It then only briefly touches on why they're not allowed on the roads, saying that lights and breaks are required as if that's also ridiculous. Actually that also sounds very reasonable to me! Is that really such an arduous requirement?
I could understand if someone disagreed with my opinion. But the article's tone is that my opinion isn't even valid. Now that is ridiculous.
on the safety issue, we should look at the differential effects of scooters on overall safety and hold a greater good standard. so let's say the baseline safety record of a city is 1 death and 10 injuries per thousand people on the streets. if scooters on sidewalks (vs on roads) changes that to 0.5 deaths and 12 injuries per thousand, that's a net gain in overall safety and scooters should be allowed, regardless of your opinion of them.
on the nuisance issue, i'd suggest a majority standard. if 10% of people think scooters are a nuisance, while 90% think they're great, then we should allow scooters.
that would be the (or a) democratic way to resolve the issue, rather than spouting opinions at each other.
It's not as clear cut as you pretend.
Advocating for scooter riders to be forced onto the road is absolutely advocating for more unnecessary deaths. Car vs. scooter is dramatically more lethal than scooter vs. walker. It really is clear cut.
If you are concerned by the way scooters are used on the footpath then advocate for more courteous scooter use.
There's no reason why people can't use scooters safely on the footpath. It might take people a while to learn how, but fundamentally scooters don't pose a significant risk to walkers the way cars do to scooters.
I agree, although you've guessed roughly what the reasons are. I certainly agree that if I'm in a 10% minority then the law should change!
But the point of my comment wasn't really to push my opinion as such. More just to point out to the GP that there could be a reason the law is the way it is above it being written by someone thinking of donkeys and pigs - an attitude that came off as quite arrogent, to be honest.
it's dangerous to ride on major roads if you're not in a car (truckers apparently call motorcyclists "organ donors"), so i propose a middle ground: encourage scooters to use secondary roads, which have less traffic, so they won't need the protection of the grade-separated sidewalk. this already happens for bikes through the placement of unprotected bike lanes on those secondary roads, rather than on major thoroughfares. but for major roads, allow scooters and bikes to use the sidewalk if there is not a protected lane.
the longer term vision would be to convert parking lanes into protected travel lanes for bikes and scooters, leaving sidewalks solely to pedestrians.
https://ebiketips.road.cc/content/advice/advice/buying-and-r...
I take a bike to get from place A to B faster. I'd take an electric bike to get even faster while spending less of my own energy. Actually, I'd be quite happy even with just 250W as long as I can use all of it on top of my muscle power, no matter how fast or slow I'm going.
Speed is ultimately what makes me pick the car over bike for longer rides.
That said, I'm all for people buying electric motorcycles if that's what they want. It seems like an area ripe for innovation, and getting somebody to step down from a car to something smaller is great by me.
The 25 kph limit makes no sense. It's a slower speed than almost every rider out there, and it's frustratingly slow as a daily commute.
The Oxford Cycling Club, pictured here http://www.oxfordcyclingclub.co.uk/the-kings-men/ claim an average of 20 km/h (13mph) and they're lycra clad racing-bike riders.
I think you can break 25km/h readily, but I don't think that means we should increase the speed allowed with power assist.
There are moves to make city traffic 32km/h (20mph) limited which would put paid to your 40km/h anyway.
"The average speed can vary according to weather conditions and ability, but expect an overall average of around 17mph -19mph for a ride of 60 miles"
Furthermore, an average speed will have significantly faster and slower portions along the ride. The OCC will drop to far slower speeds uphill and will ride far faster on the downhill.
Yes, of course downhill is faster. On a mountain bike I've only knowingly once managed to break 30mph, but that was going for it and definitely not erring on being safe. My average road speed at the time was about 15mph.
The top speed for powered cycles should be around the normal average as then there's not a large differential between powered and unpowered bikes making it safer when they share road space.
"lycra clad racing-bike riders" ride far faster.
Capping a vehicle at 15mph means you'll be constantly getting passed on trails. I have ridden a 15mph capped scooter, I was one of the slowest vehicles in my local area that day. I returned it.
The top assisted ebike speed should be well below the top pedalling speed. Which it is.
I also see unfit people hike up their bike and then ride down. I'm ok with it. If it gets them moving, my hat's off to them.
I really don't understand why it is so controversial.
The idea that a 10kph speed differential between vehicles is a problem doesn't make any sense considering you have a 25kph speed differential with stationary objects on your commute. Or 50kph if you consider two 25kph bikers passing each other.
It's really a non issue. 25kph is an unreasonably slow limit. The energy levels involved in a bike crash simply don't compare to the potential for damage in a car crash, in part due to the lack of mass.
