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Comment by photoGrant | Hacker News Reader

I like it mainly because this probably is limiting electric bikes more than restricting cars. It's a lil' difficult for cars to hit 50 /too often/ and I say this anecdotally but those bikes in a very 'bike friendly' city are blurring lines and only getting faster.

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Electric bicycles aren't allowed to exceed 25km/h anyway, so legally only human-powered bikes can exceed the 30km/h speed limit. If the owners messed with their bikes to override the speed limiter, I doubt they'll care about the 30km/h signs.

Mopeds and similar vehicles (the ones with license plates and mandatory helmets) will probably be hit the worst.

In Norway the law is stated such that you can get help from the bicycle engine to reach max 25km/h.

It's not very difficult to reach 30km/h to 50km/h manually on a bicycle.

50 is literally faster than Tour de France pros maintain on flat ground. A regular person on a normal bike will have a hard time even doing 30.

Thanks for pointing that out.. Maybe 35km/h is a more reasonable ceiling.

The reason I mentioned this number is because I found this article of some Norwegian middle aged woman saying she is reaching 50km/h explaining something with the speed limit of bicycles in Norway.

However she meant that she reaches that speed downhill, which makes sense..

https://elbil.no/lovlig-elsykkel-i-508-km-t/

30km/h is doable with some minor effort, sure, but it's not exactly common. You'll be held up by other bikes constantly on most roads this applies to.

50km/h is for athletes or going down steep hills. If you're training for the tour de france in some random neighbourhood in Amsterdam, I think you're doing something wrong.

50 sustained is trained athlete level. Normal cyclists can't do that for any length of time.

Nitpick: the assist must cut off at 25 km/h but you can pedal it faster if you are up to it. (unless it's a s-pedelec which is allowed to go 45 km/h but away from bike lanes).

One thing that really surprised me about London when I visited (and people told me that this was also true for the EU and so presumably Amsterdam), was that ebikes are limited to a top speed of 15mph before pedaling. If I heard correctly, it sounds like this won’t affect ebikes?

This surprised me because in NYC ebikes are limited to 25mph before pedaling.

That's an EU thing and aims to make it safe to put e-bikes on the bike paths instead of in the car lanes. It groups vehicles with similar speed and relative weight together.

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