The thing that excites me most about e-bikes is that they change the politics around cycling. Proponents of efforts to make roads safer for cyclists have always gotten pushback from people who think that cycling is a niche hobby of rich lycra-clad yuppies.
With e-bikes becoming more common, I know a number of people who would not have touched a bike share but are using it as a replacement for Uber/Lyft rides. People can cycle in to work without breaking a sweat.
It's a bummer that so much legislation aimed at reducing emissions subtly encourages the use of cars without throwing any bones to people who would like to ride bikes, electric or not.
> Proponents of efforts to make roads safer for cyclists have always gotten pushback from people who think that cycling is a niche hobby of rich lycra-clad yuppies.
Which I think is misguided pushback btw (which I think you agree with based on the context).
I see it as a chicken and egg thing. The roads are unsafe for bikers, so the only people who bike are those who are super dedicated to it. Then when people ask for the roads to be safer, it gets pushed back as "only biking enthusiasts use the roads now".
Safer roads means more people will bike, which means biking will stop being seen as an elitist thing.
Edit: to add on, bikes are like 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper than cars too, both in upfront and ongoing costs also. It’s super unfortunate that it still gets the stereotype as a “rich white people” activity when it’s really so much more financially accessible than a car.
> It’s super unfortunate that it still gets the stereotype as a “rich white people” activity when it’s really so much more financially accessible than a car.
It's true that a bicycle is itself cheaper than a car, but housing within biking distance to job centers sure isn't. In my view this is the primary reason bicycle commuters are stereotypically rich folks. The bicycle itself isn't the expensive part; you need proximity, extra commute time, and infrastructure. That stuff just isn't accessible to many people.
This doesn't generalize to most cities though. In my Rust Belt city, the government has put a lot of effort into making cycling safer on the road. The people cycling from one neighborhood to the next are a diverse bunch. Kids are using cheap hand-me-down bikes to go to school. College kids are commuting to campus. Adults of all ages are riding to work at a service job or downtown office.
What it took was a focus on good quality bike lanes outside the affluent white neighborhoods, bike accessibility at transit stations/on busses, and expansion of bikeshare to poorer neighborhoods.
The rich lycra-wearing stereotype won't go away until we invest in equitable access to bike infrastructure.
» What it took was a focus on good quality bike lanes outside the affluent white neighborhoods, bike accessibility at transit stations/on busses, and expansion of bikeshare to poorer neighborhoods.
I've never been to Chattanooga, TN but once I realized I can work from home I've been curious about owning a home somewhere with gigabit fiber but without ridiculously expensive real estate within commuting distance to a Costco or Sam's Club (so clearly not Jersey City, NJ or Longmont, CO).
What I noticed just looking at Google Maps Street View was that any home within my price range lacked a sidewalk. Apparently, only the wealthy people in Chattanooga, TN need sidewalks. How do we talk about bike lanes when places lack sidewalks?
Because where you gonna walk to? Your gonna walk 5 miles to Target and back?
That'd why sidewalks is polish. Most sidewalks I see outside of tight downtowns are useless and barely used, and they aren't free to build and they don't generate anything if no one uses them...
I've been to and through Chattanooga a bunch of times. It is a city where you almost definitely need a car for basic subsistence.
The poor areas are super poor and semi-distant from goods and services. Biking somewhere from the poor areas, unless you have time and energy to spare, is going to be a big undertaking most of the time, not even accounting for the hills.
They are not a default thing anywhere in America that developed after WW2. Most car centric places dispense with them as an "unnecessary" cost or, where they do exist, they're disconnected decoration with limited utility.
I've lived in Chattanooga long enough to call it home (decade+). First thing about Chattanooga is, it's built on the backbone of the Interstate system, in the valley between some mountains. It's a bigtime car city. Anyone outside our immediate downtown has to hop the highway to even get here, or brave treacherous mountain roads (our W Road is even a tiny bit famous... W not being a compass point, but a shape).
As you've noticed on Google, our downtown and close-lying (expensive) neighborhoods have sidewalks and bike lanes aplenty. They're fantastic. But there's no similar facilities in older, poorer, and outlying neighborhoods (many of which were simply suburbs until the city crept in). Nor any practical connection between neighborhoods for foot+pedal traffic.
Housing within bicycle commuting distance (under 5 miles) in many cities is abundant, if you’re willing to forgo a car. Especially if you convert the car savings to rent or mortgage payments.
Basically, if you can be all-in on not driving, you save a lot. But once you even want to drive a little bit, the savings to driving only sometimes instead of all the time is not very large (and can in fact be negative, as you pointed out with needing closer housing with parking). Unless it allows you to go from a two to one car family.
The right way to drive a little bit is car share programs, or just eating a car rental fee occasionally. Mean cost of car ownership in the US is over $9000; you can buy a damn fancy e-bike and rent a car a few times in a year and still come out quite far ahead. (and you only need to buy the e-bike approximately once.)
Limos (especially older ones) are surprisingly cheap. Growing up, my family of 5 used to take a limo to the airport for vacations. It felt kind of ridiculous, but it was actually about the same price as the 2 taxis we would've had to take (and obviously way more pleasant), which itself was cheaper than parking and leaving a car at the airport.
It probably says more about how expensive taxis were pre-Uber. I'm sure ride shares are a nontrivial part of living without a car today.
It's true, but with a folding bike your criteria for a house can now be "fewer than 5 miles away from a tube/train line" and let the public transport do the heavy lifting.
That's a fact about policy choices, not something that can't be changed. If building housing wasn't illegal it would be built. Developers love money and the Green Belt is quite big enough to spare one Mnahattan's area if it was politically possible to build a Manhattan's worth of housing on it.
> That's a fact about policy choices, not something that can't be changed.
Ok but now we’ve moved from ‘bicycling is relatively practical’ to ‘it’d be relatively practical if only everything about our politics and built environment was instantly completely different.’
Having done a similar distance in the cycling capital of the world for about a year I wouldn't exactly call it "easy". I was happy to exchange it for a bus + tram combination even though it added ~15 minutes. Though I'll admit it's nice to be able to commute that distance by bike once or twice a week; but to do it day in and day out gets tiring.
Can confirm this: I'm doing a 14 km commute and yes, for the first few weeks it's really tiring. Wanted to go to sleep as soon as I got home every afternoon. However, after say 2 or 3 months, your metabolism sort of adapts to it and you do it "naturally", without thinking too much about it. The idea of taking the bus again makes me anxious, though.
It's a very easy bike commute for the kind of people who self-select as riding bicycles.
General population would struggle. I used to bike commute twice that distance regularly and think that'd take me more like 25, maybe 30 now that I haven't done it for almost 2 years.
Funny thing about exercise is you get better at it, people who have had ebikes for a while (especially the ones that assist based on pedal power) tend to be less overweight and fitter for a reason. Also trikes work just fine for someone with mobility or balance problems (although a decent e trike is by no means cheap, similar up front to a second hand car).
I live in a city with mediocre to poor bike infrastructure at best, and I see plenty of 50-70 year old women doing 25km/h on ebikes or 10-15km/h on regular bikes.
Granted I wasn't overweight when I started, but after 5 years of largely being a couch potato and doing office work, I averaged around 20km/h or ~12mph door to door over a commute of 10 miles on a 40lb trike.
After getting fitter I'm about the same speed but a shower and change of clothes at the other end is optional now even on a 32C day rather than being drenched.
Your experience can only be due to bike hostile infrastructure or laws. If you had to stop three times for 2-5 minutes a piece at each intersection in a car while the empty lane for bikes and pedestrians got a green light on the off chance they showed up, you'd probably be complaining about how inconvenient driving was.
I do it every day. It depends on elevation gain (so it could take much longer depending on the route) but usually I'm closer to 15 minutes than 20. 15mph on average for a daily bike commuter doesn't seem unreasonable at all to me.
It depends on location, if you're biking in a city at rush hour you're stopping every other block, getting stuck behind other cyclists, and at least where I live, constantly slowing down to avoid getting killed by potholes. There's basically no way you're doing 5 miles in 20 minutes.
If you commute you will mostly ride on dedicated bike lanes without many stops so you can go at full speed most of the way. I've commuted around 3 miles in a not so bike friendly city in Europe and it took about 15 minutes since there are dedicated bikeways without any traffic lights you can take most of the way.
If you commute in rush hour that is actually a lot faster than going by car, so biking is the fastest option available.
Edit: And that was at a leisurely pace, similar to the effort of walking.
I used to do a 5 mile commute. I didn’t have to deal with any major elevation changes, and it was about 35 minutes. Maybe a professional athlete could do it in 20, but they would still have to wait at stoplights occasionally. You will definitely arrive sweaty unless you are in a very cold climate.
