25kmph is about the max speed for a street cyclist but vehicles that sustain this speed for long periods and can achieve it with no effort on the part of the rider are qualitatively different from the bicycles whose shape they share.
Drivers of these vehicles also usually don't want to go on the road proper so I am not very sure where they will go at all. Removing pedal-assist is only going to make these things more anti-social and people won't put up with it for long.
> Drivers of these vehicles also usually don't want to go on the road proper so I am not very sure where they will go at all.
This is really great news - it will create a much stronger incentive for the government to put in proper cycle lanes.
The problem are those 0.5-1m wide "bike lanes" they squeeze in as an afterthought in cities. Overtaking on them is basically impossible without breaking some rules, so scooters and pedal-assisted vehicles make it worse than it already is.
> 25kmph is about the max speed for a street cyclist but vehicles that sustain this speed for long periods
I'd agree with you if that was 25mph. On my road bike I sustain 20 mph for most of the ride. 25mph would be sprinting.
Also, I'd bring up a different point about ebikes. It takes a while to get steering and quick reaction time skills for going that fast, ex. having your inside knee up and being comfortable banking a turn.
Also the market for ebikes : older/entry cyclists might not have the reaction time needed at those speeds. And a lot of ebikes have upright geometry not aggressive road bike geometry.
I built an ebike to commute around on, bafang conversion kit on a mtb. Ebikes have their place, and I'm excited to commute with it in the snow. I think the main issue is we need larger paths for bikes. Not these single track lanes that exist in cities. A lot of time the time in my area it makes sense to just ride on the road than deal with a bike lane when riding my road bike (pedal power).
And the product in the article is insane in a bike lane. I think it really highlights my point about the size of lanes. They need to be bigger if bikes are going to become a more viable form of commuting for everyone.
I don't think so, they mention that it's only 1m wide, which is 25cm wider than the average bike.
Here in NL, for example, it would fit pretty much perfectly in the existing bicycle infrastructure. (barring the occasional small bridge with poles/gates at the end to slow cyclists down)
And thinner than a Canta.
> On my road bike I sustain 20 mph for most of the ride.
A few people manage 32km/h in the Netherlands or Denmark, but only if they have a long commute through the suburbs or a rural area, often for recreation/leisure/exercise.
In towns, other people aren't expecting Lance Armstrong to appear, and can step/swerve into your path. You can see from [1] (at the linked point) that there's no way you'll be going fast through the centre of Amsterdam. The path isn't wide enough, there are far too many other cyclists and pedestrians, and the car drivers yielding at the junctions would be startled, at best. The same at 4m32s (a park). At 9m37s it looks like the kind of place you'd get some road/fast cyclists (in fact the narration says so).
People who want to go as fast as you would usually select a different route, where possible.
Also, you can't have an omelette without breaking eggs. Moving away from the big, polluting, dangerous cars will necessarily involve a transition path for those that can't or don't want to use muscle power. Having small, clean, relatively harmless electric vehicles is honestly by far the best transition path I can see. Hell, I wouldn't mind seeing them with a roof in a few years.
There should be limitations, but they should well thought out. Speed capped at 25 is a big one. Separating them from pedestrians is a huge one.
But overall, please also think of the upside. Having a e-something in the streets ensures that at least half a car is staying home that day.
Why not put them on the road instead of the bike lane, then?
Sensible transport segregates vehicles by their performance characteristics. In order to travel in the cycle lane you need to be going at bicycle-level top speeds with bicycle-level acceleration. More or less. E-scooters have a much higher top speed than most normal cyclists actually accomplish in the real world and, much worse, have far steeper acceleration curves. If there were lots of vehicles of the kind you imagine in cycle lanes they would be going much faster than real cyclists actually do and consequently overtaking constantly.
This doesn't really happen much in practice for a couple of reasons. Firstly, e-scooter's wheels are too small and their wheelbases too short to comfortably travel in the cycle lane (or on the road) so they travel on the pavement and drive pedestrians barking mad. Secondly, partly because they are made of chocolate and partly for inherent design reasons, they don't last long (shortish MTBF, near infinite MTTR) - this does a lot to keep them off the roads - except when operated at a loss by venture-backed startups from California.
