Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1attice | Hacker News Reader

With thunderstorms, you count seconds 'twixt bolt and boom.

With the current golden age of electrified last-mile transport, we're seeing the gap between innovation and regulation opening up wide -- now several years.

Real-world impact: I routinely get up to speeds on my e-bike that are, quite simply, dangerous. It's not that I never hit 25 miles an hour on my old road bike, it's that I spend so much more time hanging out at ~25mph on my ebike that potholes have gone from annoyance to mortal danger.

The risk is somewhat mitigated by the enormous tires and superior build quality on the braking system, but not entirely. I'm glad to have taken a motorcycle license training course, and heartily recommend that other early adopters think about voluntarily seeking out additional training (and I imagine e-* specific courses are available now, if not soon.) Not all good ideas come with mandates :D

View on HN

Another commenter posted about this in a separate top level comment already but it's worth mentioning here as well since you mention speed. The people who routinely hit 25+mph on a regular road bike know how to handle one at those speeds, many ebike riders simply don't have the handling skills or the experience to ride safely (for themselves and others) at speed.

Honestly I think the cap most people can handle is 15. After that is when things start getting much harder to deal with.

Yeah, you're probably right. When you start factoring in inattention and insufficient physical conditioning to control the bike (ebikes can weigh significantly more than a regular bicycle) it might even be lower.

The speeds of the motorized scooters/bikes/etc., and seeming recklessness of their riders, has become a problem on the sidewalks of college town Cambridge, Mass.

For example, at least three times in the last week alone, I've literally almost been run into by someone blasting out of, or alongside, Harvard Yard on one motorized vehicle or another.

Some of the bicyclists seem similarly reckless and self-absorbed. A couple times in the last week I've almost been hit on the sidewalk by a speeding bicyclist.

Also, a few nights ago, I was almost struck in the head by someone on a Blue Bikes rental bike, blowing through a crosswalk that had a walk light, and after the cars had already stopped for the red. (They were also speeding across the ambulance entrance&exit for a hospital ED, so doubly reckless, though convenient for me, had they cracked my head open.)

Anecdotally, the bicyclist wtf rate seems much than it used to be, and I wonder whether some of the motorized vehicles are setting precedents for behavior.

I intend to bring this up with the City, where I know they have some people who care very much about bike etc. transportation. I'm also mentally composing a concerned letter to the Harvard administration, both about public safety, and about the image of their students as reckless and self-absorbed.

At least bicycles are stable. This onewheel thing cannot work without a computer balancing it (+ the rider). If it fails the rider falls on their face. It would be the equivalent of a bike fork breaking.

I picked up an e-bike not too long ago and took a bit to decide between class 2 and class 3 - I didn’t have enough experience with a bike and a speedometer to gauge whether the 20mph limit on class 2 would be enough. Having ridden around for a while now, yeah, absolutely agree - anything over ~15-20mph is above my comfort zone for “able to adjust to sudden changes in the environment.” Folks who get the “class 4”s are baiting a date with a reconstructive surgeon.

It's a bit of a balance. It's great to be able to keep up with the 25 mph/40 kph traffic on city streets, but small bumps in the pavement are rough and of course there's quadratically more energy to manage in the event of a crash.

I think we need to normalize the idea that riding a class 3 bike requires using at a minimum a full-face helmet, motorcycle gloves, and close-toed shoes.

Personally I'll likely keep riding my bike in class 3 mode since it results in zero speed penalty over driving in town (and often is faster thanks to bike lanes that bring you to the front of a line of cars stopped at a light, and can typically be parked steps away from the door of where I'm going).

While quite reasonable, you'd be facing an uphill battle in many places.

In a lot of the United States, it's pretty common to see someone riding a 160hp 4-cyl sportbike in a t-shirt and flip-flops. Other riders call them 'squids.' EMTs call them 'road crayons.'

Yeah, I'm lucky in that my city's done a fantastic job of creating bicycle infrastructure - between dedicated trails, clear bike lanes, and streets that have been designed & designated for bikes, it's rare I have to interact with fast-moving traffic (the rare times I do are just as unpleasant as everywhere else, of course).

A new e-bike rider who suddenly is capable of 20mph and has no experience to the contrary might assume (wrongly) that they can navigate safely at that speed.

Cyclists who can maintain 20+ mph on flat ground (not at all uncommon!) will have many more riding hours under their belts, and the commensurate handling skills and instincts.

This has definitely been my observation as well. E-bike riders tend to be less experienced at a given speed then cyclists.