All that said, I consider 5 miles to be pretty reasonable for a bike commute.
That would be an extremely leisurely pace. If you commute regularly on a bike and are reasonably fit, you should be able to ride at about 12 mph without breaking a sweat, which gets you a time of about 25 minutes.
It depends on where you ride. My commute is 5 miles, and it takes 30 minutes, even though I'm used to bike, because of the circulation, all the time I have to stop.
I agree it's easy if you're fit though. But I know it can be a pain for people who don't do sport at least weekly.
Well, first of all, if you bike regularly, you get all the training you need. The first couple of weeks are perhaps a bit hard, but that's about it for anyone in somewhat ok shape. And then there is the catch which is also the headline of the article we are discussing here: e-bikes. They allow anyone to go at a reasonable speed even uphill. That is, why they create a huge biking crowd.
8km is bad if the rider has to wait at a lot of stoplights or cross a lot of roads. But if there's a good cycle path, 8km is a comfortable and easy cruise. Even easier on an e-bike. I did a 9km commute down the west side bike path of Manhattan and I found it to be easy and relaxing compared to much shorter commutes through SF, for example.
I have a class 3 ebike (28 mph). I found the 5 mile commute exhausting even though I wasn't exerting myself much. Mentally exhausting, I guess. It's trivial once - it's a grind doing it 2x every day. This is in San Francisco. I'm in good shape, I run 4-5 miles a couple times a week.
I think the worst part is a stop sign every block.
As you’ve highlighted: it’s the infrastructure slowing you down. That’s why cities need to build good bike infrastructure, so it’s safe and easy to ride around.
I used to commute by (ordinary) cycling and this is a huge part of it. It's stressful navigating on urban roads through taxis and vans who seem to see you as the equivalent of a preachy vegan on wheels and drive like complete arses as a result. I've been literally run off the road by people who either can't be bothered to check their mirrors or have some creepy notion that cyclists "deserve" to be scared off the road by their aggressive driving. The only deterrent seems to be wearing a camera because they know it's the only way they'll ever have a chance of facing prosecution for it.
I'd never dream of telling someone else how to live their lives, I'm not one of those moral crusaders who endlessly harrass people about giving up their cars in favour of bikes. I just don't want to get mowed down by Billy Big Bollocks because he's too important to wait ten seconds to overtake safely.
That depends on road conditions and layout, typical traffic, weather, general health (need decent balance, eyesight, hearing, ability to ride over potholes, enough toughness that a spill isn't life-threatening)...
>general health (need decent balance, eyesight, hearing
That’s a pretty uncharitable reading of their comment. It is obvious we are talking about people that are already physically capable of riding a bike and are discussing a specific distance for a commute.
Well, that comment is quite absolute in its assessment of a five mile e-bike commute as "trivial". It brooks no exceptions even for stoplights or congested traffic conditions. It is not at all obvious to me what assumptions I am supposed to make when reading it, and its ancestor comments do not establish context as to what assumptions to make either.
Even so, I tried to find common ground by merely softening the "trivial" language to "often doable" rather than contradicting. Because clearly it will sometimes be "trivial".
So, I disagree with your assessment of "uncharitable". And I am taken aback that there is so much bitter contention over this issue when it seems to me as though the important thing is that e-bikes have made commutes much easier in general.
> bicycle commuters are stereotypically rich folks
Stereotypes are only useful to the extent that they contain a kernel of truth, and this one is just false. The largest group of American bicycle-to-work riders lies in the $20-30k/year income group, i.e. poor people. With each increase of $10k/year income there are fewer riders.
In urban areas I see a lot of the lowest income restaurant workers commuting by bike. Those people often live fairly close to work, but are in some kind of precarious semi-legal housing situation or actually homeless. Most aren't citizens and are basically invisible to politicians and urban planners.
For example check out the restaurants in Mountain View, CA patronized by affluent employees of Google and LinkedIn. Walk around back and you'll see a bunch of cheap bikes.
I think this is North American centric. In Asia and Europe housing to job centres is probably closer on average due to zoning. There’s less separation of “suburban housing areas” and “working areas”. There’s also less separation to shopping, etc so bikes are more feasible in general.
For these reason and I’m sure others, bicycles for commuting are more popular outside of North America.
> but housing within biking distance to job centers sure isn't. In my view this is the primary reason bicycle commuters are stereotypically rich folks.
Perhaps in some places (where the major newspapers are?), but there area I grew up in has residential, industrial, and commercial all mixed up in a way that solves that issue: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/50.8285/-1.0276
(Likewise Berlin, though Berlin also has much better public transport).
I was thinking that at first and was originally going to suggest that, then I realised there’s a similar stereotype in the UK despite the mixed land use.
I saw an article the other day about a woman in California who rents a studio apartment (i.e. no dedicated bedroom) for $1900 a month, and was worried it would jump up to the usual $2,300 a month after the covid special pricing ended.
Meanwhile, for $2,000 a month in the upper midwest you can rent a house with multiple bedrooms and bathroom on 40 acres of land, or a nicely remodeled house with a small yard and river views in a town if you prefer. Or, with enough for a minimum down payment saved up, you could also buy a small house on 5 acres in a forest.
Granted, you'll pay more for owning a car, but... deciding between studio, or a prime house for $300 less per month, and the car doesn't sound too unreasonable.
> Meanwhile, for $2,000 a month in the upper midwest you can rent a house with multiple bedrooms and bathroom on 40 acres of land,
Probably do that in rural CA, too (certainly you can get a nice single family home in many CA suburbs), and not be as far (but probably still too far) from the job the individual in question has that enables paying $2,000/mo in the first place. And similar work closer (to either rural CA or the upper Midwest) would pay less.
Eh, most people near me commute less than an hour to a metro area with pretty much any job you could want available, if you didn't like what nearby jobs were paying. I'm not quite rural, but not suburbia either (nearest burb is 15 minutes of driving once you get to the highway).
If you went really rural, you would be able to get much more for your money.
That was the stereotypical pattern for decades, but gentrification has somewhat reversed it in first tier cities. Families with small children do still tend to move out to the suburbs in search of better quality schools and more living space.
> Edit: to add on, bikes are like 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper than cars too, both in upfront and ongoing costs also. It’s super unfortunate that it still gets the stereotype as a “rich white people” activity when it’s really so much more financially accessible than a car.
The thought that biking is only for the rich is especially galling when I hear it said about NYC cyclists. The person saying this is thinking of the lycra'd-up dentist riding a Pinarello Dogma. The Manhattan Bridge had 180,000 bike trips on it this June. Williamsburg had 230,000.[1] Cycling is much more prevalent than non-cyclers think.
Throw into this confusion a badly implemented public transportation system that you find in most US cities.
Public transportation and city bike rental systems should be free to ride. We all pay taxes to keep roads maintained, we should all pay taxes to keep public transportation maintained.
Not charging would help busses keep their schedules with less queuing and waiting, tourists would be less likely to rent a car, and it could help that chicken and egg problem.
The problem with charging people with riding public transportation is you are taxing the very people we should be rewarding. The people who are committing to taking up less space on the road and living with a smaller carbon footprint are being penalized for their hugely beneficial decision to society not to drive.
Making public transportation better and free are the two
things that can transform a city and make it more equitable.
Poor people would have more money and more places available to spend it. Every city benefits from its people having more money to spend and more places to spend it.
> Public transportation and city bike rental systems should be free to ride.
This would depend on first fixing the poverty and homelessness that make theft, vandalism and antisocial behaviour so common. These things cost money to protect them from the impact desperate people otherwise have on them.
Now, I’d be thrilled to help pay for that to all happen, but the order should be respected; making trains and buses free isn’t as simple as it sounds.
For some reason people accept cars as the natural order. Challenge that assumption. There are lots of deficient drivers too, why do we so heavily subsidize the road system? Because it's an investment that pays back in increased economic activity. The same argument applies to public transit. In many cases it costs more to collect the fare then they ever make in fare.
There are lots of deficient drivers too, why do we so heavily subsidize the road system? Because it's an investment that pays back in increased economic activity.
Also because when you are in separate cars, you can't get sick from, or harassed by, or groped by, other drivers. If another driver is bothering you, you can usually just speed up or slow down to increase distance.
To get true mass adoption of public transit in the US, as the parent comment said, you need to fix "the poverty and homelessness that make theft, vandalism and antisocial behaviour so common," or at least work around it. Maybe trains with a hundred doors leading to a hundred isolated seating areas would convince people.
Except deficient drivers can and do result in serious injury or death of other drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, etc. I’m still not too sure I understand your argument… Why should we so heavily subsidise car drivers?
