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> Let that sink in: The Dutch are already starting to abandon their pedal bikes.

Within Netherlands the number of accidents with bikes also has skyrocketed. That's due to often older people buying these bikes. They're more mobile, however they're slow to respond, plus not used to the speed of these bikes. As a result, more accidents plus the accidents are more severe.

The electric bikes are often restricted to 25 km/h (15.5 miles/h). That's actually too quick for most electric bike users.

It's great that older people aren't reliant on others to get around. Still, electric bikes do have a huge impact on the safety of their users, plus other people on the road.

Note that wearing a hi-viz vest can actually make you more accident prone. There's been various studies that a helmet or a hi-viz vest means other cars will pass you closer than before.

> Note that wearing a hi-viz vest can actually make you more accident prone. There's been various studies that a helmet or a hi-viz vest means other cars will pass you closer than before.

Even worse, when I used to ride a motorcycle I got complaints and agression when wearing a hi-viz vest. Either people though I was a traffic controller and sometimes approach me more aggresively (aggression toward police/traffic controllers is getting more common these days in the Netherlands), or they where angry and comment that I should not pose as a traffic controller. Because if every motorcyclist whore a hi-viz vest, how can the distinct them from traffic controllers?

Different colors?

bicycles are not the solution ... The solution, as this article touches on, is light weight electric transport using the existing road structure.

To me this sounds pretty funny: you make it sound like an electric bicycle is not a bicycle, whereas to me it's still a bicycle, just with the addition of a motor. Even a speedpedelec is normally still considered a bicycle here: after all it doesn't move unless you pedal, unlike a moped for instance.

Electrics will soon start to invade

Small city in Belgium here with historically a lot of cyclists: this has happened already despite infrastructire not being sufficient :)

Even a cheap electric bike already feels much safer in urban car traffic than a pedal bike because it has super fast acceleration from a dead stop

Hmm, having used more than one cheap and not-so cheap and expensive electric ones, that is not my experience at all and for more than one reason: it only works really well (i.e. better than a non-electric bicycle) if your bicycle is in the highest power mode and in a low enough gear. Even then, it takes some experience to be able to use that fast acceleration safely. Seriously, I see people struggle everyday with starting from dead stop just because they're still in the wrong gear or fail to put their foot on the pedal in time etc. Or they succeed and then they get suprised by the acceleration and can't keep the bike straight. Just ask people in the hospitals: amount of injuries is up since electric bicycles happened.

To me there's a big difference, in terms of urban transport, between a pedal bike and an e-bike, mostly because of the acceleration capability of the e-bike, which is even better than fossil fuel engines.

My feeling is that initially the 'e' revolution will start with e-bikes but ultimately will end up with electric mopeds (no fiddly gears) and electric tricycles (two wheels at the front) with seat belts and modest roll cages.

To me there's a big difference, in terms of urban transport, between a pedal bike and an e-bike

Sure, the difference can be substantial depending on model, but my point here was that I interpreted your comment as the latter not being a bicycle anymore.

Yes that's right. To me an e-bike behaves much more like a small motorcycle than it is like a much lighter pedal bicycle.

So...electric motorbikes means you don't need bike lanes? Why don't we put children on motorbikes again?

NHTSA: "For every mile traveled, motorcyclists have a risk of a fatal accident that is 35 times higher than a car driver." [1]

In my experience, light weight electric transport mingles great with bikes, as long as they're limited to something reasonable. I can clock up pretty high speeds on a normal bike!

So no - we do need bike lanes because cars are too dangerous, whether your bike is electric or not.

[1]: https://www.askadamskutner.com/motorcycle-accident/how-do-ca...

Sure, we'll still need bike lanes for pedal bikes.

> we do need bike lanes because cars are too dangerous

Cars only are a danger when the driver can't easily see you. A bike lane tells a cyclist to ride close to the edge of the road. That's not where most drivers focus their attention on. Bike lanes also encourage cyclists to pass traffic making a right turn on the right, make cyclists harder to see for traffic making a left turn, and can catch drivers pulling out from side streets and driveways off guard.

If cyclists rode in the middle of the rightmost general traffic lane, then they are much more easily seen by others, get more clearance when passed by faster traffic, and don't have issues with right it left turning traffic or traffic pulling out from side streets.