If I crash my car at 50 km/h collision speed chances are quite good that I'll be sleeping in my own bed that day.
If I crash my bike at 50 km/h collision speed, I'm lucky if I survive.
Energy levels are irrelevant. When I'm riding a bike, my body is the crumple zone.
Crashing a bike at 30mph/50kph is not as dangerous as you suggest, you can find plenty of higher speed bike crashes on youtube with no fatalities. Road rash and broken bones are the most likely outcome. I've crashed at this speed and I walked away with road rash only.
There is an enormous difference between a bike crash which results in sliding along the pavement and a car crash.
> It's really a nonissue
Well, it may be for you. I've been biking for 15 years and it really is an issue for me. I don't want pedestrians, cars or fast objects on bike lane. If there are a lot of bikes on the bike lane and convoy goes at 30 kph that's perfectly fine, I go 30 too. But if people go 25 and some asshole is trying to go at 35, then we have a problem.
Speed differentials like that are the norm where I bike. Bikes mainly share a section of the road with pedestrians. So you get people standing around, going 0kph; you have people walking 5kph; people jogging 10kph; kids, the elderly, and people loaded with groceries biking 15kph; normal cyclists who aren't in a hurry doing 20-25kph; fit cyclists and people in a hurry up to 35-40kph. I don't think anyone's got a problem with it really. We kinda know how to share the road, even with people going different speeds.
Drivers, mainly, are afraid of fast cyclists jumping red lights.
I, as a cyclist, am more concerned about dogs, but that phenomenon hasn't bothered me much in the recent years. I once got bitten by a dog that gets excited by cyclists..
I think you're over-estimating average possible speed on a city route.
[1] http://slocyclist.com/whats-the-average-speed-of-tour-de-fra...
Yes, more or less any grownup in fair shape can pedal 40 kph on a flat, as long as they don't run out of gears. Maintaining over 40 kph average (which means going much faster at times) for the duration of a long race is a completely different thing.
And yes, some people actually like to sprint like hell for fun. Sometimes I do too.
Think about it for a moment. Club cyclists often aim to average around 27 kph for something like a 80 kilometer trip. Hitting 40 on a nice flat or downhill section on your commute of 3 km is nothing.
You prefer freedom for the avid electric cyclist, I want safety for pedestrians and slower cyclists.
This whole thing is so backwards. These limitations just reward people who take the big metal box, and punish those who would prefer a combination of muscle power and some electric aid.
Also, I think you're seriously overestimating the amount of danger 250W can do. I still hold that it's very unlikely for a drunk cyclist to do any significant damage to anyone except themselves with that much power, speed limits or not.
Aren't you focusing the potential negatives a little too much here? Allow a few bad apples to ruin the whole thing? If cars were invented today, you wouldn't let them on the road.
Vehicular traffic is all about taking a controlled risk for convenience. I think we could take the risk of removing the speed cap on low power bicycle motors and we wouldn't see a massive surge in pedestrian/cyclist injuries or deaths or accidents in general. Even in the hands of a drunk idiot, the bike is still far less dangerous than a car, and easier to evade should it come to that.
I think you are underestimating the difference between maintaining an average speed during a whole day and maintaining that same speed for 20 minutes.
Even in a bike lane you're still passing stationary objects. You asked "when would there be any" and then immediately gave one of the most common examples. An even more commmon example, of course, is the ground you're riding over. You have a 25kph speed differential to the earth.
There is no serious threat to your life from a bike going 35kph. I've crashed at that speed or faster numerous times on downhill courses. No need to be so melodramatic.
I mentioned that I have fallen off at this speed with relatively minor injury. People generally do not die from falling off a bike at 35kph.
Nowhere did I say anything about being hit by a car at 35kph not being dangerous. No one is saying that.
Crashing into stationary objects is indeed a much greater danger than a fellow cyclist riding with a 10kph speed differential. That was my point, which you are now re-stating.
Hope that clears up any confusion!
I don't understand this whole thread. If you're biking in a city like Boston or SF early in the morning or around 5pm, you're trying to go office/home. What's the point of biking at 50 kph? This is not recreation. This is something I do every day and my highest priority is doing this as safe as possible. Similarly, would you drive significantly faster than speed limit with your car, because you arbitrarily think "it's not dangerous"? It's nice that you think bumping into things at 30/50 is not dangerous, I respectfully disagree and consider it absolutely dangerous and kindly invite you to stick to whatever speed limit you have in your city. People are just trying to get to their work or kids and be done with their days, please don't try to be Superman.
We've been talking about 35kph, or 20 miles an hour, which is a perfectly reasonable speed for a bicycle. You're unlikely to be seriously injured if you crash at 35kph. People regularly ride 35kph throughout parts of their ride. It's normal, common, and entirely legal.