> This would depend on first fixing poverty and homelessness
How convenient for the car lobby that their luxuriously subsidized travel mode already excludes the poor, making them immune from this line of reasoning!
Simpler, really. There’s a whole bunch of complexity and crime related to public transit billing systems, fare gates, and fare gate accessibility. On busses, people who pay slowly add to the per-stop time.
Most bike thiefs are not homeless, especially high end bikes.
Not to many homeless have a bolt cutter in their worn packs, nor do they have a way to sell, or part out.
In my liberal wealthy enclave, it's middle class guys doing the stealing, or gangs.
(This whole blaming the homeless needs to stop. Most don't have the savy to steal a locked bike. Plus--riding a nice bike is a cop calling card. I know homeless guys who are afraid to carry their own prescriptions in their pack because they frisked so frequently.)
> The roads are unsafe for bikers, so the only people who bike are those who are super dedicated to it. Then when people ask for the roads to be safer, it gets pushed back as "only biking enthusiasts use the roads now".
Yup. Bit like how it's hard to argue for building a bridge by the number of people swimming across the river.
Yup. Bit like how it's hard to argue for building a bridge by the number of people swimming across the river.
It's even worse since the bridge will be built with connecting roadways on both sides so it will be instantly popular.
But often a few bike lanes will be constructed in isolation,t then people will complain "Look, we built these expensive bike lanes to nowhere and no one is even using them!" It takes a rich network of safe bike infrastructure to get average riders to use bikes. At least eBikes make hills less of an impediment.
What compounds the problem is that the bike lanes are often built where it is easy and non-controversial to do so... and so the actually difficult spots get left until last... which are often the key points that dissuade people.
Key example [0], the difference between the north and south entrances to the Sydney Harbour Bridge cycleway, which are under different local governments. The North Sydney council is actively fighting an upgrade [1], whereas on the south side it's smooth access expanding into a network of bike paths.
In my city, the major conflict points are all short stretches of busy narrow road, while paths are going in elsewhere.
This is a very important point. Bikeways, like roadways, are a system.
My South Bay commute has nice bike paths part of the way, but they stop just short of a major highway-freeway intersection. Sure, it would be tough to build a good bike lane through this busy, high speed intersection. So there isn’t one. So the bike path just… stops. And you have to navigate this scary section to proceed. So almost nobody does.
It’s such a shame since we have among the best bike-weather in the world, and a fairly flat basin to ride in. A little more infrastructure would help a lot. And e-bikes have their place for people going more than 20 mins and need to arrive feeling presentable.
> Edit: to add on, bikes are like 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper than cars too, both in upfront and ongoing costs also. It’s super unfortunate that it still gets the stereotype as a “rich white people” activity when it’s really so much more financially accessible than a car.
Here’s a theory: road cycling is more available to those who live reasonably close to work and have time to spare, and that is relatively rich people. Poorer people literally cannot afford not to have a car because they have to travel long distances to work, and their areas are not well served by public transport.
The real difference is people working 9-5 see other commuters working 9-5 where students, working class, and poor people have a much wider range of schedules.
As to living near the urban core, inner cities have a lot of relatively poor people. Roommates and HUD style affordable housing add another dimension to housing that’s not obvious to most people. Twenty to Thirty percent of the units have been set aside for low or middle-income residents, which means the monthly rent is affordable to low or middle-income households and those households must qualify at the outset.https://www.residenewyork.com/faq/how-many-units-are-allocat...
This might be different in the US, but here in Berlin access to cars correlates very strongly with income. The majority of below-median-income households don't have a car, whereas the top earners have several.
You have a point, but the Lance Armstrong wannabes make everyone miserable. In my area, they “took over” a popular bike trail and now kids and more casual people are pushed aside.
If you think fast cycling "Lance Armstrong wannabes" are bad, wait until the trail is taken over by 30mph eBike riders that not only aren't experienced enough to ride safely at that speed, but they bolted on the eBike drive to a bike that was not intended for that speed.
30mph is often needed to keep up with cars in areas where the bike infrastructure is poor or nonexistent. If you can't maintain the speed of traffic, cars will try to pass creating a more dangerous situation for the ebike rider.
I fail to find the connection between speed and safety, especially from a completely unshielded pilot point of view. It's not a bike's job to maintain safety and traffic speed, but the opposite.
> It's not a bike's job to maintain safety and traffic speed, but the opposite.
It does not matter whose job it is. If increasing speed improves safety for the cyclist, in this case by reducing the incentive for car drivers to overtake, then a good number of cyclists will do it.
I'd like to see the proof that increasing speed improves safety for the cyclist.
There's no road I commute on (including 25 mph city streets) where a 30mph bike would keep up with traffic, riding a skinny tire 40 lb bike at 30mph in the road shoulder that passes for bike lanes around here sounds hazardous.
If I wanted to keep up with car traffic so I can ride in the road, I'd get an e-scooter or e-motorcycle that's designed for higher speed. But then I couldn't ride in bike lanes.
Bike lanes do not exist in most places. The poster had said that their comment was about:
> areas where the bike infrastructure is poor or nonexistent
If there are bike lanes, then being overtaken by cars is not as much of a problem. But in most places, cyclists have to use the same lanes as motorised traffic, so it is more important to be able to keep up.
I built a 35mph capable ebike from a lot on a MTB with dual disc brakes and the best s-pedelec tires I could find and I'm pretty stressed out already at 35kph. I can't imagine doing 50kph much less on a bike that isn't intended for it. You really would have to be almost suicidal.
I have to say though being able to keep up with cars when I can't have a bike lane is pretty nice.
I haven't seen it in the comments yet, but it will only be a matter of time before these ebikes will need to be registered, have a number plate, and can receive speeding tickets.
Right now there is no way to identify a speeding bicycle, no matter how fast its going. You could be doing 50 in a 40 zone and there is no way to issue a fine.
Bikes are frequently pulled over for speeding. I don’t know where you live, but cops like to set up bicycle stings at the bottom of hills in the Bay Area. Not to mention giving out tickets for things like missing bike bells. Oh, and if you don’t register your bike with the police good luck having them help with recovery.
I have a friend that got a speeding ticket on the back side of the Marin Headlands - it was a moving violation, he went to driving school to keep it off his record.
Where in the Bay Area are bells required? I've never heard of police there ever enforcing equipment requirements, not even lights at night.
That depends on the jurisdiction. In MA, it’s a point of ambiguity, but I think that’s resolved in favor of e-bikes being treated as mopeds today (with a max of 30mph): https://www.massbike.org/ebikes
This one time a guy did like 35mph on a road for like 2 miles. I was ready to be annoyed when I saw him turning and accelerating, but that’s the speed I usually do, so they just kept up. Guy hit 40 at a couple points and legit could have gotten a speeding ticket.
However, in general, a lot of cyclists in my area are extra aggressive and it creates conflict and the general sentiment is one of annoyance at them hijacking this one relatively busy road. But it’s also motorists not knowing how to pass them properly and share the road. We just need bike lanes on this road. Everyone just wants to get where they are going and the perception is cyclists are out there doing it for fun (most of them are just doing it for exercise on this road, not commuting).
That's fair, but (in my area at least) they're a lot more rare than asshole cars parking in bike lanes or driving too fast. I'd take over-aggressive bikes over thoughtless and negligent drivers any day of the week.
Overall it’s hard for different physical capabilities to share a resource. If the pandemic taught me anything, it’s that peoples perceptions and ability to act in the common good are wildly inconsistent.
Runners took over a popular route that has roads with a low speed limit and bike lanes on either side. They run with lien 4-5 people next to each other and will never yield. I’m forced to slow down to a stop if a car is near or swerve into the road. They have plenty of signs telling bikes to ride single file but the runners could care less.
I don’t know where you live, but in the SF Bay Area the SF Critical Mass and East Bay Bike Party are both pretty casual events… To the point they attract the odd skateboarder or roller skater.
Responsible bike riders should publicly condemn Critical Mass. They are the type of people that make drivers and pedestrians hate people on bikes, and go out of their way to escalate confrontations due to some bike rider victim complex.
I’m not sure why responsible riders wouldn’t want to see huge groups of riders asserting their equal right to public space?
Critical Mass helped spur NYC’s bike lane growth. If you’re against direct action that’s fine, but it’s hard for me to see what works better in initiating long term transformation than direct action protests like Critical Mass.
I cycle to work on fairly rare occasions. My kids ride on city streets every so often. There is nothing that I’ve seen Critical Mass (or events like it) do that I think is positive.
I think this is the same with every sport, in my experience, Seen in with swimmers cycelists. But also if you go cross country skiing during the winter here in Norway you meet the same kind of people.
