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Comment by socialismisok | Hacker News Reader

This is the year I finally got an e-bike (a tern hsd). I basically never want to drive my car now. I just did a run to the nursery to pick up 4 cubic feet of potting soil on my bike, and it's incredible to be able to use both the roads and the paths to get there.

As a bonus, cyclists don't have to stop at stop signs in Seattle, so you can maintain 20 miles an hour easily.

All with none of the feeling of isolation and alienation that a car brings.

I strongly encourage folks to go do a test ride on an electric bike. Absolute game changer.

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Seattle cyclists don’t have to stop at stop signs, but they do need to yield. Unfortunately the new law didn’t change anything: cyclists still refuse to yield, even to pedestrians, and in general act like entitled assholes. Even the lazy ones on ebikes!

Thankfully they are at least better than drivers around here. But yes, bikes absolutely need to yield!

Seattle I find is a few decades away from really getting things right. We’re in North Seattle and the EW routes are sorely lacking. I end up being on a couple arterials that are likely not safe for me. My spouse, however, doesn’t feel safe on those roads and so won’t do the EW trips on the bike. Seattle drivers are getting better at giving space and respecting cyclists. On 8th NW I used to get close passes multiple times per trip, now I have them every other trip.

Yeah, I'm also in North Seattle, there's a few routes I can use with some key crossings and a lot of use of stay healthy streets.

I'm inclined to suggest that cyclists have the right to be entitled assholes (with the exception of not yielding to pedestrians).

On the grand scale of things, cyclists, even the lazy e-cyclists, are actually doing their part to contribute to a climate change solution, unlike the extraordinarily lazy and entitled drivers who refuse to modify their lifestyles to actually do something real to reduce their carbon impact.

Even EVs pale in comparison to e-bikes for the actual contribution they make to reducing carbon emissions (especially since half of a car's lifetime emissions comes from its production).

There's also some evidence that when you account for the energy cost of calories from food and its associate carbon emissions that ebikes are actually drastically better than regular bikes in terms of distance traveled per unit energy used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport.... So your degrading language of lazy ebike riders might be completely misaligned with reality. And that's not even considering the possibility that ebikes enable drastically more biking and less driving since they make the choice to bike rather than drive much more palatable for more people and situations. e.g. I can do a full Costco run on my ebike and cart home 50lbs of product no problem. If I only had a regular bike, I'd be drastically more likely to make that shopping trip in a car.

Drivers are the assholes in city life and should entirely submit and yield to cyclists while bowing to thank them for their service for our collective environment. A service drivers themselves are too weak or selfish to participate in.

The fact that electric bikes might be more energy efficient than regular bikes is wild, but makes sense. And I've been able to replace probably 60% of my car trips with bike trips so far, and I'm still a fairly novice biker.

It's amazing how much even a small cargo bike can haul.

What's even more wild is that even regular cycling is double the energy efficient as walking. And ebikes are 5x more energy efficient than walking.

Depends what you mean by ebike

Something the same weight as a regular bike with a 250W motor doing the same speed is vastly more efficient.

A LEV with accessory pedals doing double the speed with 2kWh of battery is at best a wash and likely requires 1000s of trips to break even on the embodied energy.

In my mind yielding should be based on the relative efficiency of the transportation. Mass public transit should have priority, then bikes, then pedestrians. Cars should obviously be last. Of course this shouldn't be all the time. Even when this is the system in general people should follow rules and take their turn to keep everyone safe.

I would prefer pedestrians > cyclists > tramways > bus > cars.

- Pedestrians are the most vulnerable and should be protected. Also most people are supposedly regularly pedestrians so it seems it would benefit everyone to have them prioritized. They also don't usually form uninterrupted flows like bikes or cars can.

- Then, bikes are very efficient and quite vulnerable.

- Then, I really want public transport to be as smooth as possible and cars should be discouraged (if not forbidden except for specific good reasons), especially the ones that only have one or two people in them, so tramways and bus should always be prioritized.

- Tramways should win against buses, they also don't usually form uninterrupted flows and we want them to be fast.

I believe a really efficient public transport is very important for a working city, and cars are usually the only thing forming continuous streams and are, I think, the only reason we have traffic and traffic lights.

As a pedestrian, I've certainly ran into more bikes than cars failing to yield to me, but that's because if I'm at all uncertain, I don't even try to see if a car will yield to me. For two reasons.

1. When a bike does something stupid and dangerous, I expect them to usually not run into me. When a car does something stupid and dangerous, collision is a very likely possibility.

2. The difference in consequences of collision with one versus the other is drastic.

As a Seattle driver, cyclist and pedestrian I have to say: * I essentially never feel threatened by pedestrians (regardless of which mode I'm on) (with the increasing exception of the raving mad ones, but that's another problem) * Very very very rarely feel threatened by cyclists (I've had a few minor interactions with e-bike riders overtaking that have made me nervous, but not really more than that) * and frequently feel like I'm close to being injured by some nutcase driving a car

YMMV, but two plus tons of metal travelling at 100kph driven by someone who can kill without consequences is simply inherently more threatening

I’m surprised no one has called you out. An e-bike is a motorized vehicle, you should not be in bike lanes. Just like electric scooters and such should not be on sidewalks. E-bikes trivially go 30mph and can carry substantial weight as your pointed out. May as well just let motorbikes at that point.

I don't know about Seattle, but here in Europe, when speaking of "e-bikes" people speak of a specific category that only goes up to 25 kmph (16 mph). Basically, it only goes faster than a normal bike if it's either very loaded or up a hill.

E-bikes that go faster than that are, as you suggest, treated like light motorcycles, and require all the same things: license, insurance, registration, and equipment (motorcycle helmet and gloves in the EU) and are explicitly forbidden from riding on bike lanes.

Ebikes are not motorized vehicles, at least in Seattle. An e-bike requires pedaling to control your speed (it does not have a throttle like a car or motorcycle), it is speed limited (the motor only helps until 20mph, above that you pedal to go faster).

If your vehicle has a throttle and doesn't require pedaling, or the motor provides for speeds above 20-28mph (depending on some factors), then the regulations agree with you.

A bike like the Tern HSD is not legally classified as a motorized vehicle.

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