They also seem less likely to be comfortable riding on the road (understandably) so illegally use sidewalks to a greater degree.

I've certainly seen this with the rent-a-bikes - there were rent-a-ebikes in my area for a while, and those folks were frightening.

Of course, we've still got the rental e-scooters, so our supply of "people riding way faster than logic, wisdom, their wheels, and the surroundings would suggest" is still adequately supplied.

In SF, I actually notice this more with the non-rental ones - the bikeshare e-bikes are pedal assist so a bit different.

I am hoping that as time goes on these newfound e-bike owners will get more comfortable and will respect traditional biking norms.

Another phenomena I've noticed is a lot more kids with e-bikes, oftentimes 3 kids to a single bike.

God… the most close calls I’ve seen have always been with rental e-scooters. Both of them blew past a red light, which btw, I was stopped at on my e-scooter. He nearly got hit by a SUV if the driver didn’t stop.

I think there’s some expectation for bikes to go with traffic, rental scooter riders think they’re some kind of unicorn where right of way no longer applies.

And I am assuming they are rental scooters because of the styling and lack of helmet.

I think generally the cultural expectation among bikers is stop signs as yield and red lights as (at minimum) stop signs.

The other thing is someone on a pedal bike hitting 20+ is generally doing it in an area that can handle it. An ebike you can get to 20 plus in half a block.

And we have still had one of those cyclists (on a traditional road bike) with all of those riding hours, handling skills and instincts, kill an elderly pedestrian on a mixed-use trail around here by maintaining that 20+mph.

I'm starting to think e-bikes that go that fast should use traffic lanes intended for cars and motorcycles, not mixed-use trails intended for bicycles and pedestrians.

That's heartbreaking.

20 mph on a mixed-use trail is dangerously reckless, unless you get a long empty stretch out in the countryside.

There are always groups of 4+ pedestrians who will suddenly spread out and block both lanes completely, with almost zero warning. If you can't react to that without an accident, you're going way too fast.

It would be nice if pedestrians would stay in the correct lane, but it's never going to happen. Even if you're only going 5 mph, you've rung a loud bell, and you've clearly said, "Passing on your left" (if that's the local trail's convention), then half the group will immediately spread into the left lane. And the other half will block the right. This is the most basic fact of mixed-use trail safety.

According to witnesses in this case, the cyclist called "on your left" (which is the local convention) prior to attempting the pass, and the pedestrian moved left. The descriptions did not sound over-the-top reckless to me.

"Heartbreaking" was really the only word for it.

Huh, I used to commute on a mountain bike in Somerville, MA. There were a couple of sections where I normally hit 20-25 mph on downhills. (Ones with no side roads to the right, and no tight corners.)

I wouldn't have wanted to wipe out or go over the handlebars at that speed. But on a familiar road, with 26" knobby tires and a front suspension, I had reliable control. The gyroscope effect of mountain bike rims is substantial at 25 mph. And a mountain bike is usually fine even on awful pavement, especially for someone who also rides in the woods.

The biggest danger by far in that scenario was Boston drivers. All the injuries I ever heard of were cars doing something illegal, or people getting doored on the Central Square bike lane. Overall, the statistics are pretty decent for experienced cyclists, if they're riding their daily commute and obeying traffic laws.

For an ebike, I'd want to stick with max 20mph pedal assist, and full size tires. And I'd want something I could ride onto a soft shoulder at full speed. So probably knobby tires and a front shock? If I can't drop 2" onto a sand shoulder, then I'm going too fast.

Even on normal bicycles, most people seem to have pretty bad handling skills. The two things I think people should really practice are braking (especially emergency braking, using primarily the front brake) and very low speed riding.

I was using an e-bike on a road with some ripples (I guess they messed up during paving). I was thrown off of the bike, and my helmet prevented any serious injury.

I wasn't even going very fast.

The only solution to that (and the potholes) is larger wheels.

What about this experience is specific to electric bikes?

Smaller tires and rotating assemblies with less mass are more susceptible to uneven pavement. For example, a vehicle like a motorcycle or even a motor scooter will be able to handle imperfections on city streets more easily.

If you got a bigger gyroscope under your butt, you're harder to knock over.

Bicycles tend to go with smaller and less massive wheels, because it decreases rider effort required to spin them up, and it's generally a reasonable compromise for vehicles that operate at slower speeds and on smoother surfaces. Of course, if we start adding more power beyond human effort, more speed, and put those vehicles on surfaces designed for larger vehicles, it may make sense to reevaluate that compromise.

Just to make sure we're on the same page: the answer to my question is "nothing", right?

