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Comment by paiute | Hacker News Reader

I love mine, I think it opens up some opportunities to work on relations with cars and pedestrians. I feel less in the way when I can maintain a better speed up hill. and on trails it's not a burden to slow down when passing pedestrians on foot. Nothing is worse than a bike whizzing by when you don't expect it. I just wish they'd remove those stupid speed limiters.

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If you remove the speed limiter you are riding an electric motorcycle, which needs to be somewhere other than with pedestrians and cyclists.

Except in many places pedestrians and cyclists have no choice but to share the road with cars and I don't see too many people clamoring for speed limiters on those...

If you remove the limiter and pedal assist requirement, you have an electric motorcycle. If you want one of those, then you'll need to be licensed to ride one.

Do you want an e-bike you can ride like a bicycle, or do you want an e-bike you can ride like a motorcycle?

only because we have brain dead laws on e bikes. why not 24.5 mph? I see actual electric motorcycles on our bike paths all the time, I have never seen them cause a real problem. People on normal bikes cause all the problems because they have so much invested in their current speed.

Because kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity, and 25mph is 56% more energy which is a huge problem in a collision with a pedestrian or a crash.

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/05/31/3-graphs-that-explain...

It's also a big issue with response time and with the rate pedestrians expect bicycles to be travelling. You shouldn't bike on the sidewalk because no one is looking for vehicles going more than a few miles per hour (walking). You shouldn't bike more than 15mph on trails/lanes shared with pedestrians for similar reasons. 20mph is a tolerable compromise, 25mph is flat out dangerous.

This matches my experience on shared pedestrian / bicycles low density roads in countryside. 30 km/h (a little less than 20 mph) is the limit between okish and dangerous. Actually pedestrians start to worry a little before that speed but of course half of them don't see the bicycle approaching. The cyclist see them a long time before overtaking and assesses whether they are safe to pass or require a slow down.

This is a good example of how we get bad laws... Should overweight cyclists be forced to have a lower speed? I can still get my ebike to 25 mph down hill, I would never dream of passing a pedestrian at that speed. I picked 24.5 for a reason and not 25 BTW.

tbh I wouldn't mind the peed limit being higher but introduce some sort of driving lic and exam for it with periodic re-testing. Also re-testing should be mandatory for car drivers too. Both theory, practical, reflex testing.

I ride a bicycle, bike and drive a car and the ammount of crazies on all sides leaves me speachless sometimes. I see cyclist cutting off cars and shooting into a roundabout just because cars will avoid them. I actually had a crash becasue of a retard like this and I chased him until I caught him. Took him to court and won.

On the other side of the coin - I see cars taking turns without checking their mirrors, overtaking while in a queue without making sure no cyclists are passing by. Smashed a bike to bits because of 1 twat. His insurance paid for the bike and treatment.

P.S. I'm not a perfect driver but people these days lack consideration and defensive driving(even the notion of it is foreign now)

I don't understand what you're asking for. There are already electric motorcycles which don't have artificial speed limiters. Those require a motorcycle license and can be driven on any road.

They also generally have 7 times the vattey capacity and at least 15 times the power output. The speed limiter is not the main difference.

I don't think this is a fair take. People on normal bikes do cause problems because of the reason you listed but it's surely not ALL of the problems.

So true. Normal bikers break the rules of the road by far the most in my experience because god forbid they have to stop and start again.

More specifically, you have and electric motorcycle with no traction, no safety features and an untrained rider.

Riding a motorcycle is easier than a bike. In a motorcycle there’s three evasive actions: brake, accelerate or swerve. On a bicycle there’s only two, and that lack of speed is exactly what causes some of the riskiest behaviors from motorists (e.g. close passing.)

I think it's charitable to say there are even two fully useful evasive actions on a bike. An absolutely tiny contact patch and low weight mean that there's simply not enough traction for any sort of aggressive change in direction or speed without ending up off the bike.

What's pernicious about this is, that under normal circumstances most people won't have ridden a bike past these limits, maybe ever, so the first time you realize your bike can go from well behaved to on the pavement instantly is the worst time for it to happen.

