the assist just cut off at that speed? So you can cycle it like a regular bike faster. So what's the problem? Wouldn't it be stupid to have "bikes" which can go eg. 100km/h?

Yes it cuts off, so it doesn't make me faster, except in the few seconds I take to accelerate (or climb uphill, which is not often). So it's really just dead weight.

> Wouldn't it be stupid to have "bikes" which can go eg. 100km/h?

No, why? If I could, I would.

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