The opposite. The answer to your question is that electric bikes have unique handling characteristics compared to everything that isn't an electric bike.

If your comparison is human powered bikes, the answer is that you have more energy at your disposal than a human powered bike, and so you may be on a different surface and at a different speed than you otherwise would be, with equipment designed for different conditions.

I suspect a regular bike would also have a hard time (my car shakes like crazy going over that spot), but the e-bike has much smaller wheels (about half the size of a bike), and that made it much much worse.

In my city they rent out these scooters with tiny wheels and people are only allowed to use them on the road. Those ripples are at the bottom of a nice downhill, and if anyone were to hit them on the scooter they'd probably go flying. I just fell hard.

A lot of ebikes go with pretty chunky tires (for a bicycle). Mine are like 3.3 inches wide. (Rad Power Bikes)

I'm mostly just a pedal assist guy though, I only go for the throttle on big hills or coming off a light with a car behind me.

Yeah, they do it for exactly that reason -- but not all do. Some even go with smaller tires to be convenient in a folding form factor, etc. And then you're got things like e-scooters which will launch a person at the mere thought of uneven pavement. I don't understand how people will ride those things and then call a motorcycle dangerous.

There’s a guy in my neighborhood who rides an electric stand-up scooter, who wears an aerostitch and a full-face motorcycle helmet while doing so.

He’s smart. It is not very common that people fall off of a two wheeled vehicle and hit the direct top of their head. You’re most likely to hit your face and extremities.

Riding position and weighting distribution.

If you're sitting straight up with 90% of your weight on the saddle, this can happen easily. If your weight is evenly split between saddle, pedal and bars, and your elbows are bent, you can absorb some pretty rough roads.

Did you bike much before? My impression of road biking and really any biking is that one eye has to be constantly glued to the road surface while the other eye watches for non-surface obstacles

The ripples are invisible - even knowing they are there I can't see them at night. I just know from memory to avoid that spot.

I don’t understand this aspect, just because it’s possible doesn’t mean one should.

And in your case it’s clear you don’t think it’s a good idea but seem to say you do it anyway, why do you do it?

>"heartily recommend that other early adopters think about voluntarily seeking out additional training"

Alternatively one can stop being an idiot and ride at safe speed. I bet that "additional training" would require at least this kind of sanity

Safety is conditional to a lot more than speed.

...and yet the future continuity of your consciousness itself depends on at least a minimum-viable level of safety!

What a diabolical tradeoff :D

something-something anthropic principle

People assume a "bike" is safe, and a "motorbike" can be dangerous, but there's no real difference between them.

I've reached 35 MPH downhill under pedal power; if I had wiped out I would have been in a world of hurt, or dead, depending on how it had gone.

I've hit 50 mph downhill on my bike just to say I'd done it. I started thinking of all the ways it could end badly. As soon as I hit 50, I was on the brakes.

I was almost killed by a downhill max speed bike crash when I was ~12.

Wearing a properly fitted helmet, I was knocked unconscious and concussed quite badly by the hit to my head.

One of my own more indelible memories is of sprinting down a sizeable hill, out of the saddle and over the front wheel, handily pulling away from my buddy whose bike computer was reading 65 kph (40 mph), wearing shorts, cleats, gloves, and a shit-eating grin.

Two days later, tooling around on flat ground, my handlebars came apart in my hands, thanks to hidden long-developing stress fractures, a characteristic of aluminium alloys. (There'd been numerous previous falls.)

Speed is indeed fun. But its consequences can be extreme.

(I've hit 80+ kph / 50+ mph on other rides.)

Another factor is rider mass. An elite cyclist at 60--65 kg (135--145 lb) can brake far more effectively than a past-their-prime 115--135 kg (250--300 lb) rider, particularly, again, on a grade. Brakes have only so much stopping power.

E-bikes make higher-speeds for less-experienced and less-skilled riders far more attainable.

Typical recreational cyclists spend most of their time in the 20--30 kph (12--18 mph) speed range.

>"People assume a "bike" is safe"

Bike is not safe. And it is not even about being hit by the car. Cyclists often fall and often it results in broken bones etc.

If you look at cities where bikes are well integrated then they are way safer than cars.

Safety is proportional to skilled and educated riders & drivers.

Road design plays a huge role.

Safety is also more than just "number dead" or "number seriously injured" though that plays a part. Some of it is also "number of incidents that could have been serious" - people walking can bump into each other without any real risk of serious harm (though a mob/crowd crush is a real danger that has to be considered, for example), but many bicycle/pedestrian or bicycle/bicycle incidents have the risk of serious harm.

