I think the pros outweigh the cons? Anything that steers us away from car culture is desperately needed at this point, and this is one of the only practical alternatives in suburbia.
I would be for bike safety being taught at schools, though I feel licensing for minors would be a quagmire? Let’s not go there. I would be for speed limiters that are harder to bypass. For example, I can disable mine by phone app. If I had any trouble I could ask, well, a teenager? lol
But perhaps most importantly, cycling infrastructure, at least in North America, is a joke and there is so much that can be done on the safety front it’s not funny. I wish the decision makers were all bike commuters. Then they would understand the level of impracticality in their well-meaning but futile attempts to improve the situation.
This basically sounds like the regulation in Germany. Bike safety is being taught at schools, and there is a discrete distinction between e-bikes and Pedelecs. Pedelecs, which only support while pedalling, are legally bicycles with a speed limit of 25 km/h (15 mp/h). Everything above this limit or with the capability to drive without pedalling are called E-Bikes and need insurance and some sort of license.
There is a lot NA could learn from Germany and, well, Europe in general. I’m in Canada and read an article recently about how some Scandinavian communities keep their bike trails serviceable all winter long. I wish! They pack down the snow kind of like a cross-country ski trail here but over a broader width.
I think the real concern should be all the exercise the kids aren’t getting by riding eBikes. Kids that ride bicycles everywhere build muscle and cardiovascular strength and the benefits of that carry on into young adulthood. Our children are already playing outside a lot less than they used to. Children should get lots of exercise, and eBikes provide very little compared to a regular bicycle.
Eh, people riding an ebike everywhere probably wouldn’t be riding a bike anyways if they didn’t have that ebike. It just offers a larger range of area they can go to. I bet most would just be sitting at home if they couldn’t ride their ebike to their friend’s house or wherever they want to meet their friends.
The difference here is we already have motor vehicles, and already have 2 wheeled motor vehicles, they’re called motorcycles and they’re highly regulated and require a special license. Just because the motor is electric doesn’t make it not a motor vehicle.
There was literally a mother in the article that helped her son remove the speed governor on the bike and allowed it to go 70mph and even admitted that she thinks these companies make them easy to remove for better sales and no liability. She said she got him the bike when he was 14.
Rollerblades, skateboards, and bikes only go so fast. Even at the regulated limit of 20 mph that is a speed kids are not hitting on their own. Have you ever tried to ride your bicycle at a sign that detects your speed? It is REALLY hard to hit 20mph let alone sustain that speed. And that’s the speed these kids are going all the time if they haven’t messed with the bike to make it go even faster. There needs to be better regulation with these.
20 mph (32 km/h) on a regular bike is doable, but yeah, usually that involves a very “flat” road or even a road that has a slight decline. And as you’ve said, maintaining it (e.g. for more than 10 seconds) is a whole different story.
Furthermore, it also requires a certain fitness level and “bodily involvement”. The thing that still catches me off guard at times is how relaxed some people on ebikes look while going that fast. Whatever kind of judgement I could make in the past on how fast someone is approaching based on how much they “visually excert themselves” (e.g. hunching forward or even standing up) kind of has become meaningless with ebikes.
However I wouldn’t want to share a bike path with individuals riding carelessly at 40kmh/30mph. At least here where there is some semblance of ‘bike culture’, unrestricteds do ride slowly on paths and walkable areas, and usually only let it rip in the road.
Teens might not necessarily abide by that, or understand the risks. They tend to prefer escooters here anyway, and those top out at a much slower 20kmh/15mph… could be worse I guess 🤷♂️
Since North America is poorly designed, it isn’t a good thing. If North America was better designed then biking and walking would be safer. #NotJustBikes
Even better is that you wouldn’t need an e-bike either, as frankly the high speed ones are incredibly dangerous especially when there’s good infrastructure for bicycling.
Sure, they’re incredibly dangerous. But they’re still way less dangerous than cars. I’d rather be complaining about ebikes injuring people than the countless deaths caused by motor vehicles.
Ebikes will need some regulation to limit speeds, of course.
Denmark already have regulations that stipulate that ebikes and escooters can’t go faster than 20kmt and i feel that’s reasonable. For scooters you’re also required by law to wear a helmet.
