I’ve put 4000 miles on my e-bike in the past 2 years. Even though I follow traffic laws, I’ve seen far too much fuckery by other e-bike riders. I’m seeing children riding e-bikes and scooters, without helmets, doing crazy shit in the middle of the road almost cause accidents. I have narrowly avoided hitting such children on 3 separate occasions. I see plenty of adults on these things also not following traffic laws and riding these things on busy sidewalks.
I really do not want e-bikes to be regulated like cars. Being forced to register and carry insurance makes an inexpensive thing expensive. That being said, there are tons of dumb assholes out there that will ruin it for the rest of us.
Registering is fine, a lot of people voluntarily register their expensive bikes with local police that have those programs anyway.
Insurance is weirder. Cars require as much insurance as they do because they weigh multiple tons and can kill people and destroy infrastructure. A powered bike can do a lot of damage, especially if it rams someone, but it has an order of magnitude less destructive potential than a car. Especially for a limited powered bike insurance “should” be significantly cheaper.
The difference is honestly closer to two orders of magnitude.
E = 1/2mv^2
1/2 * 1000kg * 50 km/h * 50 km/h * 0.2778 mh/skm * 0.2778 mh/skm = 96 kJ
1/2 * 100kg * 25 km/h * 25 km/h * 0.2778 mh/skm * 0.2778 mh/skm = 2 kJ
Just license them in accordance with their capabilities. All the bad press about ebikes lately is running cover for government negligence over lack of normalizing them into existing licensing frameworks, on behalf of the automotive lobby that knows if these vehicles aren’t given an appropriate legal niche they will instead end up being seen by society as dangerous scofflaws and ultimately banned or legistalted out of practicality.
Use your brains. Ask why the discussion doesn’t revolve around appropriate licensure and infrastructure, and instead revolves around how to get rid of them.
IL has a L license for motorcycles under 150cc, no reason not to have a kwH rating for it.
Do states not? PA is 750W, but bikes might be governed to 20 or 28mph.
A 110cc motorbike can do 60 mph, theres a fundamental difference between that and a souped up ebike doing 30.
Souped up e-bikes are approaching 60+ now too.
This kid who killed a pedestrian was caught going 56mph in the weeks preceding the accident.
I think it makes sense for those bikes that can do 30mph+ and aren’t even meant to be ridden as bicycles despite having pedals. They usually look like a motorcycle and can accommodate two riders. Having bicycle pedals shouldn’t be a loophole for bypassing drivers licensing requirements and traffic laws. These things are usually ridden by 10-15 year olds who don’t yet have formal training. I saw a kid cause an accident buzzing through a 4-way stop. I’ve also heard of them colliding with pedestrians at high speeds on sidewalks. E-bikes are a good thing overall, but it’s the Wild West right now and some e-bikes can go way too fast for something that isn’t regulated.
I’ve got a skateboard and unicycle myself, I think all these things are great, but you’ve highlighted the big problems that exist today. It’s the kids that have no sense, whip by people walking, being ignorant to traffic rules, etc.
I watched 2 kids on a gravel path whip by on escooters past a 5 year old swaying back and forth on a pedal bike as he was obviously trying to learn. That could have gotten bad.
I agree with all of your points. However, in California, ebikes are already regulated:
https://riding5.com/blogs/news/california-ebike-laws-class-1-2-3
The only “wild west” thing happening is that some people are riding illegal, (they’re already illegal. We don’t need new laws) unregistered electric motorcycles. The 30+ mph “ebikes” you refer to: those are motorcycles.
What makes it the Wild West is there is no good way to enforce anything at the moment, so any existing regulations are ineffective to the point where the current environment is de facto unregulated
Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, the East Bay legislator behind the license plate bill, says law enforcement in her district has been raising concerns for some time. Officers told her they are seeing dangerous speeds from electric bikes but have no practical way to issue citations without putting themselves or others at risk. A license plate changes that equation.