And "depend on people to do the right thing at the right time with the right skill" should be the absolute LAST fallback - only used when there is no other reasonable option.

Motorbikes can easily (<10 seconds?) reach 4x your 35 mph, is probably why. That's why the full-face helmet and racing leathers. The leathers aren't going to help you if you go flying and hit something, which is why you should never ride that aggressively on the street, but if you go sliding for hundreds of feet, hopefully you only need a new suit and not most of your skin.

But you're right that even at 35 mph you'd be in a world of hurt. Every time I see a bicyclist going aggressively downhill in a bowl helmet and a barely-there lycra suit, I cringe so hard. You know how they get rid of road rash? They aggressively brush it out with what amounts to sandpaper.

Yet, the average motorcycle accident happens from speeds less than 30mph. Those speeds are plenty enough to kill. It all depends on what you hit and how.

Are you saying that 25mph is inherently unsafe? What's the safe speed then, for a normal dry day?

Does this speed limit apply to motorcycles too?

Falling from a standing position can be dangerous. "Safe" is a function of the environment you're in and device you're riding- traction, obstacles, intersections, speed of other traffic, visible distance (fog / clear sky / bend in the road), wind, all sorts of things.

Motorcycles have different tire sizes, masses and centers of gravity. The speed they can "safely" travel will always be different than a bicycle.

> Falling from a standing position can be dangerous.

If your definition is "nothing is safe" then there's no reason to complain about 25mph in particular.

> "Safe" is a function of the environment you're in and device you're riding- traction, obstacles, intersections, speed of other traffic, visible distance (fog / clear sky / bend in the road), wind, all sorts of things.

So give an example.

Either specify conditions or assume generic conditions.

Don't say someone else's example number is wrong without giving a rough correct number.

> Motorcycles have different tire sizes, masses and centers of gravity. The speed they can "safely" travel will always be different than a bicycle.

Great. That answers my second question of two.

It's not that "nothing is safe" but rather nothing is "inherently" safe.

I've crashed several times going roughly 12mph, with only a few scrapes and no broken bones- once because by brake line snapped, once because my tire got caught in a crack in the road I didn't see, and once because a car pulled in front of me.

Any one of those could have ended in a broken neck if I'd landed wrong. Going slower might have prevented one or two of those. Going faster wouldn't have caused worse injury in the third case given that I bounced off the car rather than going straight to the ground.

Well specifically I said "inherently unsafe" which does exist.

But we can ignore the word inherently, because the post I replied to seemed to be objecting to 25mph in general, and I wanted to dive into that.

That's fair. I'd feel pretty uncomfortable on most bikes at 25mph, but I've happily gone 18 without stress on an empty road on a clear day. I think most people who don't have a lot of experience should stick to 10-12 and work their way up, much like learning to pilot anything.

Safe braking distance depends on how much you weigh, the quality of your gear, and the road. I'm 6'4" and weigh 50 more pounds than I did as a scraggly youth when I did faster speeds, so unless I'm on equipment I trust very well I wouldn't often go over 15, I think... for me, most bikes don't brake well enough, and some aren't balanced well for my height.

I ride motorcycles on highways going 80mph+. I rode an engine conversion at 25mph and nope'd right out of doing that again.

The motorcycle's geometry is way different. It has a much larger contact patch. It has much more powerful brakes.

Goodness, no! There is no such thing as 'inherence' when discussing safety, that's a category mistake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake

I will say, anecdotally, that 25mph can sometimes, or even often, be unsafe on several popular brands of e-bike.

There are lots of reasons for this, but anecdotally, tire thickness, wheel diameter, rider height/stance, and braking system quality all seem to contribute, along with a lot of other factors that are hard to reason about beforehand, but easy to read off crash statistics, if you have data of sufficient quality.

The one factor that is really counterintuitive for me is weight. We learned in the motorcycle course that a heavier motorbike will actually be safer in, for example, rainy conditions, as the weight of the internal-combustion engine pushes the motorbike against the earth, expelling water from between the tread and the asphalt.

E-bikes, however, are often bicycle-ish in weight -- only twice as heavy as a standard bicycle, say, instead of ten times as heavy, which is what a motorcycle is. Nevertheless, they still vroom at motorbike-ish speeds.

This makes e-bikes "inherently" more dangerous in icing conditions, in comparison to an ICE motorbike, as there is less weight holding the business end of your e-bike-tire flush with the asphalt.