We have the same/similar regulations in norway as well. I don’t have an e bike, but I guess the speed limit must be annoyingly low. I often pass them on my regular bike in like 30 km/h.
I could be wrong and the speed limit is only for scooters but honestly I don’t care to look into it. I prefer my regular bike and until I’m old and incapable of using that I won’t change.
Edit: Learned a lot about this today. Cheers fellas for the replies!
IIRC motor power has to be limited to 250w, and the speed gouvenor is set to 24km/h.
I have one of those E bikes that only run the motor when the user pedals, and it wasn't hard to remove the speed limit. The bike paths here in Oslo are a bit sketchy sometimes, so I usually dont go above 30km/h, though my bike can reach 40 at full battery.
Edit: speed limit is 25km/h
This article is obviously from an American perspective, in which case e-bikes are probably a necessary evil to give kids more freedom. But from the Dutch perspective I’m certainly a bit scared about them. I see more and more kids racing through the streets on those things. These kids often used to go by bike anyway, but their speed was still limited by their physical ability. Now they have to put in less energy, meaning they’ll gain weight, and they’re also going way too fast with a heavier bike that they don’t fuly control. It’s led to plenty of dangerous situations already. People obviously aren’t forced to buy an e-bike, but the kids without one often have a bit of a problem when they have to cycle 10km every day with friends who do have one. So it becomes a domino effect where we end up in a worse situation than before.
Especially in the Netherlands, better to have those escooters than to have actual scooters which make tons of noise and blow exhaust fumes to any biker that drives behind them.
Oh yeah for scooters it’s better. But for bikes it’s only better if it leads to someone using a bike where they otherwise could not. Otherwise it makes stuff more dangerous and expensive and less healthy.
Here electric dirtbikes are a problem. They rip around with no lights in the dark, and you can’t hear them coming. Things like that make me understand why places like Paris have bike gates to restrict the handlebar width and tyre size of bikes that can pass through
The riders wear no helmets whatsoever, so I’m just currently waiting on that problem to sort itself out 👍
Still infinitely better than hearing a two stroke from half a mile away though
I was going to say, when I was a kid, growing up in the 70s, I had a dirt bike with a spedometer and I regularly pushed that thing to 25mph just with the pedals.
My first thought was “faster than 20? No big deal…”
But then I hit this:
“in fact, the Talaria can hit 70 miles per hour. His mother gave him her blessing, she said, and even helped him clip a wire that removes the speed “governor” that ordinarily limits the vehicle to 20 miles per hour.”
Having an eBike that can go that fast with relatively no modification at all does not seem wise to me, and it’s irresponsible of the parent to assist in that.
1 year after graduation, one of my high school friends got into an argument with his girlfriend, was riding his motorcycle too fast without a helmet, and crashed straight into the back of a garbage truck, killing him instantly.
A bike helmet wouldn’t have helped, maybe a DOT approved motorcycle helmet would have.
I was going to say, when I was a kid, growing up in the 70s, I had a dirt bike with a spedometer and I regularly pushed that thing to 25mph just with the pedals.
My first thought was “faster than 20? No big deal…”
But then I hit this:
“in fact, the Talaria can hit 70 miles per hour. His mother gave him her blessing, she said, and even helped him clip a wire that removes the speed “governor” that ordinarily limits the vehicle to 20 miles per hour.”
Having an eBike that can go that fast with relatively no modification at all does not seem wise to me, and it’s irresponsible of the parent to assist in that.
1 year after graduation, one of my high school friends got into an argument with his girlfriend, was riding his motorcycle too fast without a helmet, and crashed straight into the back of a garbage truck, killing him instantly.
A bike helmet wouldn’t have helped, maybe a DOT approved motorcycle helmet would have.
Edit I looked up the mod, it brings the bike to 70Kph, not mph. So about 45. Still faster than I’d want my kid going.
FWIW, I used to have an ebike that went up to 70, as an adult, that I used to commute to work and do shopping. New regulations came in restricting all new ebikes to 25 km/h, and now a shopping run takes an hour one-way.
I never actually timed it but I can work it out. Back of the hand maths says 25 is a third of 70, roughly, so the journey used to take a third of the time, twenty minutes.