She also pointed out that the rise of e-bikes among younger riders has made it harder to know at a glance whether a child is legally riding an age-appropriate e-bike, operating an illegally modified one, or cruising around on an electric moped that is not supposed to be on public roads at all.
I’m a bicyclist and I think this is not a bad idea. Class 3 e-bikes have engines which can accelerate to a top speed of nearly 50 km/h which makes them practically slow motorcycles at that point. A collision between a pedestrian and an e-bike accelerated to top speed will send at least one person to the hospital. And the risk of cyclists who blatantly flaunt traffic laws is also present, even though most people in my city tend to follow the law. There’s a bike path in my city which is used as both a commuter route and a recreational route, and some people ride their e-bikes at crazy speeds just centimetres away from children riding their tricycles.
What I wouldn’t support is the extra paperwork burden. Opponents of this law are right when they say that it should be made easier to switch from driving to using an e-bike, not harder. But minimal registration formalities are probably fine, as long as they are made relatively easy. Maybe something like a registration plate which is affixed at the factory and which you have to register using the DMV website or an app. This would also make tracking down stolen bikes easier.
E-bikes are already capped at 25km/h here. Aren’t they elsewhere?
That’s nothing a cheap EEPROM reader from China cannot solve…
In the US e-bikes that can reach 60 mph — which is 96.5 km/h — without peddling are starting to become common, especially with children. They are motorcycles.
If you can’t tell the difference between an e bike and an e motorcycle then you shouldn’t be legislating
How should one distinguish them? Pedals are the obvious way, but they don’t have anything to do with safety. A bike could have pedals and go 200 km/h.
What would a bike require to go 200km/h.
Seriously. Think about it.
A motor. Which is what ebikes have. The difference between a 20km/h ebike and a 200km/h ebike is the strength of the motor.
If you don’t cap the strength of the motor to be classified as an “ebike”, one could build an electric motorcycle that goes 200km/h and call it an ebike.
That’s exactly what i’m talking about.
We’re facing similar kneejerk laws down here and there is a massive world of difference between a 250-500w ebike and a multi kilowatt emote / dirt bike. However, legislators are acting like a goddamn 250w pedelec with an assist cutout at 30kph is the same as an illegally imported kilowatt emote some dipshit 17 year old ploughs into the back of a parked car at 60kph
I think we probably agree on the fundamentals here: it’s the power and speed that should be a regulatory distinction.
That’s not e-bike versus e-motorcycle exactly. It doesn’t matter what the form factor or control mechanism is. If it’s fast and powerful, you can’t ride it on bike paths and need a driver’s license to take it on the road.
As a cyclist, I’m all for e-bikes requiring a license.
Most e-bikes in my area are ridden by people who can’t get a driver’s license. This includes people underage, people with their license revoked, and people who have restrictions on their licenses.
And people regularly remove the regulators on those bikes, making them unsafe on the roads.
Meanwhile, they’re also tearing up the mountain bike trails I normally ride on my pedal bike. Many of the people riding these have zero traffic safety training, zero trail etiquette, and zero interest in cooperating with others.
Last week at dusk I had what looked like a 13 year old riding his bike behind me in city traffic, doing a wheelie. Eventually he swerved around me to cross oncoming traffic and hop up onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street so he could avoid an intersection.
Sure, there’s probably plenty of well behaved e-bike riders out there, but the volume of unsafe ones I’ve seen over the past month is insane.
Perhaps you live in a car dependent area and e bikes are the first viable non car mode of transport in your area and so you are seeing those growing pains of introducing a new mode of transportation for the first time in its history.
Ebikes should not need a license, the bikes themselves need regulation so they are safe without one.
Ebikes should not need a license, the bikes themselves need regulation so they are safe without one.
Agreed. What in my country are class I and II bikes should not need a license. The regulation you speak of should “regulate” class III bikes as something other than an “e-bike”, and require license/registration/insurance. We already do this with hypothetical class IV bikes; a motorcycles.
As a cyclist, I’m all for e-bikes requiring a license.