The Atlanta Beltline is like this and it is crazy. I had some jerks tell me to "keep those kids on a leash" while they raced past us at 20 mph. I hope they fell down later.
> Safer roads means more people will bike, which means biking will stop being seen as an elitist thing.
I don't think it is just safety. Most people understand an e-bike is going to be more dangerous, but they are popular anyways.
The other factor is distance. e-bikes increase the distance that can be covered by a significant amount, which changes a lot of commutes from "too far" to acceptable. The only people who can afford to be within a bike commute are at least above-average income-wise.
its like some minimalists you see bragging about how they only have 1 spoon and 1 bowl and have no need for any other cutlery. like yea that's really easy when you are living in a city and within a five minute walk of multiple cafes and restaurants or where you can order takeaway. try living with 1 spoon out in the middle of nowhere and get back to me please
Along similar lines, I think the fact that many cities aren't particularly bike-safe causes (some) cyclists to behave more assertively to the annoyance of motorists. This adversarial relationship hinders potential political cooperation. Admittedly, when I'm driving my car or riding my bike, I often find myself getting mad at people for doing things I know I also do when riding my bike or driving my car.
I rode a bike to school when my limited money would buy a very bad car or a nice bike. So I opted for the bike and had to ride it because that's all I had. I did that for a couple of years - even in the cold and ice. My commute distance varied in my biking days, from 6 to 20 miles.
I always obeyed all the traffic laws, though occasionally in the early AM I'd find lights that would not turn green for a bike no matter what I did.
I had people scream at me to get off the road, and otherwise be exceptionally rude. I occasionally had bike lanes and appreciated them, sought them out because it provided better spacing. But the busses on those routes were frequently in the bike lane and were, frankly, slower than I was. But navigating them was always a pain until I got well past them.
On slower roads (20-25 mph) with no bike lane I would take a lane to myself and keep up with traffic but only when I could reasonably keep up.
In the end, safety won out, and I abandoned the practice.
Now, as a driver, I am appalled at the behavior of cyclists. With my experience I take interest in and carefully watch their behavior.
Running red lights and not stopping for stop signs is the worst. And it's pretty universal.
Bad spacing in the lane, little to no accommodation for drivers when they could provide a bit more space for a comfortable pass. Sometimes they can't help it, and I get it, but when they can and don't... I always tried to be crystal clear about my messaging to the cars around me. I'm taking the lane here for my safety because there are parked cars in the bike lane or otherwise on the shoulder. I'm done now and look, I'm providing lots of space for everyone to safely pass me.
So the rude behavior I encountered was finally somewhat understood.
I really appreciated having good bike lanes. But cyclists do themselves no favors in how they conduct themselves, which will hurt them when pining for better road accommodations.
Even the cost factor is complicated. Everyone factors in the cost per mile of the bike, which is excellent, but the input calories are non-trivial and if you're not running the numbers on just ramen noodles it turns into quite a significant financial cost.
In regards to bike-rider behavior on roads, of course cyclists appear "misbehaved" on roads. The roads are not designed for cyclists, so we have to fight with the design of the transport network to get anywhere
Car-oriented transport infrastructure has been a terrible mistake. Don't blame the cyclists for trying to salvage something from the wreckage.
There is no significant tax pool coming from cyclists to build or maintain said infrastructure.
I don't blame them for trying to salvage/use something from what exists, I've been there. I found the behavior of ignoring established traffic law as if it were optional to be dangerous and selfish.
> There is no significant tax pool coming from cyclists to build or maintain said infrastructure.
Don't they pay income tax? I think I read that most of the cost of roads in the USA is raised from income tax and sales tax.
> I found the behavior of ignoring established traffic law as if it were optional to be dangerous and selfish.
A lot of car drivers are out there too running lights, breaking speed limits and driving under the influence. People are the problem, not their transport.
But it seems to produce economically terrible outcomes longer term... Induced demand is a good example - you get to the point where you need to pay huge amounts of money to expand road infrastructure, but as soon as you do it encourages even more use so after widening a highway, there is often an increase in travel times fairly soon after the upgrade after the initial short-term benefit!
Strong Towns also have some good examples of how car-oriented infrastructure can also be economically unsustainable in that it encourages low-density neighbourhoods with a lot of roads, so long term cities can't afford to maintain the roads without cross-subsidising it from new developments. So if the city stops growing, it often can't sustain the infrastructure it has! Whereas somewhat more dense areas (especially where retail and small business tenancies are mixed in with housing) can have much more property tax income per unit area as well as less road infrastructure to maintain which can tip the balance to being economically sustainable in itself.
I would argue the opposite actually. If the US had embraced trains as people movers early on, with local subway systems, I'd imagine we'd have seen even more economic growth than we did. Our cities would be far more prosperous, our people healthier, our energy footprint lower. Better social mobility..
It seems likely that cars actually hindered average GDP growth from '45 to today, rather than helping it.
I have been explicitly told by my local bike coalition not to stop fully for stop signs. Stopping fully is not particularly safe and local motorists don't even expect it. Given that information, what do you think is the correct behavior for a beginner cyclist like me?
I don't know about the US, but a stop sign here in Australia means complete stop. If you fail to fully stop in your driving test it's an instant fail. If you fail to fully stop and there is an accident, you will be at fault.
In Australia, bikes are required to follow the same rules as cars when on the road.
In some US states rolling stops for bikes have been legalized as "Idaho stops".
I have used a bike as my primary transportation for 15 years. The majority of rides are in traffic - there's very little dedicated bike infrastructure (painted sharrows or gutters don't count)
Trust me when I say, in the US, an intersection is the most dangerous place to be. You are a sitting duck if you aren't moving when clear.
A lot of drivers straight up don't pay attention at lights, due to phones or spacing out, and don't give you space when coming up behind you. Mix in right-on-reds, unprotected left turns, and the general drivers failure to negotiate turns - if it's clear I'm going. It's also safer for me to stay at a relatively consistent speed for predictable passing than accelerating in mixed traffic with very different acceleration curves.
Yeah, and it's generally bad for bikes. Stop signs are designed for cars - cyclists are approaching an intersection much slower, so have way more time to look, and can much more easily see around them than a driver (no pillars or vehicle parts around them blocking visibility), so most of the time are able to make a better decision about whether they need to stop or not than cars.
At the same time, it takes a cyclist far longer to start off from being stopped, so every time they stop when they didn't really need to, it puts them in a vulnerable position for much longer time than was necessary. So apparently it turns out a lot safer to let cyclists slow at stop signs but not have to fully stop if it's safe to continue.
In the US, the letter of the law is that cyclists must make a full stop, yes. But cycling activists often argue that this is a law that needs changing, and would help get more casual riders on bikes. Additionally, most bike riders in cities are on the lower income side; this would reduce how much they're cited for what is fairly accepted behavior.
Stop signs here in Australia, like most of the world, are only placed where the visibility actually makes it necessary to come to a stop. They're far more common over in the US. Pick any random intersection, it probably has a stop sign or four.
If all the give way signs on my commute were replaced with stop signs, I'd sure feel like rolling through them.
Rolling stops are fine, I have no problem with that. That's a good effort, gives you time to really examine the area.
Don't blast through at full speed even if it looks clear. That's a bad unsafe habbit.
> Now, as a driver, I am appalled at the behavior of cyclists. With my experience I take interest in and carefully watch their behavior.
> Running red lights and not stopping for stop signs is the worst. And it's pretty universal.
Some areas have a yield at stop signs law for bikes so the stop signs could be legal, but I think a major driver of this kind of behavior is bike hostile infrastructure. If you've stopped for your 20th red light that prioritises non existent car traffic and that won't turn green today, or you're going past your fifth intersection that requires crossing at signals 3 times, waiting 2 minutes a piece on an empty road with visibility 500m in each direction it starts seeming pointless. Once someone is in the habit of disobeying clearly pointless (or in the case of many stop signs, actively unsafe because there is no visibility at the sign and accelerating up hill from a stop rather than 2mph causes you to spend far more time in the danger zone) signals and signage I can see it being easy to start ignoring others.
Respect works both ways, and when your city and laws clearly disrespect someone you shouldn't be surprised they stop respecting you.
The only cyclists I actively disliked were those who had stripped their reflectors and then rode around dressed in black at night. Scared me half to death when I finally saw them. That move agitated me quite a bit. Thank goodness I've only run into that once.
Seems to me that it's a very bad idea to disrespect in ways that actively make your own life less safe. Especially on something as fragile as a bicycle. Regardless of the disrespect heaped your way.
>Coal-Rolling Teen That Hit Cyclists Charged With Six Felonies
>The 16-year-old was not arrested after the incident, but has now surrendered to authorities.