Your comments about "sticking to the speed limit" make no sense whatsoever. We're talking about speeds far, far below the speed limit even on residential roads.
I'm flabbergasted that you're having such a freakout over a bicycle going 20mph. I'd hate to see your reaction to an actual gas powered motorcycle or scooter.
On a bike path?
> When are there stationary objects on the bike lane? When a car is stopping, and that annoys the hell outta me and by no means ok or the norm.
(Practically) at pedestrian crossings too, but I assume that GP is referring to objects along bike paths/lanes like trees, sign posts etc.
> If there are a lot of bikes on the bike lane and convoy goes at 30 kph that's perfectly fine, I go 30 too. But if people go 25 and some asshole is trying to go at 35, then we have a problem.
What if there's that one guy going at 15 km/h when everyone else is at 25 km/h? This also assumes that there is a convoy to speak of. I'd regularly ride mostly alone, only occasionally passing other people.
So to summarize, the argument probably doesn't make sense to you due to differences in culture, city planning population density... You name it.
In a dense city with a lot of bicycle riders I personally think that a 25 km/h limit is reasonable, but on a rural bike path without crossings or stops I'll easily exceed that comfortably and safely.
You have to realize you’re not the average person right? E-bikes are great for people with mobility issues, people who aren’t interested in riding under only their own power, etc.
The average running speed of humans is around the same limit - 11 to 15 mph (17 to 25 kph). Almost everyone bikes faster than that.
I’m not sure what point you’re making about the downhill speed? If you dropped a cyclist out of a plane, they’d do like 320kph. Nobody needs on an electric assist when they’re going downhill at 40kph.
Also I’m not sure who you think is averaging a running speed of 15mph for more than a few hundred feet. If you can hold that speed for 4 minutes you’d be one of about 1000 people in the history of the world. Even holding 11 mph for more than 10 minutes is out of the realm of possibility for the vast majority of people.
Electric bikes at reasonable speeds help people of average to below average fitness (whether by age, disability, or other reason) get out and be active on a bicycle. I don’t believe they should be souped up to help some MAMIL (middle age man in lycra) set a new Strava segment record.
I could go faster, but then I'd have to change clothes and shower, which would make me slower overall.
Even taking into account only young adults, I'm sure most of them can't sprint 11 mph
Almost no-one cycles faster than that. If you cycle at 25km/h in Copenhagen, you will be in at least the top 5% for speed. I used an electric bike for a while, and could overtake almost everyone — I assume it followed the same EU regulation limiting it to 25km/h.
I think I'm a fair bit faster than average, and I tend to cycle at about 15-18km/h, at least according to two GPS tracks I have. (I don't log how fast I'm cycling; I forgot to turn it off on those two days.)
Many of the cycle commuters in my city also join group rides (peletons) on the weekends. So it is very common to have cycle commuters riding above 30km/hr on both shared paths (pedestrians, cyclists, scooters, dogs etc) and on the roads.
Electric assist bikes are becoming more common here, as they allow people to commute without needing to shower in summer. Legally they are restricted to a 250W motor and are also supposed to lose electric assist above 25km/hr. I routinely pass people riding these bikes when doing a training ride.
There are also quite a few people importing e-bikes and motor kits that have much more powerful motors and no speed restrictions enabled. When I am riding hard (40+ km/hr, >300W depending on wind direction) on an aero-road bike and get passed by a guy sitting upright on a mountain bike who is barely pedaling - his bike has to have a 500W or higher motor.
I would like to see the current regulations we have retained riding on shared paths, but I would also like to see the unrestricted electric bikes added as a new class for road use. A e-bike with a 500-1000W motor is easily faster than most cyclists. With modern disk brakes, stopping at speed and in the wet is less of a problem (c.f. rim brakes). The battery required also makes it easy to mandate powerful LED headlights and tail lights. Adding indicators wouldn't be hard either.
If you said, "the average running speed for trained male high school seniors is 10 mph", I might find that plausible. Probably high, but plausible.
1. Men are substantially faster than women. The number you gave is high for men, but ludicrous for women.
2. There is nothing average about a 15 mph (4 min mile) running speed. It is quite rare for men to achieve this speed and has literally never been accomplished by a women.
3. Those numbers reflect an unloaded run of exactly 1 mile. Commuting in the city by running would substantially slow people down.
The physical fitness requirements for the US Army assigns maximum score to a 6.5 minute mile (over two miles) and that's for 17 year old males. For late 20s women, the minimum qualifying time is about a 10 minute mile.
The world record for the fastest mile run is 3:43.13 for men and 4:12.56 for women. Literally no woman in history has managed to maintain a 15mph speed for an entire mile. Even men only hit that point in the 1950s. Going for a 10k run, the world record is a touch over 14mph for men and somewhat less than 13mph for women. 15mph isn't "average running speed"; it is "world-record speeds."