It depends on the bike though. I mountain bike with large soft tires, good suspensions, and low air pressure have quite a lot of grip compared to a road bike with tiny super hard tires. You can do a lot of crazy things. But I agree that the average commuter bike has low limits.

"the first time you realize your bike can go from well behaved to on the pavement instantly is the worst time for it to happen."

I am always afraid of falling of the bike while there is a bus driving behind me. Could happed with a pothole, random garbage/bottle of the road, etv

If you’re an urban cyclist find a safe place like a parking lot to practice sudden braking, tight turns, etc. And if there’s a suitable spot practice riding on gravel too… Should roughly simulate loosing grip on rough roads.

It is trivial to get a motorcycle license in America. An order of magnitude more training should be required for cars and motorcycles before I would consider people trained.

It depends heavily on the state you live in I believe. It's also somewhat irrelevant to my point: if you're going to be on the road with a vehicle that has similar capabilities to a motorbike, you should at least know what the other drivers have been taught, if nothing else.

>with pedestrians

Do some cities actually let cyclists bike on sidewalks? I bike 24/7 but this seems crazy. Bicycles needs their own, separate, protected paths, at the road level. Period.

I live in a city that explicitly allows cyclists to bike on sidewalks, and I'd never bike otherwise. One time I tried road-riding the mere 15m home from the gym and had 3 close calls from drivers. We also have separate, protected paths at the road level. Anybody who wants me to ride on the road can send me a blank check to cover medical expenses in the case of an accident if they are so invested in my riding according to their preferences.

Luckily it's illegal to ride a bicycle on sidewalks in my country and yet many people do it at half the speed and half the comfort of what they would have on the road (sidewalks are not maintained to be smooth and are cluttered by all sort of things and people.) I'm a cyclist and I really hate them. If they are afraid to ride on the road, it sucks for them but it's only one of the things people would like to do and cannot do. Walk, catch a bus, drive a car.

Besides Europe, I remember seeing several sidewalks in Japan that allowed it. And many (most?) streets in Japan are fully mixed across modes, and have no sidewalk, so you'll see bikers+pedestrians(+cars) combined there too.

There's something very nice about these types of mixed streets, but they're pretty much unheard in the US. They work very well on small residential streets, where cars would otherwise get 80% of the street width reserved to their use, even where car traffic is low.

Also, US sidewalks tend to be extremely narrow, which makes it worse to share modes.

It's technically illegal to ride your bike on the sidewalk in at least Tokyo. The lack of protected bike lanes, however, means that very few people obey that law.

There's a lot of mixed-use streets here without sidewalks, and if cars weren't allowed on them, they'd be great. I'm always worried about being hit by a car on them.

Tons of sidewalks in Tokyo are marked for mixed use. You'll see these round blue signs showing both a bicycle and pedestrian

https://i.imgur.com/OzShuC8.jpg

I wouldn't generally call Tokyo a bike friendly city but they do have bike parking lots and more and more bike lanes are being added.

In Japan, you definitely see bikes going fairly quickly on sidewalks where there is a fair bit of pedestrian traffic. I'm especially careful in Japan to not make any possibly unpredictable side to side moves when walking because that's a good way to get clipped.

I've even seen bikes trying to make their way through a pedestrian crush that's basically the people density of Times Square in NYC.

> Do some cities actually let cyclists bike on sidewalks?

Not sidewalks per se, but combined, mixed-used paths are very common. Whether this is a good idea or not is another issue.

Sidewalks let you fill in gaps in the protected path network by riding slowly.

In my city at least you can't really go fast on the sidewalks even if they're empty (lots of uneven brick, chunky curbs, trees, buildings have stoops, etc) so it's not a big issue. If someone has to go a couple blocks on the sidewalk they'll generally get back on the path / road as soon as able

In DC it's specifically allowed except for a prohibited section near the Mall downtown. And in that section the law is widely ignored by both cyclists and police either way.

Yes. Several cities in the Bay Area have shared sidewalks; e.g. Embarcadero in San Francisco, and Foster City has a ton of them. I don't know of any cities that allow all sidewalks to be used by bikes, but I'm sure some exist.