>On September 25, a group of cyclists riding near Waller, Texas, were hit by a Ford Super Duty driven by a 16-year old youth. Reports from witnesses indicated the driver had been "rolling coal" on the group immediately prior to striking six cyclists, four of whom were hospitalized due to injuries sustained. Now, news out of Texas is that the teen driver is finally in custody according to the District Attorney of Waller County, over a month after the incident occurred.
>[...] Cyclist Chase Ferrell, who saw the events unfold, told Fox 26 at the time that the crash happened "because [the driver] was accelerating to blow more diesel fuel on these cyclists," adding that the driver "ended up hitting 3 people before his brakes even started." Ferrell noted that the teen remained at the scene after hitting the cyclists, and spoke to police. However, the driver was not arrested in the wake of the crash. "I don't understand, if it was me who had struck someone else, I would be in jail," noted Ferrell.
>It doesn't matter that it will be nearly impossible to enforce: this legislation is more than welcome.
>For those not in the know, rolling coal is the name for blasting black smoke out the exhaust of a diesel-engined vehicle. It is done by modifying the air and fuel mixture in forced induction diesel engines to make the engines run rich, the result of which is a cloud of soot blowing out the tailpipes. This is done for the childish sake of annoying people, typically anyone that a coal-roller doesn't like, which includes but is not limited to hybrid drivers, convertible drivers, bicyclists, pedestrians, and anyone who so much as looks like they don't attend the same evangelical megachurch. Why do people do it? Nobody one can say for sure, though it has been suggested that it has its roots in anti-environmentalism.
There is a significant difference between recreational level exercise and work-every-day-because-you-have-no-other-method that's burning potentially >1000 calories per day and measurably increasing your food bill.
I didn't mind it, but I had a plush, quiet, comfortable car with an excellent sound system and that cruise control system that follows the car ahead of you. Would listen to music, a podcast, audiobook, or just enjoy some quiet solitude, all climate controlled. Some cars even have massaging seats now.
In Sydney they have been adding cycle lanes to a lot of roads. I don’t bike because Sydney drivers are terrible. But it’s a real half measure. They need to aggressively push out drivers I think.
I think the issue goes further than that into being a societal problem.
Majority of America is overweight, staring down at their phones day and night, and dread physical activity. They also like to flex their position and wealth to others, one of the reasons why pickup trucks and big SUVs sell in great numbers. These people are in no hurry to transition to riding bikes.
The only way biking might work is if some popular celebrities on social media or otherwise started doing it, since many Americans just like to imitate what's popular.
I'd suggest starting with bike paths to schools. Kids don't have the problems you mention, they also don't have an alternative when they want to travel independently.
A lot of Americans are morbidly afraid of their children being away from adult supervision for more than a minute. I think suggesting 10 year olds ride a bike instead of taking a car or bus might infuriate more than a few people.
I remember discussion on reddit where people literally called mom neglectful because she refused to have car.
The issue was that she and 4 years old walked 20minutes to preschool and back. That is it, 40 min total walking time was assumed to be beyond 4 years old capabilities.
Well, it's scary, perhaps because drivers are the most likely people to kill your kid. But all the same I was very fortunate to have parents that let me roam free and explore from a young age.
Not irrationally; there are numerous well-publicized incidents, such as child protective services being called for a six-year old playing unsupervised in their own front yard. Or, and I do forget the state (though I think it was Maryland), a state official saying that children under fourteen should never be left alone unsupervised for any length of time. When I was twelve, I babysat my little sister all day and made us hot lunches. Nothing fancy - just your standard packaged noodles or similar - but yeah, I knew how to use a stove safely.
They do imitate it, they do enough to take pictures of themselves and they buy into the sports clothing brands and entertainment. Few actually do regular and consistent exercise.
I think there would be an increase in biking if the celebs did it, but I say this imagining a new generation of Americana growing up watching a bunch of them doing it, not just one or two starting tomorrow and the nation follows suit.
E-scooters might be a way in. They're not as fast or as safe (to the rider), but they're practical in way e-bikes aren't due to portability. You can carry one into the office and charge it under your desk. And they lack the cultural baggage of cycling. And it's possible to look suave on one in a way that bicycles make difficult.
They're horrifically expensive, but something like an electric brompton as most of those same advantages. You can also usually take them on a bus or train.
I'd disagree on the looking suave bit, it might just be because so many riders are clueless (and this perception being reenforced by selection bias), but someone on an escooter always looks far sillier to me than someone on a dutch style or folding bike, or even someone in lycra.
It's a little rich to criticise on grounds of cost and then suggest an electric brompton in the same breath - they're nearly 10 times as expensive as the cheapest bikes/e-scooters. You can spend that much on an e-scooter, but you don't need to. E-scooters are about as affordable as bicycles.
Regarding lycra - we can disagree on whether you look suave while riding, but a huge advantage of the e-scooter is that you don't need special clothing - don't even need to tuck your pants leg into your sock. You wouldn't turn up to a date clad in lycra - but you can ride an e-scooter to one.
> It's a little rich to criticise on grounds of cost and then suggest an electric brompton in the same breath.
Apologies, I was trying to say that the brompton was the horrifically expensive option.
Upsides is they are a bit better for carrying cargo, can handle slightly rougher terrain, are a little more comfortable at long range and are a little more compact than the more capable escooters.
Both have their place, I was just trying to mention another option that hadn't been included.
That has not been my observation, except for kids and people delivering food.
Consider there may be a dignity issue: If you are a lycra-clad yuppy, you're cycling because you want to. If you're poor, it looks like you can't afford a car.
Given that breakthrough is significantly more expensive e-bike, owners being too rich was unlikely to be the real issue. If more expensive tool fixes social problem, the people were more likely to be offputted by poor.
It cuts both ways. I am lucky enough to live in an area with an EXTENSIVE system of mixed-use trails for bikes and pedestrians. I worry that e-bikes, which are potentially much less pedestrian-friendly, will lead to a pushback against bikes being used on these trials at all.
Mixed-use paths are an extremely bad idea and dangerous for everybody. I actively avoid them as a pedestrian and as a cyclist. They should all disappear. If ebikes help to accelerate the inevitable dismissal of these stupid mixed-use lanes, so good!
A bike-friendly infrastructure is based on three separate networks, for pedestrians, cycles and cars. Each of the three networks must be continuous, reasonably complete and able to stand on its own.
I think I mostly disagree. But this probably depends on the definition of cyclist. If these path users are lycra-clad individuals trying to go as fast as they can and desperately trying not to lose momentum, the experience will be poor. Similarly if you have e-bike users who are basically taking silent mopeds down a trail and swerving between people things won’t go well. But if it’s someone who is not obsessed with speed just trying to go from one place to the next on a wide path it’s probably fine. E-bikes are an advantage here because they remove the incentive to avoid slowing down to preserve momentum.
Ultimately it depends on the cycling culture in a place and a lot of that depends on whom cycling is available to. If it is more accessible you will probably find people acting more sensibly and more like pedestrians.
A mixed use trail can provide refuge from busy roads. This is much more important if roads are awful for cyclists and I this can often be the case in some parts of the world. If roads are good for cyclists then the obnoxious people who would otherwise endanger those on the trail will be happier going faster and straighter along the roads. But they will only get better if cycling is more popular which will only happen if it is more accessible.
I think mixed use paths are not particularly bad and are also necessary on the way to better infrastructure.
Mixed use paths as seen in parks are for dogs, pedestrians, children cyclists and beginners. They are not and should not be for commuting except maybe as a last mile connection, because commuters are moving at about 15-20km/h if they want to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time. As soon as they get busy there are so many conflict points that accidents are inevitable.
Calling them bike infrastructure is like calling a school zone with zebra crossings and speed bumps a highway.
They are what should be built first though, because you don't get new cyclists without low speed, safe, fully separated bike infrastructure. They should always be paired with a nearby road with a cycle lane and somr plan for separated infrastructure though.
I don't think this is true. The mixed use paths are pretty good start. People use them for commute. The special bike lane is more expensive and ideal step, but not necessary.
As soon as any significant fraction of people use them they become congested, slow, and dangerous to pedestrians. Slowing to 5km/h repeatedly whilst waiting for an opening for a large portion of your journey makes commuting far less pleasant and severely limits viable range, and being overtaken constantly is unpleasant and dangerous for pedestrians.
The separated bike lane *and* the mixed use path is the end goal, but if the immediate goal is to save the city money and make people healthier rather than create conflict and negative sentiment towards cycling, then you need a separate route for ebikes and more experienced commuters. Sharrows or magic paint suffice for this (at least temporarily) with adequate traffic calming or if the main car flow has an alternate route.