Sorry when I say bike lane I mean separated bike lane or cycleway, with a physical curb between traffic and the bikes. This is much safer than biking on the road or on the edge.

In Sydney we have dedicated bike signals at intersections (with dedicated infrastructure) so turning is no issue.

I agree with your point that it is safer to ride with traffic in the middle of the lane rather than an unseparated bike lane - that's not infrastructure, that's paint on a road.

A good friend of mine was cycling in a painted on bike lane and got car doored by a policeman. There is no hope of the general population checking their mirrors when opening car doors if policeman can't!

I agree many more people will feel more comfortable with an ebike in traffic but there are plenty of places without a plethora of ebikes and also plenty of bike commuters, but this change doesn't happen. The "feels much safer" argument is mostly about drivers respecting cyclists...which hi-viz and ebikes won't do. Hi-viz and helmet admonishments only lead to victim blaming. Hi-viz won't make me show up on a driver's phone, sadly.

In cities with reasonable 25mph speed limits and traffic calming then riding around with a regular bike works fine. EBikes are only icing on the cake for some people but I disagree that this is a simple single technical fix (i.e. more ebikes).

> And they paid twice as much for their electric bikes ($2000) than they did for their pedal bikes. Let that sink in: The Dutch are already starting to abandon their pedal bikes.

This is nonsense. Those ebikes are pedal bikes, they're just electrically assisted up to 25 km/h. You still have to pedal to move forward. And you have to ride them on bike paths/lanes just like normal bikes. So they certainly don't enable getting rid of bike paths: mixing those 25 km/h (often elderly) ebikers with car traffic would be a disaster.

Many issues with this approach - for example back home roads are frozen with snow +- 4 months per year. Often heavy rains outside this period. There are no 2 lanes - only one, so your approach would be blocking rest of the traffic heavily (even e-bikes are much slower than most cars FWIW, maybe people are just lazy and don't use the potential, don't know). People simply don't have 2000$ for an electric bike, thats super luxury back there (hard to explain to HN crowd used to buy their latest iphones, almost nobody back home has apple products).

And back home is still above global average in terms of income. It might work for western hipster places like SF, but globally this is harder to achieve.

The Dutch are finding that e-bikes are more of a substitute for a car than they are for a pedal bike. That should play even better in lower income countries. Time will tell.

Even electric bikes are not the solution, at least not in many parts of the world. What happens when it rains / snows? I don't know what the solution is though, maybe small electric cars, self driven, as part of public transportation service?

I regularly ride my "normal" bicycle (including 2 little kids in a trailer) in the rain in Berlin (where it rains for 167 days per year on average, which is ~45% of the year).

You just need the appropriate clothes & gear.

where it rains for 167 days per year on average, which is ~45% of the year

Well, neighbouring country in which it rained on 199 days on average in the past 20 years or so, but since it doesn't rain all 24hrs of those days, a more interesting figure would be that it apparently only rains about 10% of the time here. Meaning about 90% of the whole time there is no rain.

my point was that rain is not unusual here.

There is no wrong weather, just wrong gear.

And when there's a lot of snow, a bicycle is "wrong gear".

(N.b. I ride in the snow for hundreds of kilometers every winter. I know you can take a fatbike to powder snow but that's just too strenuous for most people.)

Most cities don't get more snow than can be cleared from the roads.

But clearing snow takes time and equipment and main routes have the priority.

For example my commute of about 20km has about 10km that gets cleared early in the morning if humanly possible; maybe 9km that usually gets cleared during the evening; and maybe 1km that may take 3-5 days after a big snowstorm.

Looks like there are seasonal jobs waiting to be created.

idk, people seem to commute by bike even in the winter in Anchorage, AK... It isn't like there is a fresh dump of 6" powder every day. Most places, you get a dump of snow, it's sloppy for a day or two, then back to packed down snow and ice.

When faced with something like that, I usually just switch to the bus for a day

What happens when it rains / snows?

Nothing / depends on the rider.

There's proper clothing which keeps you dry. Personally I find fresh snow awesome to ride in. Not so fresh snow is less fun, but I still do it. But indeed if you cannot / do not want to take the risk then in most places infastructure is not quite ready yet and we do need solutions. Shared electric vehicles combined with decent public transportation services would be my bet.