11-15mph might be reasonable (but definitely on the higher end) for average sprinting speed (we're talking <100m). For running speed, 8-9mph is more reasonable for expectations of fit young males (you need about 8.5mph to qualify for the Boston Marathon if you're a young man, just 7.3mph if you're female).
https://www.electricbike.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Char...
That's pretty much it. Nothing precludes having further categories of ebikes or mopeds, or treating more ebikes as bicycles. That is up to member states.
What is not is e.g. saying that all ebikes are legally mopeds requiring wearing a motorbike helmet and registration plates.
Yes, that's the L1e-A category.
> That's pretty much it. Nothing precludes having further categories of ebikes or mopeds, or treating more ebikes as bicycles. That is up to member states.
No. Almost every single vehicle you could build has a vehicle category defined by EU regulation[1] and that same regulation requires vehicle inspection, license plates and driving licenses for these vehicles. That means that this vehicle model must be registered - tested, specifications approved by government etc.
And of course if there is no category for your vehicle, you can't do it.
> What is not is e.g. saying that all ebikes are legally mopeds requiring wearing a motorbike helmet and registration plates.
You even said it yourself. That is the whole problem! Building a road legal vehicle in these categories is almost impossible if you're not a large company; importing it is even harder. The compliance required would at least double the price of the vehicle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_category#EU_classifica...
This, again, is a cross-EU baseline for compatibility. The very page you link provides the example of the Czech Republic's own classification.
> And of course if there is no category, you can't do it.
Of course you can, EU classification categories are cross-country compatibility classifications, your own country can do whatever it wants as long as it at least matches those requirements.
The EU allows driving an L1e on an AM license meaning any holder of an AM license can drive an L1e throughout the EU. Your country could require no license whatsoever on an L1e. What they can not do is require a higher license: as long as other laws and regulations are followed, any AM license holder should be able to drive an L1e.
Likewise your country could have categories for things the EU doesn't have categories for, all it means is that these vehicles are not necessarily legal outside your country.
> You even said it yourself. That is the whole problem!
Of course not, that's completely nonsensical.
> Building a road legal vehicle in these categories is almost impossible if you're not a large company; importing it is even harder. The compliance required would at least double the price of the vehicle.
Oh for fuck's sake that has to do with your country's regulations not the EU, the EU does not forbid these vehicles, it only mandates baselines for member states. If you're unhappy with how the MOT handles s-pedelecs, take it up to your MP and the MOT.
See for example the British kit car laws, which allow them to be driven throughout the EU.
However states require to move the registration of your car if it stays inside over some time.
But yeah, you're right, my bad.
This means you have scooters, which are silent like a Prius, speeding along at 20mph next to pedestrians.
I support these scooters because they can reduce car usage, but they could have worked with the cities to make sure they were rolled out in a responsible way. But these companies must “disrupt,” right?
Also, we have four or so scooter different companies operating here. Which means we now have scooters everywhere. Some in the walkway, some toppled over, etc.
I understand what you're saying and agree that it should work that way in an ideal world.
But government bureaucracy moves incredibly slowly, especially for things they don't have very much incentive to do anything about. Imagine a business approaching a governing body and saying "I want to roll out electric scooters to the city!" They would probably get little more than a raised eyebrow and minimal progress over the course of years, not to mention they may simply choose to be lazy and reject it entirely.
When a business "disrupts", it might be inconvenient, but it actually provides incentive for the government to move.
Hmm, I wonder how feasible it would be for the next generation of scooters to have pedestrian-collision avoidance tech built into them. Put in a camera or two, some neural nets or whatever other tech is needed, and the scooter would limit its speed to something near (1.5X or 2X) walking speed when you get close to a pedestrian.
Even if you ban scooters from sidewalks, it's still going to happen, so this could perhaps increase safety. And maybe even allow the two to peacefully co-exist.
Thus the benefit to the user would be higher speeds most of the time and faster travel overall.
I support the law, most British towns don't have enough space for electric scooters and pedestrians to mix — recover some space, for example by changing a car lane into two cycle lanes, and then we can discuss where scooters belong.
They're very rare in Copenhagen, but like longboards, rollerskates, and fast children on kick scooters, people use them in the cycle lane.
The e-scooter rental business model is a different thing, because you can do the exact same business model with plain bicycles as china has shown.
So if I was a cop, would I really give a shit about things that were equivalent to bicycles? No, unless I was on a ticket revenue generation kick.
Scooters, electric ones, moved closer to bicycle speed and yet many cities treat scooters closer to pedestrians.