The separated lane is just too expensive while there are just a few bikers. If people start using bikes on mixed purpose roads too much, building them after makes sense. But while you are just in the process of promoting the whole cycle thing and there are not that many people, building dedicated tracks does not make much sense. This was the case in our city for quite long time. There was no massive negative sentiment towards cycling. More like, cyclists complained and when there were enough of them infrastructure started to build.
Imo, American negative sentiment and aggression toward bicycles is way more about politics and assumed demographics then anything else. It does not matter how well behaved average cyclist is. It does not matter how intrusive or safe it is. The people who are aggressive will focus on that one minor infraction that happened once to validate their anger.
> The separated lane is just too expensive while there are just a few bikers
I think we overall agree, but there are many things that can be done to reduce conflit points.
Firstly I agreed that the mixed lane with a shared car/bicycle alternate route should come first (as this covers both short/slow speed trips and high speed/high confidence trips), but secondly the shared lane has an absurdly small cost. Under 5% of the space and an even smaller fraction of the money spent on roads will give you a world leading bicycle network, and if you build it, it will be used -- cycling on good infrastructure is simply so much cheaper and more convenient than car ownership and cycle lanes have so much more capacity than roads that it becomes a no brainer.
I agree that bootstrapping it to get the political will needed for that pittance is extremely hard, which is why we need to think very carefully about encouraging long distance commuters who must average over 15km/h to make reasonable time and people taking the pram for a walk to mix. Ebikes are a big potential issue because they are both fast and favoured by new riders. It will only take one ebike with the speed limiter removed accidentally injuring a kid and hitting the news to set back bike infrastructure in an entire country by years.
Step 1 is mixed paths connecting local destinations (schools, shops, church, etc) and start reserving your space for the separated bikeway
Step 2 is a fully connected network where all the mixed paths have an alternate route with magic green paint or sharrows for high speed trips and to handle congestion.
Step 3 is build the separated paths.
You can't skip step 2 or avoid thinking about step 3 until it is too late.
Additionally throughout this process you need to fix all the cyclist and pedestrian hostile signals (waiting for a full 5 minhte cycle at a one way street full of stopped cars because the button wasn't pressed is absurd) and provide some alternative to stop signs (carefully designed roundabouts, yield signs, or cyclists-yield laws with public outreach work okay).
It's not really expensive, since you're mainly re-drawing lines on the road, removing a lane for cars (or reducing parking area) and adding a lane for e-bikes. The bonus is that it encourages more e-bike use and reduces vehicle pressure.
So, you cannot afford enough space to store your stuff (your car, which besides having an impractically huge size is a major ecological burden) and you want that your city allocates premium street space just for you. Then you say cyclists ask too much. This over the top attitude would even be cute if it wasn't sadly so common.
You complain that bike lanes are not used "enough", but a single parked car forces a whole lane to have a throughput of 0 commuters per hour. A bike lane that gets a single cyclist per hour is infinitely more efficient!
That's a nice ideal but it's just not realistic in most existing built up areas. There's literally not enough space for three separate networks without knocking down existing buildings and buying a lot of land through eminent domain. Let's focus on what can actually be achieved with realistic levels of funding.
"That's a nice ideal but it's just not realistic in most existing built up areas. There's literally not enough space"
There was not enough space for cars, we tore down entire neighbourhoods and blasted through bedrock to create highways.
There is not enough money to fund a moon program or fix climate change, but when time came to bail out the banks, if you stacked that money as 1-dollar bills it would reach the moon.
There is not enough money to Fusion research, but our fossil fuel and airline subsidies in one year are greater that all-time fusion research budget.
I encourage you to watch [this video.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o) No one believed they had enough space in the Netherlands either. Turns out they did, with some creative engineering, time, money, and sheer force of will. It's not easy. It takes a long time. But with a steady hand and the ability to cut through lobby interests, it can be done. Note that they didn't need to knock down many buildings in the NL. They did things like reducing 3-4 lanes to 2; making roads and footpaths narrower; reclaiming roads and re-routing vehicle traffic elsewhere; and of course better utilising a lot of wasted curbside land. Plus lots of redrawing of city plans to ensure future building and renovations incorporated the vision.
That’s only true if you presume that demand for roads remain constant. Ideally you’d hope that cycle infrastructure would offset some road use, which would allow the state to reclaim some lanes for cyclists. Given how space inefficient cars are, it wouldn’t require a significant drop in road usage for cyclists to be given all the space they need independent from pedestrians.
Most roads around here that are not controlled access are one lane in each direction. Those that aren’t have often had a lane dedicated to buses (and emergency vehicles). There are rarely lanes free to be taken unless cycling becomes so prevalent to displace cars to zero on some routes.
Depends on your city I guess. You didn’t specify where you live, but I’d broadly categorize the cities I’ve lived into two categories.
The first is car centric, with lots of roads and deep set backs. These cities are amenable to bike and public transit transformation in terms of space, but usually have political resistance to change. These cities will be the easiest to add extra bike infrastructure to, once a political mass is reached. My current city is like this, and the current bike path master plan is trying to add enough paths for 96% of the city to be near bike infrastructure (currently it’s 10%).
The second category are really dense, and do not have the space for any extra lanes. But these cities dedicate a huge amount of space for parallel parking. Theoretically the city could remove parking for bikes, but practically this means purposefully pricing people out of car ownership, which is obviously unpopular. These cities should focus on public transit, which is by and far the most space efficient way to move people. For a lot of these cities this is less about installing new lines, which is expensive, but about making the existing system feel cleaner and more dignified. It will always be hard to make improvements when even the crappiest sedan is considered a step up from taking the subway to work.
Pretty much all roads where I live have two sidewalks, two rows of parked cars and at least one lane for car traffic, usually two. Take away half the free parking and you have space for cyclists.
I don't think this is true. I lived in SF for a while (assumedly this meets your definition of built up), and there's plenty of space.
The key is that cars don't belong in most places anyway. A residential street can easily be design as a 10mph one way cobblestone road with calming measures, freeing up the "other direction" side of the street for a 2-way bike lane and expanded sidewalks. Larger roads can be redesigned similarly for bike/transit with cars filling in particular niches like delivery of bulk items, etc.
A tram or two way brt lane, a dedicated bike path, a footpath, and 2 lanes of car traffic can carry 5-20x as many people as a 6 lane stroad and takes up less space.
It also costs less to maintain, kills fewer people, massively reduces healthcare costs improves the local economy and is far nicer to live next to.
There is plenty of money, most places are just directing it to yet another road widening project that will make things worse.
Not sure how common this is in other places but in Massachusetts a fair number of rail trails have sprung up over the past few decades--often over considerable opposition in some town or another. Some, like the Minuteman, were explicitly "bikeways" (although pedestrians and, for a time at least, rollerblades are also common). Others have always been pitched as mixed use.
In any case, it's pretty much a non-starter to prohibit at least conventional bikes or pedestrians even though, on the more crowded and narrower paths, I'll avoid them during busy times as a walker.
You're forgetting that car lanes & parking spaces on sides of roads can be re-drawn to fit e-bikes and reduce overall car use (which is the goal anyways).
Not sure why you're downvoted on this. I used to live near a very popular mixed-use bike trail, and walking with my kids there was really unpleasant. There were some cyclists who would go really fast and not slow down at all, and I had little kids who might see a butterfly and move unpredictably. It was bad for everyone.
I agree with this. I definitely think there are some kinds of pedestrian traffic that probably shouldn't use a high traffic mixed trail. Situational awareness and understanding how to stay on your 'side' of the trial is pretty important.
In a perfect world, sure. But it's quite a bit better than treating bikes as human powered cars. It's also pretty easy to do safely: walk and ride on the right, pass on the left, and only when there's no oncoming traffic. People here follow that convention and it mitigates almost all of the issues.
I agree, but I prefer mixed use paths to mixed use roads. In terms of speed and safety, bikes are much closer to pedestrians than cars. It is insanity to have bikes sharing the road.
We're in a weird situation now where I think most people riding e-bikes are doing so illegally on trails and paths. It's not being enforced yet where I live and I fear the push-back when someone inevitably gets hurt.
> I fear the push-back when someone inevitably gets hurt.
Which is fascinating and really tells you something about ingroups and outgroups because cyclists are hurt and killed every day by drivers and strangely nobody seems to be that fussed about it.
The only time I ever biked to Cleveland, Texas (about 60 miles North of Houston) I spent much of the trip dodging drivers who thought it was entertaining to throw things at me. Thinks like bricks.
The hatred heaped on cyclists escalates towards violence, and next to nobody on the escalating side (motorists) really acknowledges that it happens.
The Texas "rolling coal" case shows you can attempt to murder a group of cyclists and face no legal repercussions if you are in the right political climate.