As a cyclist, I disagree. For traffic, we only need licensing on e-bikes that support people to go faster than ±20 km/h whithout pedalling to such speed by their own body strength. Basically: treat e-bike like the motorcycles they are. But ± 20km/h is a speed a normal healthy person on a normal non-electric bicycle can also easily achieve. It’s a generally safe speed in most situations. If it isn’t, it’s a mental health or sociopath behavior of the driver / very poor street infrastructure problem, but the light e-bike shouldn’t have to take the blame.
On mountainbike trails (and on hiking trails!!!) i’m more in favor of something getting close a complete ban for anything motorised.
While my knee-jerk reaction was that they’re going to over regulate, all those changes are already in effect in the EU and it didn’t destroy the e-bike market there. So I guess California will manage.
Class 2 and 3 requiring license plates makes sense to me.
And class 1 would be pedelecs in the EU, where they are capped at 250 Watt and 25 kmh. Class 1 being capped at 750 Watt and 16mph (25kmh) seems okay, might be inconvenient with how much further apart everything is over there, but reaction times are the same all over the globe.
I personally don’t even drive the full 25kmh, in the city I’m capped by the manual cyclists in front, which I don’t need to overtake. And outside I’m too worried about my battery to go full power. I will say, cargo bikes in particular could use a higher powered motor than the 250 Watts we have here, but I have no idea what a good cap would be.
You’re thinking on the right questions…
It took years, but finally I realized the appropriate threshold is simply to have people go on an exercize-bike/meter, for a 90-minute-session, & have them sustain what they can, for that duration, then multiply their RMS-output ( root-mean-square rounds-down ) by 3x, & make that THEIR motor-limit:
This means that you don’t get flimsy 50-lbs children with 750-w of bike-motor, & you also don’t hobble linebackers ( I think that’s what they’re called: NFL tackles? ) with the same limit you’re putting on small/flimsy ones.
Proportionate to the strength you wield when managing your own body, see?
So, for many reasonably-strong riders, it’d be … around 300-w, tbh…
Alot of people would hate me for making the limit sooo close to their own physical-strength, but … live longer.
& simply make another limit, higher, & require license-plate for that category.
I’d make it so that within the 25-kph & 3x-sustained-90-minutes-wattage, no license-plate is required: you get a photo-ID card which says you don’t need a plate.
More power, more speed? then you need a plate.
Some cities need 40-kph to do the parkways, & that’d have to be one of the limits.
60-kph would be needed for other parkways, but that’d be absolute-limit, & some body-armor would be reasonable at that speed ( since crash-energy goes up with the square of the speed ).
Having been a courier, I’d put an either-speed-XOR-weight limit on them, so the fast-light people can get that, but the heavy-cargo couriers get a slower-speed, … I"m not the only courier who discovered that it’s … an experience that many couriers have had … to discover that one has been biking, in traffic, while unconscious. Sleep-biking. And I want that NOT happening at high-speed.
So, this is all like graduated-licensing, but done vertically, instead of temporally.
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Um, no.
Hi, we’re disabled.
Don’t try to restrict us from using stuff that helps bypass the disability, thanks.
– Frost
I’m not tying to restrict you from using stuff that helps bypass disability.
I’m trying to have more-likely-to-kill-someone behaviors more-licensed.
Ignore that distinction if your ideology wants…
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No, what you’re doing is tying people’s speed to what their specific body can produce rather than what is safe. Those are two very different things.
Not what I meant:
I’m tying power to the power that the bicyclist can naturally produce.
I’m tying speed to licensing-level, because crash-energy goes up with the square of the speed.
Physically-weak? THEN small-motor.
Linebacker? THEN huge-motor.
Speeds are tied to licensing.
I’m not tying speed to body-force, I’m tying it to licensing-level/competence-carefulness.
Don’t know how I fucked-up the communication so bad, but sorry.
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Okay, but you’re still talking like tying power to people’s body energy output is a good thing. Speed, power, whatever, limiting our machine capability just because our body is limited (preventing working around disability) is an asshole move.
