>"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
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
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.
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.
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.
Wearing a properly fitted helmet, I was knocked unconscious and concussed quite badly by the hit to my head.
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.
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.
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!
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.
What a diabolical tradeoff :D
something-something anthropic principle
Does this speed limit apply to motorcycles too?
The motorcycle's geometry is way different. It has a much larger contact patch. It has much more powerful brakes.
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
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.
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.
When you consider the total weight with the rider, the difference in weight might only be 3x.
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!
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.
Motorcycles have different tire sizes, masses and centers of gravity. The speed they can "safely" travel will always be different than a bicycle.
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.
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.
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.
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.