There was also a similar case in Austin where a cyclist shot a driver who tried something similar; the cyclist was released without charged and the driver was charged with attempted homicide or similar. Personally I’m impressed the cyclist managed to hit the driver while biking, which seems like a very hard thing to do.
That being said, these are edge cases. The sad reality is that a driver must display extreme levels of negligence or malice before the state will step in to punish them. In NYC only 1 percent of drivers who injured a pedestrian or cyclist even got a ticket. Assuming the driver is sober and doesn’t flee the scene, neither cops nor DA’s really care about prosecuting negligent drivers who injure or kill anyone.
don't you have restricted ebikes in the US? In most of Europe they're either sold restricted to 25kmh, in which case they're legally bikes, or unrestricted, in which case they're legally mopeds
My city had issues after the escooter craze started. They outlawed them on side walks and started giving a lot of tickets to people who kept doing it. Not sure if it worked or the craze died down.
Even in the places I'm familiar with which still allow escooter rentals, my observation is you don't really see very many of them--either being ridden or littering the sidewalks. It does seem to be one of those things that, while you still see them, appear to have mostly been a fad. At least in the cities I'm familiar with.
This is a real problem. IMO, the issue really is that ebikes are too good/too flexible. They are fast enough to get you to work quickly and more comfortably mix with city traffic. The flipside is that they're too fast to mix with pedestrian traffic. If there were some way of limiting speed on mixed use paths, e-bikes would be perfect.
Speed limits are effective? Serious enforcement? Surely you must be kidding. Speed limits are a joke everywhere, even school zones during drop off times.
Any reasonable speed limit for a shared use bike path (IMO, <15mph) will be routinely ignored by both e-bikes and roadies.
E-scooters in Europe are generally soft-limited to 25kph (15.5 mph). This is seems like quite a good practical measure, although it's "problematic" from a software freedom perspective. It's quite hazardous for the rider to go much faster than that anyway, scooters are much less stable than bikes.
Actually there should be speed limits for shared paths even without ebikes. Here (Hungary, EU), I think it's 20kph (12.5mph). Even that is too fast to hit someone, but of course, the point is that you'll have more time to slow down and react.
I'd say they are somewhat effective. I don't ride much on shared paths, but when I do, I usually see people not going full speed. After all, unlike with a car, it's also dangerous for the biker. The only concern might be that you may experience speed differently on an ebike/pedelec since you have to put in less effort. I've never tried those so I have no idea.
Speed limits are not enforced in my corner of the country and the limits are way too low; it’s regular to do 85 in a 45. I’m additionally dubious of the ability of police to actually catch a speeding cyclist; when I was a college kid I easily outran the campus bike cops simply by being in good shape.
> Proponents of efforts to make roads safer for cyclists have always gotten pushback from people who think that cycling is a niche hobby of rich lycra-clad yuppies.
Here in New York City, people delivering food, packages, etc are one of the major biking contingents, I guess invisible to the Hacker News community.
Sadly, here in New York City, kids can't ride bikes around for fun except once or twice a year when they close Park Avenue or if you get an open street. I don't see why kids riding casually shouldn't be a major interest of the population. If the streets aren't safe for them, maybe change the streets and disallow cars instead of depriving kids of that space.
Isn’t LA extremely sparse to the extent that cycling is a lot of effort because of long distances? I suppose e-bikes help but don’t you still lose a lot of the advantages—less time at the start and end of journeys and less distance from parking areas—to the increased travel time from large distances?
LA is surprisingly dense for an American city. I’m too lazy to look up LA numbers, but in the US as whole most car trips are under 5 miles. This is perfect e-bike distances, and after accounting for finding parking, walking across a massive surface lot or riding elevators down a parking deck, the e-bike might be just the same amount of time.
not really, though socal on the whole is a sprawl. greater LA is decentralized into a bunch of blended edge cities[0], but the city itself is basically split into the LA basin and the san fernando valley. within these sub-regions, it's eminently bikable, with the two areas linked by subway and rail for bikers. central LA, encompassing downtown through mid-wilshire and toward santa monica/venice, is relatively dense (20-40k/sq mi), and roughly 15 miles from downtown to the beach (also connected by light rail). if you live in this central LA area (or central san fernando), most places you need to go are less than an hour's e-bike ride away, and most likely less than 1/2 hour away.
Not from LA, but was able to test it in real life during one of my visit with friends there (a couple of years ago).
We got to Santa Monica beach in the afternoon, spent some time there, and we had a reservation for dinner in koreatown (close to downtown), roughly 15 miles away. Closer to 5:30pm it was time to leave, so we split into two groups: 3 people decided to take Uber, 4 people (including me) decided to take those Lime/Bird escooters.
The results were rather surprising. The escooter group got to the restaurant about 15 minutes later than the Uber group, but only because we were navigating to the wrong place and overshot the restaurant by almost 2 miles. Without counting that, our overall trip was around 1.5 hours.
Here is the kicker: batteries on those scooters were rather not the best. With 4 people riding together, every 20 minutes or so, someone's battery would die (because we didn't all start with 100% at the same time, it doesn't mean that the battery life on those was just 20 minutes, it was just the offset that led to this). And when the battery would die, we wouldn't abandon the person, so we would start searching around for another scooter being available somewhere nearby.
With this in mind, if it was just 1 person riding by themselves, it would definitely beat an Uber ride on that day. And even with 4 people with batteries dying every 20 minutes on someone's scooter, we pretty much beat the people who took Uber by a small margin (which would have been much larger if it was just one person on one escooter).
To underline, I was surprised by two things on that day: how awfully close to the stereotype LA traffic actually was and how viable escooters were in that environment. Prior to seeing it with my eyes, I was also thinking that LA was a bit too sprawled out for it to work. Glad to have been proven wrong.
that would be a waste of resources. in my area, it's the cars that need more enforcement. every single day i see multiple cars brazenly running stop signs and sometimes even stop lights. they don't even slow down. that's potentially deadly; not so with bikes.
> Proponents of efforts to make roads safer for cyclists have always gotten pushback from people who think that cycling is a niche hobby of rich lycra-clad yuppies.
I'm a daily cyclist (18-20 miles round trip for work) and I don't know which one annoys me more: the lycra yuppie who wants to race me, or the e-bike Patagonia vest financebro yuppie who salmons[1] me while screaming through his AirPods :-)
While I agree with e-bikes being a generally good thing, I also think they involve a lot of secondary consequences and we still need to figure out the best solutions. For example, having more e-bikes on the already overcrowded bike path near where I live is becoming a disaster. There had already been enough problems with mismatched speeds, impatience on all sides, etc. There had even been fatalities. Adding e-bikes makes all of that even worse. While I have little love for the "rich lycra-clad yuppies" (there really are plenty of them) who are mostly just horrified by the idea of their hobby becoming more inclusive, I kind of agree with them that the path can't safely support yet another (faster, heavier) type of conveyance. I wouldn't want horses on the path for the same reason.
There's a complementary issue with e-bikes on roads. There's still going to be a speed mismatch, with e-bikes in the middle this time instead of the high end. Bike lanes are going to become more dangerous, traffic-light timings will have to change, etc. Where are the e-bikes going to be parked or stored while not in use? On my now-ended visits to Seattle I saw these problems already manifesting, and they're likely to become even worse as e-bikes continue to become more popular.
In the long term, maybe the "changed politics" will lead to improved infrastructure that supports all classes of users including e-bikes. In the short term, it's likely to be a free-for-all like I used to see in Bangalore with all the tuk-tuks and scooters mixed in with cars and trucks and buses. Not looking forward to it.
this is exactly the politics around cycling that need to change. cyclists have been asking for better infrastructure for decades, and been told to go play in traffic because we're a weird niche interest group who can be ignored.
we need better infrastructure for non-car transportation. the short-term hell is simply more people experiencing what most cyclists are already used to.
> the short-term hell is simply more people experiencing what most cyclists are already used to.
Did you miss the part where the cyclists are the ones inflicting that hell on others sometimes? Cyclists haven't been the only ones demanding better non-automotive infrastructure. I've supported the local path with both my dollars and the sweat of my brow, only to have freeloading cyclists tell me that they have priority (exactly opposite to how the laws are written) and I should get out of their way. One political change that needs to happen is that cyclists need to stop looking down their noses at other non-automotive users. When cyclists stop treating pedestrians exactly the same way they complain about being treated by cars, maybe greater cooperation will be possible. Nobody likes the smell of hypocrisy.
again, this is exactly the sort of politics that hopefully will change as more people ride bikes.
yes, there's some bad cyclists. but because there's few enough cyclists, people who aren't cyclists like to group us all together. when a driver or pedestrian is an asshole, you say the person was an asshole, because you understand that they don't represent all drivers or all pedestrians any more than you do. but when a cyclist is an asshole, you jump to treating that as the behaviour of all cyclists, as if we're all the same, because we're just a group of weirdos that you don't feel a part of.