And your idea that if people weren't on e-scooters that they would be in cars or something - not really. In my area they would be on public transport.
Why force normal cyclists and pedestrians to deal with these much faster vehicles in cycle lanes and pavements when we already have roads, and conflicts between road users today is already problematic.
I’m certainly not advocating that e-bike should mix with cars. I’m saying the than an e-bike that assists beyond 25kph, or doesn’t require peddling, isn’t an e-bike. It’s just an unlicensed motorbike pretending to be an e-bike.
There are electric motorscoters and there are ebikes. Only the latter should, in my honest opinion, use the full bike infrastructure.
Make 30kph the default speed limit in cities and let e-bikes drive with that speed on most roads, what's problematic with this approach? Are 5kph more really that more dangerous that you need to create a speed difference between even slow cars and bikes?
The limits there because these devices are just meant to be cycling assistance, not replacements. You don’t want to be mixing two distinct classes of transport together (this is whole reason why protected cycle ways are so important), because overtaking etc is inherently dangerous.
There’s nothing preventing people from just creating electric motorbikes etc and driving them on the road with other road traffic. But having vehicles like that mix in close proximity to pedestrians and un-assisted cyclists just moves the problem we already have with car-bike conflict on to cycle lanes and pedestrian spaces.
Also that extra 5kph is gonna have a pretty negligible impact on transit times, so is it really worth all the extra problems?
Wait, what? I bike commuted for a while in both Cleveland and Boston. I can pretty handily maintain 30kph, and regularly hit over that when either warranted by traffic conditions or on a slight downhill.
I do not consider myself a fast cyclist by any measure.
I am quite confident that even the most casual group ride of semi serious cyclists would drop me in 5 km on a good day.
Is my view of cycling speeds that skewed, or is the distribution very weird in some way?
As for the extra 5kph making a difference, no it's not a huge deal in time. It's immensely important to riding safely in faster traffic. I find that the closer you can ride to the speed of traffic, the fewer boneheaded things people do to get past you.
Being able to do 40kph for short stretches to basically match the speed of cars through a dodgy intersection is a huge improvement in safety. 30 isn't 40, but every little bit helps.
Yes
> It's immensely important to riding safely in faster traffic
This why it’s skewed.
I agree that riding close to the speed of traffic is important. But over here in Europe we have far better cycle infrastructure compared to North America. In many cities you don't ride with normal traffic, so you don’t need to go that fast. Instead your just cycling with with other bikes.
It sounds like you cycle in a fairly hostile area for bikes, so speed is needed just to be safe. Can totally understand why you would do 30kph+, and indeed I do the same in nastier parts of London.
But a consequence of the hostile environment is that you’ll only be cycling with people who have made an active choice to cycle and are more advanced cyclists who are happy to deal with shitty car drivers.
As you move towards proper cycle infrastructure the average cyclist becomes increasingly casual and amateur. Riding not for sport, fitness or to be green. But rather riding because it’s just easier that other public transport options or using a car. Cyclist in this category cycle slower, and more casually. They just wear normal clothes and cycle nice and slow so they don’t get sweaty.
If you wanna see more, I would recommend the YouTube channel “NotJustBikes”. It can be quite eye opening to see a world where everyone cycles because it’s just cheaper, easier and faster than every other option.
[0]: https://www.wheelerz.nl/fietsen/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2...
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=druk+fietspad+nederland&hl=e...
In fact the 25kph is so they are legally bicycles across europe, no questions asked.
Countries can allow faster or more powerful devices, but the european baseline is that a pedelec is a bicycle period.
Kph, mt, sec: are all widely used but wrong.
Additionally TfL have had the entire of central London (within the congestion zone) 20mph.
In any case, in cities something which can go over 25kph without pedaling is likely safe enough to drive like a vehicle.