> What happens when it rains / snows ?

Then you ride with appropriate clothing, as usual.

Yes, that means that if one insists on "business" attire, one has to change on arrival - which I do.

Is there only one solution? No.

I commute daily in London on a bike. I wear a coat and gloves. Waterproof over trousers are also an option

> Even electric bikes are not the solution, at least not in many parts of the world. What happens when it rains / snows?

What happens when it rains?

As someone who lives in the developing world, I'm always a bit taken aback when people seem to be so unaware of the lived experience of the billions of people outside of America & Europe. This isn't some hypothetical scenario that we don't know how it plays out. It is the lived experience of hundreds of millions of people who get by just fine.

I live in a city in Southeast Asia where every day over 6 million people commute on two wheeled vehicles. We have monsoons, so 6 months of the year are the rainy season.

What happens when it rains? We don't need to make theories. We just look at the real world in places where people can't afford cars and have to deal with rain. They get by just fine.

Go to almost anywhere in Asia, from India to Taiwan and everywhere in between, and you'll find hundreds of millions of people that get to work, school, hospital, and everywhere else they need to be on two wheels despite torrential rain and sweltering heat.

It rains all the time in Tokyo and other parts of Japan, and bicycling is extremely common there. It's also very hot during the summer months.

I guess the key is: don't be lazy?

If this is predicting electric bikes that can keep up with the current speed of the roads, I don't think it sounds meaningfully different from light motorcycles in terms of infrastructure. The vulnerability of the traveller sounds the same. But perhaps the lighter vehicle and environmental benefit will help it reach a critical mass where change will happen..

I think we're generally headed for slower roads in built up areas. It's the cheapest option. 15mph roads will probably be safe enough for cyclists and I personally believe stopping distances have got to come down a lot if we're ever going to let the robots drive cars in towns.

I've been saying for a few years now that self-driving cars are a fetish. (And can we please please call them "auto-autos"?) The thing to make is a self-driving golf cart. You could build that today, make it small, light, soft so it can't kill or maim people, sell a million of them.

(Old people! They still need to get around, they tend to be not so great drivers, and they don't mind the mellow, easy route.)

I'm not sure this is true. I average faster than the maximum speed of electric bikes cycling my commute, and I do not feel remotely safe in city traffic. Drivers don't have a problem with slow cyclists, just cyclists in general.

At different times I've been in all these roles, motorcyclist, cyclist, car driver and e-biker. As a driver I find e-bikes much less frustrating than pedal bikes because they keep up with traffic when the light turns green. As an e-biker I also feel safer because I stay fully in the traffic lane (at intersections), I don't have to always have one eye out for passing cars while I'm also changing gears and watching out for getting doored by parked cars. That's my experience.

I think you're confusing ebikes with motorbikes.

Ebikes are restricted to 25km/h, at least in my region. You sometimes see them going faster so you know they've been modded or aren't compliant.

A lot of ebike riders are going faster than their skills would suggest, i.e. no time to build up experience of safe riding.

I accelerate faster than many ebikes, on my CX bike (which is vastly better than your typical Amsterdam upright bike), and will peak around 30-35 for bursts when in traffic as needed. Having said that I ride hard even though unfit, and have to avoid the typical bike lanes as they're just too slow for my liking - taking the longer way home is less stressful.

I like your points about getting rid of exhaust fumes, but why stop at sub 125cc..

Smaller engines are often less efficient, rarely have emissions control devices, and are more often two-stroke engines (which are much more visibly polluting and almost surely much more polluting in reality).

As deployed, they’re also often on vehicles that don’t get inspected and often don’t get maintained until they flat out don’t work.

You sometimes see them going faster so you know they've been modded or aren't compliant.

Well, except when going downhill. Or just because the cyclist puts some effort into it and rides faster, which isn't impossible at all on flats.

I want talking down hill... More the 30-35 kmh nonchalantly with zero effort kind.

The extra weight of the ebike system becomes a significant factor when trying to push past the cut off point manually. Speaking from experience with a Bionic system.

Note that here electric bikes are currently mostly treated like normal bicycles, and don't typically mingle with car traffic.