'70 MPH e-bikes' prompt one US state to change its laws

In the more rural, even suburban areas, it might be totally safe, even safer to go 25-30mph instead of 20, if you’re on a road with 35mph car traffic.

I agree with you for major cities, I’ve had to deal with the antisocial people who rip through crowds.. but a sweeping ban like that will limit usefulness outside of cities.

I’ve hit 30+mph on a regular bike with a strong wind at my back, and it felt fast. But not dangerous by any means - I was out on a rural country road. It’d be nice to get that “wind” from electricity, regardless of the weather, to greatly reduce the commute time between towns, without needing to drive a (more dangerous) car.

I'm all for people having easier access to the joys of getting around without a car. But sometimes I wonder if that accessibility makes it easy to bring car-like speeding mentality in places where it wasn't before.

However, in practice, no one is enforcing these laws and it’s difficult, because there is no easy way for the police to determine what class a bike is and no authority providing you with a license plate to verify the class that would limit your access if you didn’t have it. The government has basically accepted that most ebikes conform to the ebike laws most of the time. However, I believe many rental e-bikes like Lime/Bird/etc do conform to the law and are Class 1 or Class 2 bikes.

these power ratings are usually incorrect and depending on construction of e-bike might not be enough for good acceleration uphill

It's taken a generation for acoustic bike lanes to be standard infrastructure in the US, and they've mostly been an exhaust valve. I spent the 2010s bike commuting in SF, and even at rush hour you'd have at-most a dozen bikes waiting at a stoplight. In part because we still need to do so much to make urban cycling as safe as it is enjoyable, even in inner cities, cars outnumber bikes.

Over the last few years, motorbikes have become desirable at a scale the US is unfamiliar with and unequipped to service. They're a cool toy for kids, a useful tool for commuters, and the lowest barrier to entry for deliveries. In the same way it's not safe to mix someone in the foam hat we call a bicycle helmet with multiton metal vehicle traffic, it's not safe for motorbike riders either. They have too much speed and inertia to mix comfortably with bicycle riders, but not enough protection to mix with cars and trucks. Worse, car drivers seem to have forgotten how to drive. Red light running is no longer rare, and more drivers seem to be watching the phone in their laps than the traffic ahead.

Filtering and lane splitting doesn't solve the big-car-vs-tiny-motorbike problem, but it at least helps. Unfortunately it's mostly a California thing. A few states are experimenting with reduced flavors of it, but safety (in the form of filtering/splitting) is still at odds with the law in most states.

There's a principle in Dutch traffic engineering that each grade of mass/vulnerability needs its own right of way: Pedestrians have crosswalks. Bicycles have cycletracks. Cars have roads. Trains have rails. Each one is vulnerable to all the bigger ones and a threat to all the smaller ones, so they each have a solution. Our cities need to bring that approach to motorbikes.

Unfortunately, this goes against the grain of race/class/tradition. The people in power tend to move through the world in cars, so accommodating other modes is an unfamiliar nuisance to them. (See also: the decades it took for bike lanes to become standard.) NYPD has been actively harassing cyclists this year because the nepobaby chief of police's heiress mom is afraid of them.

Delivery riders tend to be immigrants. They're willing to work hard jobs for low wages, and there's a black market of Uber Eats profiles that they can rent without work permits [1]. They can be intimidating - looking foreign and not speaking English. They learned to ride in places with less regimented road cultures than the US (places where motorbikes are expected to filter to the front of traffic). Being sandwiched between cars is both dangerous and slow - both counter to the instincts of someone who gets rewarded for completing a delivery quickly. Of course they break the law - filtering, riding on sidewalks, riding the wrong way…

What cities need to do is give well behaved motorbikes a practical avenue. Maybe there's a motorbike lane next to the bike lane. Maybe filtering is legalized. There's plenty of room to find a solution here. Give them a safe and reasonable option, then ticket the people who continue to break the law.

Instead, we're likely to be stuck with obsolete laws for a while. Immigrants speeding through traffic and riding on the sidewalk are not a sympathetic constituency. But until the law catches up to the technology and the culture, this is going to be a mess.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V9ypoULc0I

It's not reasonable to say "every parent should learn about the dangers of different types of electric vehicle through the injury of a child in their peer group"

- https://hpcbikes.com/products/revolution-xx

- https://www.eridepros.com/pro-sr (no bicycle pedals)

I was able to find some 60MPH e-bikes that looks somewhat like a very bulky bike but even then, it's still closer to a motorcycle with pedals.

But in reality there's a lot of untrained teens going different levels of too fast and that is something we should be trying to prevent.

Clearly speed isn't the only thing that matters to this classification and we've made a mess conflating "can ride on public roads" and "can operate a motor vehicle" and deciding what exactly we have a problem with for under 16s.

Edit: I am not saying these things aren't crazy fast and dangerous, but if you go into an electric motorcycle store and they try to sell you an e-bike with a pedal assist, it's obvious they are not the same thing. The form-factor is just different.

Which in practice means that anyone who doesn't pass a vibe check can be stopped for a fishing expedition and the officer can say in the report "well, they appeared to be going faster, oops".

We have a TON of ebikes i Norway and the cops regularly do checkpoints of suspected chippers in the main commute routes.

They have a little threadmill thing similar to what chiptuners use when tuning car engines that measure torque, watt and top speed.

In the US, the issue is mostly cops in cars. I'm pretty fortunate that my city has cops on bikes in common biking areas. That has reduced a huge amount of bad behavior of people on ebikes.

Technically they're not illegal, but they are classified as motor vehicles and require a driving license, tax, and insurance. However, no one actually offers insurance, and I guess you'll also run in to problems registering them for tax, so they are effectively illegal.

This is just silly and because of a 1980s legal definition of "motor vehicle": "a mechanically propelled vehicle intended or adapted for use on roads". Non-enforcement seems like a good thing in lieu of parliament amending this unintended and silly classification. This is exactly what happened here in Ireland and some other countries.