Hacker News Reader

Comment by calpaterson | Hacker News Reader

My personal experience sharing space with electric bicycles/scooters in a large town (London) is that the public is very quickly getting sick of 25kmph vehicles that travel on the pavement and to - a lesser extent - even when they are cycle lanes.

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.

View on HN

Try tracking delivery riders. They're pretty constant at 23-24 kph.

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.

>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.

Why not put them on the road instead of the bike lane, then?

Because once you increase the speed to mesh with road traffic & add strength to survive a collision with a car, you have a car.

Bingo. You have <5kph for walking, 10-25 kph for this whatever-it-is-which-I-hope-grows, and 50+ for cars. They can mix occasionally, separated with paint or good will, but as much as infrastructure permits we need all three.

Sorry, a 25kmph electric go kart ("e-scooter") with a roof (!) is not a bicycle and is not the right vehicle for a cycle lane.

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.

I'm in the US, where I think the limit is 25mph /750w for ebikes.

> 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.

No, 25km/h is the normal maximum speed for a normal person cycling.

> 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.

[1] https://youtu.be/M8F5hXqS-Ac?t=62

>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)

> I don't think so, they mention that it's only 1m wide, which is 25cm wider than the average bike.

And thinner than a Canta.

> the public is very quickly getting sick of 25kmph vehicles that travel on the pavement

> 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.

Sorry if I was unclear: I don't agree. I feel pretty mixed about "pedal-assist vehicles" in cycle lanes and oppose scooters and everything else.

I have no problems with pedal-assisted vehicles or scooters on proper bicycle paths that are at least 2m wide (per direction, so 4m if there's oncoming traffic). There overtaking isn't an issue, and 25km/h vehicles are somewhat average in terms of speed is there's no incline (leisure bikers are slower, while a good road bike goes faster).

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com