Embarcadero's a special case since it's so wide, and barely has car traffic crossing it. (It borders the ocean on one side.) San Francisco has many protected bike lanes and if your route is on those exclusively, it's very nice.

Definitely, quite common on European cities.

Does it matter if it is not enforced?

That depends on the conditions. If you adapt to the conditions then that would be fine, if you don't then even at normal e-bike speeds you are a danger. I never got why we have 200 Mph cars but a moped that can go 30 over the legal limit gets confiscated.

Because a moped that can go 30 over the legal limit is no longer a moped, it is a motorcycle and needs to be taxed, insured and tested as such.

My e-bike is taxed, insured and tested to the same standards as a light e-moto (in Germany, a Riese & Mueller 'charger'). The only difference with the bicycle version is the speed limiter setting.

That and it's not a motorcycle so you're not going to get stuck on for riding it on a bike path, surely?

No, I'm not allowed to ride it on a bike path. I am allowed to ride it on a combined bike/moped path.

Only a tiny handful of expensive sports cars can actually reach 200 mph. While there a few limited exceptions, in most jurisdictions anyone caught driving at 200 mph will be arrested and the car impounded.

In this context 200 or 150 mph are the same: illegal, and instant death if anything goes wrong.

Those speed limiters are indeed stupid, especially because on a 'regular' bike you can fairly easily outrun a normal e-bike (though probably not for as long unless you are in very good shape). Normal ones should be limited at 35 or so and speed-pedelecs at 50 Kph so you don't end up holding up other traffic. Where I live a speed-pedelec has to be in traffic but it isn't allowed to go as fast as that traffic, which creates all kinds of dangers.

I'm of the mind that it's up to every individual to decide how much risk they want to take, but I think an e-bike that can do 55 mph is significantly more dangerous than a motorcycle. Tiny amount of traction, no ability to maneuver or speed up further to get yourself out of a dangerous position. Crude/no suspension. No traction control, no turn signals, silent. Cars on the road see a pedal bike and expect you to behave like one. Rider unlikely to be wearing the correct safety gear. If you lay down a bike at 55 and you aren't wearing leathers you can literally bleed out right there on the pavement. The list goes on and on.

Again, not saying it should not be allowed, but man, at that point please just take care of yourself and get a little honda motorbike and a full face helmet/leathers.

People appear to be mixing units here, I believe the parent commenter was using kph, not mph.

55mph on an ebike would be insane :) even 55kph is really really fast if you're not on perfect asphalt - the slightest pebble hitting the front wheel and it's goodbye

To clarify, it's insane from a practical standpoint to allow e-bikes to go that fast, but from a technological standpoint many e-bikes are more than capable of going that fast, and much faster. I have seen e-bikes that advertise their top speed as 80 mph.

If you have suspension and the proper tires (which are a legal requirement in many places) you can take pretty big pebbles in the front wheel.

It's intentional to limit these to $regular_speed - 5km/h, same as with mopeds. I assume it's so you are converted to a real vehicle (car) by virtue of being assaulted on the roads by those driving them?

I certainly don't agree with 35km/h on bike paths. The current 25km/h is plenty and given their popularity with older ages, already producing outsized numbers of injuries and deaths.

What are the rules where you live? In France it's either a bike if the assist is limited to 25kmh (you could go above that on a nice flat road, but the gearing usually isn't designed for it) , or a "<50cc motorcycle" in which case it can go up to 50kmh (like all other <50cc vehicles). In the latter case, no bike lanes, you need a rear-view mirror and helmet, and for some bureaucratic reason the brakes have to be inversed

Same in Italy.

It means that a ciclyst on an ebike can outperform a group of friends with normal bikes on an slope but can't stay with them on the way back home and they'll have to wait. I experienced that and it's not nice. The two types of bikes mix well only in low intensity sightseeing rides.

well, only if the friends are keen cyclists with road bikes.

no commuter in shirt and trousers with saddlebags for the laptop etc is going to be running at more than 25kmh

Of course. We were slowly pedaling uphill with road bikes and our friend was speeding in front of us. But we had to wait on the way back home because we could do easily 30 km/h on the last 20 km (completely flat) and his engine cut off at 25.

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