Likely Also this guy later:
“One time when I was in high school, I snuck out the house with my dad’s 5.0 and shredded the back roads. We were just kids being kids!”
20mph
Omg this is so dangerous, I am so much safer with an 2 tons machine that goes 180mph and needs the driver to pass a exam that a monkey would pass.
Also, it’s not particularly hard to reach that speed on an acoustic bike.
“Bikes are unsafe” says Mike of the Ford company, known for its “ChildCrusher ™” trucks.
Look.
Just because pedestrian deaths went up 70% between 2010 and 2021, much of which is attributed to light trucks, and just because trucks have gotten significantly larger and more geared towards NOT doing the things they were designed for, that doesn’t mean Mike here is a clueless jackass who is also complicit in making life more unsafe for pedestrian-wait
trendy mode of transportation
This is a
bit waiting to happen. 
One the one hand, fuck the NYT’s smear campaign against e-bikes, but on the other hand, fuck e-bikes.
The ease of pedaling is great, they get people riding bikes, and the acceleration capacity feels a lot safer in stop and go traffic, which is nice. Obviously in the presence of cagers I will defend e-bikes, because they’re better than cars, but I have a lot of issues with them if I’m talking with other cyclists. To do 20 on a real bike, you’re at least going to have the experience to to handle the bike at those speeds. Additionally, a road bike takes some space to get up to 20- you won’t be doing that on a sidewalk or an urban bike lane, which I have seen with e-bikes.
Look up something like a Sur Ron and tell me you’d want to share a bike path (or god forbid a MUP) with a 12 year old on that 50 kilo electric motorcycle. They’re heavier, less maneuverable, and objectively more dangerous than a real bike.
That’s not really an argument against e-bikes though, it’s an argument for lowering the maximum speed they’re allowed to reach using assistance from the motor.
I’m pretty strongly against motorized vehicles on bike paths unless necessitated for accessibility.
What difference does it make if e-bikes are restricted to a speed that the average “analog” bike can easily do though?
- these speed limits are easily circumvented and some bikes are designed to make that possible
- the acceleration of an e-bike is way higher, which means that riders can get going at very high speeds in tight spaces where regular bikers couldn’t.
A better solution might be capping the power output of the rider and motor combined at something like 300W (ie a good sustained effort for a strong cyclist), and disabling power assist if the rider breaks that threshold.
I think there’s some merit to this, but:
-Saying teens should just ride regular bikes in a country that, for the most part, has shit cycling infrastructure and a car-centric culture that is hostile towards sharing the road with cyclists is a non-starter, unless you are also advocating for changing that.
-If you want to whine about how dangerous it is for teens to ride e-bikes that can go over 20mph then surely you would have a problem with the states that allow teens to drive vehicles that can go much faster than that and cause way more damage to those involved in an accident with them.
Oh man, when I was growing up, kids used to ride all sorts of weird things, like fucking gassed up go-karts. An e-bike would have been a relief.
Yeah, kids were all about the terribly, terribly illegal petrol scooters, though I was a bit young for that fad.
Okay, then change design and zoning to make bycicle transportation feasible for more people.
“we can’t because biking isn’t currently feasible for enough people.” –local politicians
rinse, lather, repeat.
Regular bikes are good.
E-bikes are also good but not as much as mountain or road bikes.
Just limit the power then and let people figure out how to modify it if they want more power. Then it will no longer be able to go as fast.
That’s already exactly how it works. The guy is just mad that people can have light electric motor vehicles for little money.
There is an issue with people, especially teens, going like 40 on a MUP, but that’s an issue of infrastructure and traffic enforcement any way you cut it.
I mean there are a lot of e-bikes floating around where they’re capped at 20, but there’s a conspicuous little cable that you better not clip, even though people tell you to, because that would disable the speed limiter. It’s not exactly like people are installing custom hardware to overclock their e-bikes
I know many of those, like the original surron, but they look like motorcycles and scooters, not bicycles. It’s not impossible to make normal ebike-looking components go at that speed, but it will severely limit their lifespan or outright destroy them and you’re still going to need an expensive large battery to make it work, so I’d be surprised.
There’s the Bafang Ultra motor that can be hacked to do that (using a laptop and a special cable and shady exes from forums) but last I checked it will overheat and destroy itself without physically opening it and tweaking the thermals if you push it to those numbers. It’s not easy to make a motor that can go at that speed and put out that much power and still fit in a normal bike frame.
It’d be pretty easy to stop abuse just by limiting dry weight to, say, 30kg.
this guy sucks but he’s not entirely wrong. There’s a memorial on my street from a bit over a decade ago when Chinese quads were really popular. All the tweens in a local neighborhood used to ride them around with their even younger siblings on them, usually 3/4 of them not wearing helmets, doing wheelies, etc. It was extremely unsafe, but for whatever reason (either ignorance or stupidity) their parents allowed them to ride them when they weren’t home. All of that stopped after a little group of them were hauling ass on the side of the road in tall grass and one of them tried to outrun the line of them next to the trail in the tall grass. He ran head-on into a telephone pole, flat out, without a helmet, and died instantly.
I understand, but quads and ebikes are quite different. They’re much smaller and aren’t gas powered, far less force. They can be modified to go up to like 30 miles an hour, but normally cap out around 15.
If mopeds and cheap quads like that can be driven and easily bought by children, ebikes are a form of harm reduction.
There’s a lot of “ebikes” that are just electric dirtbikes with vestigial pedals. It’s easy to modify them to put out way more power than they’re sold with, too. There has to be some kind of grappling with this new category of things that can pretend to be a bicycle but still spin tires, rip past 30mph, etc. They need to either be hard limited or treated more like motorcycles than bicycles.