But 'inherently' is in scare-quotes above because it's still not quite right to say that every e-bike will be more dangerous because of this -- and I'm sure the market is already working on mitigations.

Tradeoffs, all the way down

> Goodness, no! There is no such thing as 'inherence' when discussing safety, that's a category mistake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake

Keep in mind I was responding to someone implying that "don't be an idiot" is all you need, which is pretty similar in bad reasoning.

I wanted to know why that particular person objected to 25mph.

> The one factor that is really counterintuitive for me is weight. We learned in the motorcycle course that a heavier motorbike will actually be safer in, for example, rainy conditions, as the weight of the internal-combustion engine pushes the motorbike against the earth, expelling water from between the tread and the asphalt.

> E-bikes, however, are often bicycle-ish in weight -- only twice as heavy as a standard bicycle, say, instead of ten times as heavy, which is what a motorcycle is. Nevertheless, they still vroom at motorbike-ish speeds.

On the other hand, motorbikes lose a bunch of pressure because of tire shape. And the rider provides a lot of weight. So I'd want more information here; it's more complicated than motorbike vs. motorbike.

All excellent points, but I think there's something like 2-5x as much tire surface area in contact with the road, and something like a x10 difference in weight, but I'm quite pointedly not googling either of these hand-wavey claims.

Suffice to say, you're quite right, and I don't have all the answers. And I suspect very strongly that regulators are similarly answer-tare.

Which is why, for now, it's a great idea to purchase e-bike-specific training if you're going to be spending a lot of time with an e-bike between your thighs, and, in a pinch, you can learn a lot from a motorcycle course.

Anecdotally, I use the controlled-skid technique at least once a week, when decelerating suddenly (to avoid a pothole, say.)[1] My middle-aged miniscuses would thank me, if they had the power of speech. ;)

[1] Sadly, I still have some of the bad cycling habits I picked up in my twenties in Chicago, blithely ploughing through six-way intersections and so forth, but none of the associated physical characteristics that made this activity if not safe then at least stochastically survivable.

Specifically, reaction time, strength, and flexibility are all reduced, but all the bad habits I acquired are still there. This is the other reason I took the motorbike course: pruning leftover bad habits that I can no longer afford to offset.

> All excellent points, but I think there's something like 2-5x as much tire surface area in contact with the road, and something like a x10 difference in weight, but I'm quite pointedly not googling either of these hand-wavey claims.

When you consider the total weight with the rider, the difference in weight might only be 3x.

Interesting claim -- what's your reasoning?

I would suppose it would depend on the cc of the motorbike, so, tentatively, yes, that makes intuitive sense -- a Honda Ruckus for example might not be much heavier than 3 e-bikes.

All the same: big bikes are heavy, and that turns out to be a good thing, balance-wise. Really different feeling. You can't really put it in words, it has to be experienced!

> a Honda Ruckus for example might not be much heavier than 3 e-bikes.

I don't think you're following what I'm saying.

If the ebike is 50 pounds, and the motorbike is 550 pounds, and the human is 200 pounds, then motorbike+human is 3x the weight of ebike+human. And that's how much the tires are pushing down.

Makes sense. Thanks for this!

Think of "idiocy" as the lack of intelligence, rather than a separate entity of its own, similarly to how high-school physics (and therefore, contemporary common sense!) understands cold as the absence of heat.

This means that you can get rid of idiocy by adding intelligence to a system, in the same way that you can warm up a room with a space heater.

But how do you build up intelligence? Put it this way. Your onboard wetware neural network needs to iterate on e.g. pulling out of a slide, and a bunch of other stuff that you won't know how to do unless someone trains you. No iteration means no gradient, and no gradient means 'no smart'.

So if you want to defeat idiocy, you need training. Now, you can train you, but of course, you'll never know if the training was complete.

Thus the obvious antidote to e-vehicle idiocy-at-scale[1] is, yes, formal lessons and deliberate practice. Just like driving. Just like piano.

[1] a friend from grad school who is Korean told me that there's a word in Korean that literally means "road stupid" and this is the only fact I know about Korean and I love it. So many people are road stupid! I'm one of them! I'm trying to improve!

>"Now, you can train you, but of course, you'll never know if the training was complete."

Deliberate practice I understand.

The proposed "formal training" for this specific case however would not know "if the training is complete" either. They'll just be taking your money.

Well, they're welcome to it -- at least once a week, I use dodge-skid-stop, a specific skill I formally acquired by trying to do it and dropping the training bike a bunch while a grouchy 65yo biker glowered at my incompetence until it evaporated. Take my money

Reply on news.ycombinator.com