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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

A major problem with electric pushbikes is that they are fast.

A few days ago I was pulling out of a side road. I was turning to go into town such that I had to first cross a lane of traffic going out of town.

I checked the crossing lane — nothing except for a guy in work clothes, no helmet, on a push bike. I checked the other direction and it was clear. I looked back towards town and got ready to start moving and…

HEY! The guy on the bike who was maybe 100 yards away before was now right in front of me. I was moments from pulling out in front of, or more like on top of him. He must have been doing 25-30mph without breaking a sweat.

It’s going to take a generation to re-learn our assumptions about what these vehicles mean. I wish, for their sake, they were speed limited to be like normal bicycles.

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In Europe, the speed at which an ebike motor may assist one is limited to 25 km/h (~ 15.5 mph):

  > pedal cycles with pedal assistance which are equipped with an auxiliary electric motor having
  > a maximum continuous rated power of less than or equal to 250 W, where the output of the motor
  > is cut off when the cyclist stops pedalling and is otherwise progressively reduced and finally
  > cut off before the vehicle speed reaches 25 km/h;
  -- REGULATION (EU) No 168/2013, Article 2, §2 (h)

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

Note that while the current regulation is valid since 2016 there was a (in this regard) very similar one since 2002 (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A...)

It is way too easy to remove that limitation. At least in the Czech Republic where I live it is common and it is one of the reasons I have love-hate relationship with e-bikes. I love the idea of e-bikes replacing cars to commute but they are also causing some kind of eternal September in biking. Suddenly there are multitudes of e-bikers without technical skills passing you dangerously fast on trails that were previously accessible only to trained (and therefore experienced) bikers. It spoils the fun when you are going up the hill 15 km/h and suddenly someone passes 2cm next to your elbow at 40 km/h.

Mountain e-bikes are an entire different kind of beast and living in the alps I agree with your observation of more unskilled and untrained people getting on trails that are a bit over their head, but that already happened here when some regions opened their cable cars for (mountain) biker, e.g., ski areas in the summer.

The current regulation seems Ok to me in the sense of, its simple, and it prevents most of the danger by default and the alternative would probably be to ban ebikes completely (as any hack-prevention will be circumvented sooner or later), which well would be rather counterproductive and people get hurt in cars too, so we'd need to ban almost everything..

I'd rather see some effort in educating people on bike safety in schools. We already had a bike driver licence test in elementary, while it wasn't legally binding it had some educational value, ebikes just weren't a thing there so nothing was thought about them.

The ebikes I am familiar with have a governor such that the power assist turns off entirely above 20 mph.

I’m fine with fast bikes as long as you signal “IAMA fast bike”.

Overalls on a sit-up-and-beg do not do this effectively :)

I don't necessarily think speed is an issue with e bikes, since the assistance stops at a certain speed. I commute by (non electrical) bike to work every day and can reach the same speed as e bike commuters - my acceleration is just slower and it takes more work to get there (especially on windy days)

You see regular bikes going on very high speed as well, so I wouldn't say the general speed assumption has to change

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