Freedom. I fucking hate this shit where parents own their children. Fuck off with this. Genuinely one of the most awful aspecta of American life is having to live with and get to know your shitty boomer parents instead of getting drunk and having sex and dancing, like I assume european teens get to do, considering their age of consent and drinking ages are lower than ours.
instead of getting drunk and having sex and dancing, like I assume european teens get to do
Uh, yeah but actually no. You also need to hide it from your parents wtf. Also we do live with and get to know our parents until we get out of their home which with current prices the age is around 28-30ish right now?
E-bikes are great. I’ve got one I built from a kit. That said, you don’t want kids riding more powerful e-bikes than they can handle. If you wouldn’t let your kid loose with a gas-powered dirt bike that can go 30+ mph, you shouldn’t let them loose with an equivalent e-bike.
I’m against licensing e-bikes or requiring insurance. While they can potentially be dangerous to the rider if misused, danger to other people or property is pretty minimal. The risk isn’t enough to justify requiring liability insurance, like with cars. Licensing will only discourage ridership.
That said, there should be an age requirement for certain classes. In lieu of that, parents are just going to have to exercise common sense. The kids will do what they want, rules be damned.
I love e-bikes but also think that many of those are motorbikes in disguise. a 250w motor is enough for most people (excluding cargo bikes, of course). I totally agree with you with the rest of points. In general measures that harms adoption of bicycling are a bad idea
I’ve got a 1000w motor on mine. Is it a motor bike in disguise? Yeah, maybe, since it has a throttle control. Where I live, though, there’s no regulations specific to ebikes. I obey traffic laws and stay off of sidewalks and have a drivers license, so as far as I’m concerned it’s fine. It does go about 25-30 mph, but in my mind it’s a commuter vehicle. I’m not riding on bike trails that share pedestrians and have low speed limits.
If necessary, I could modify it to make it a class three e-bike. The governor, currently off, cuts it to 750w and I could change it from a throttle control to a pedal assist with parts that were part of the kit but are still sitting in the box.
It’s in a legal gray area, as my state’s definition of what constitutes a “motorized bicycle” was written with gasoline engines in mind. There’s lots of unlicensed, uninsured 49cc scooters running around that fall into the same gray area, so it fits right in.
Only to a degree. Letting your child run free on a playground is significantly less dangerous than letting them run free in a hazardous waste landfill. We can absolutely design safe and free places. We just need to stop designing our cities for the sole use of hazardous waste (cars).
It’s worth noting that the top picture in the article is of a kid on a $4400 Sur-ron X, which is strictly not road legal and is capable of up to 45mph and can accelerate to 30mph in 3.5 seconds.
Anything over a class 2 should be licensed and require insurance. In the US if you are traveling faster than 12mph you are required to follow traffic laws. Some states even require vehicle insurance if there is an incident above 12mph.
You think teenagers care about insurance? Even if they did, they certainly can’t buy any.
I’m pretty sure the teens my neighbourhood that go as fast as they can at night on the wrong side of the road around blind corners with their lights turned off are uninsured. I love my eBike. Not a fan of how I see other people riding them every day though (and not just kids).
States have no licensing/registration infrastructure for bicycles. And any changes must happen state by state (c.f. the chaos that is motorcycle registration).
99% of the danger on roads is caused by motor vehicles. Once we’ve solved that problem we can have a conversation about whether licensing improves e-bike safety. But until that day, creating barriers to car alternatives directly makes people less safe. If you prevent teenage hooligans from biking, they will drive instead and will be an actual danger to people instead of this imagined one.
People on bikes and scooters here just blow through red lights without even looking. Sometimes I won’t even hear the scooters running the reds when I’m on foot because they are so quiet.
People I know have unfortunately died or become vegetables from non-traffic related crashes on bikes and escooters without helmets. :/
I love mountain biking, but I’m super anal retentive about always wearing protective gear, and I never ride with traffic because it’s so dangerous. I feel similarly uneasy about heavy and fast ebikes and emtbs.
I think you and the article have this wrong. 45mph is with the speed governor removed. The article doesn’t make it clear whether the parent misspoke and the reporter didn’t fact check or that the reporter just mistyped, but you can’t get anywhere close to 70 mph with a 6kW peak motor. There are people who have modded the hell out of these and poured thousands more dollars into them to get those kinds of speeds, but that’s not possible with a stock bike.
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