> when a cyclist is an asshole, you jump to treating that as the behaviour of all cyclists
No, I don't, and even if that was meant as a generic "you" it seems a bit like attempted mind-reading. How about not doing that? FWIW, the people I've worked with on maintaining my local path are mostly cyclists. No friction there. When people call out "on your left" (interestingly that's most of the women and damn few of the men) I always say "thank you" in return. I'm well aware that most cyclists are good people and I treat them as such, but there are enough - and an even higher percentage among cycling activists - that it's a problem.
I guess I should have been more explicit about referring to that subset earlier, but other cyclists should be aware that those are the ones people remember (it's basic math + psychology) and exert peer pressure accordingly instead of getting aggressive themselves every time the issue comes up.
I think the difference is that people dislike cyclists because they like the drive, and cyclists make driving extremely dangerous. I can basically autopilot down any road with exclusive auto and pedestrian traffic, but introduce a cyclist and I have to pay extreme attention to avoid causing a tragedy. I totally support cyclists right to cycle, but I’m just providing some commentary on why cyclists as a whole are painted in a bad light. It’s not really about the behavior of cyclists.
> when a driver or pedestrian is an asshole, you say the person was an asshole, because you understand that they don't represent all drivers or all pedestrians any more than you do.
Ya know, I don't have to look any farther than this discussion to see people doing exactly that, painting all drivers as bad.
When people mention this, I always ask what percentage of cars are following the speed limit—a rule of the road all the more important when piloting a vehicle which can easily kill. Cyclists disregarding the rules of the road are lower percentage, and primarily endanger themselves.
Fare: I agree that cars speed more than cyclists blowing stop sings/red lights but the latter is far more dangerous in my opinion and I see them do it constantly.
I had to slam on the breaks 3 weeks ago when making a left because of a biker completely running a red light in front of me.
Count the proportion who run the light given the opportunity. All cyclists have the opportunity, but only the front car - if it stops, it blocks others.
I'm a bit of a "rich lycra-clad yuppy" myself, and occasionally ride with other such cyclists. I've literally never heard anyone express horror at the idea of their hobby becoming more inclusive.
Mostly e-bike riders are just ignored. Like they don't affect us in any way and we barely even notice that they exist.
That is very much part of the problem. The solution is going to run into both financial and legal obstacles, so it's imperative that the various stakeholders cooperate instead of one group consistently trying to lord it over the others.
I love mine, I think it opens up some opportunities to work on relations with cars and pedestrians. I feel less in the way when I can maintain a better speed up hill. and on trails it's not a burden to slow down when passing pedestrians on foot. Nothing is worse than a bike whizzing by when you don't expect it. I just wish they'd remove those stupid speed limiters.
Except in many places pedestrians and cyclists have no choice but to share the road with cars and I don't see too many people clamoring for speed limiters on those...
If you remove the limiter and pedal assist requirement, you have an electric motorcycle. If you want one of those, then you'll need to be licensed to ride one.
Do you want an e-bike you can ride like a bicycle, or do you want an e-bike you can ride like a motorcycle?
only because we have brain dead laws on e bikes. why not 24.5 mph? I see actual electric motorcycles on our bike paths all the time, I have never seen them cause a real problem. People on normal bikes cause all the problems because they have so much invested in their current speed.
Because kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity, and 25mph is 56% more energy which is a huge problem in a collision with a pedestrian or a crash.
It's also a big issue with response time and with the rate pedestrians expect bicycles to be travelling. You shouldn't bike on the sidewalk because no one is looking for vehicles going more than a few miles per hour (walking). You shouldn't bike more than 15mph on trails/lanes shared with pedestrians for similar reasons. 20mph is a tolerable compromise, 25mph is flat out dangerous.
This matches my experience on shared pedestrian / bicycles low density roads in countryside. 30 km/h (a little less than 20 mph) is the limit between okish and dangerous. Actually pedestrians start to worry a little before that speed but of course half of them don't see the bicycle approaching. The cyclist see them a long time before overtaking and assesses whether they are safe to pass or require a slow down.
This is a good example of how we get bad laws... Should overweight cyclists be forced to have a lower speed? I can still get my ebike to 25 mph down hill, I would never dream of passing a pedestrian at that speed. I picked 24.5 for a reason and not 25 BTW.
tbh I wouldn't mind the peed limit being higher but introduce some sort of driving lic and exam for it with periodic re-testing. Also re-testing should be mandatory for car drivers too. Both theory, practical, reflex testing.
I ride a bicycle, bike and drive a car and the ammount of crazies on all sides leaves me speachless sometimes. I see cyclist cutting off cars and shooting into a roundabout just because cars will avoid them. I actually had a crash becasue of a retard like this and I chased him until I caught him. Took him to court and won.
On the other side of the coin - I see cars taking turns without checking their mirrors, overtaking while in a queue without making sure no cyclists are passing by. Smashed a bike to bits because of 1 twat. His insurance paid for the bike and treatment.
P.S. I'm not a perfect driver but people these days lack consideration and defensive driving(even the notion of it is foreign now)
I don't understand what you're asking for. There are already electric motorcycles which don't have artificial speed limiters. Those require a motorcycle license and can be driven on any road.
Riding a motorcycle is easier than a bike. In a motorcycle there’s three evasive actions: brake, accelerate or swerve. On a bicycle there’s only two, and that lack of speed is exactly what causes some of the riskiest behaviors from motorists (e.g. close passing.)
I think it's charitable to say there are even two fully useful evasive actions on a bike. An absolutely tiny contact patch and low weight mean that there's simply not enough traction for any sort of aggressive change in direction or speed without ending up off the bike.
What's pernicious about this is, that under normal circumstances most people won't have ridden a bike past these limits, maybe ever, so the first time you realize your bike can go from well behaved to on the pavement instantly is the worst time for it to happen.
It depends on the bike though. I mountain bike with large soft tires, good suspensions, and low air pressure have quite a lot of grip compared to a road bike with tiny super hard tires. You can do a lot of crazy things. But I agree that the average commuter bike has low limits.
If you’re an urban cyclist find a safe place like a parking lot to practice sudden braking, tight turns, etc. And if there’s a suitable spot practice riding on gravel too… Should roughly simulate loosing grip on rough roads.
It is trivial to get a motorcycle license in America. An order of magnitude more training should be required for cars and motorcycles before I would consider people trained.
It depends heavily on the state you live in I believe. It's also somewhat irrelevant to my point: if you're going to be on the road with a vehicle that has similar capabilities to a motorbike, you should at least know what the other drivers have been taught, if nothing else.
Do some cities actually let cyclists bike on sidewalks? I bike 24/7 but this seems crazy. Bicycles needs their own, separate, protected paths, at the road level. Period.
I live in a city that explicitly allows cyclists to bike on sidewalks, and I'd never bike otherwise. One time I tried road-riding the mere 15m home from the gym and had 3 close calls from drivers. We also have separate, protected paths at the road level. Anybody who wants me to ride on the road can send me a blank check to cover medical expenses in the case of an accident if they are so invested in my riding according to their preferences.
Luckily it's illegal to ride a bicycle on sidewalks in my country and yet many people do it at half the speed and half the comfort of what they would have on the road (sidewalks are not maintained to be smooth and are cluttered by all sort of things and people.) I'm a cyclist and I really hate them. If they are afraid to ride on the road, it sucks for them but it's only one of the things people would like to do and cannot do. Walk, catch a bus, drive a car.
Besides Europe, I remember seeing several sidewalks in Japan that allowed it. And many (most?) streets in Japan are fully mixed across modes, and have no sidewalk, so you'll see bikers+pedestrians(+cars) combined there too.
There's something very nice about these types of mixed streets, but they're pretty much unheard in the US. They work very well on small residential streets, where cars would otherwise get 80% of the street width reserved to their use, even where car traffic is low.
Also, US sidewalks tend to be extremely narrow, which makes it worse to share modes.
It's technically illegal to ride your bike on the sidewalk in at least Tokyo. The lack of protected bike lanes, however, means that very few people obey that law.
There's a lot of mixed-use streets here without sidewalks, and if cars weren't allowed on them, they'd be great. I'm always worried about being hit by a car on them.
In Japan, you definitely see bikes going fairly quickly on sidewalks where there is a fair bit of pedestrian traffic. I'm especially careful in Japan to not make any possibly unpredictable side to side moves when walking because that's a good way to get clipped.
I've even seen bikes trying to make their way through a pedestrian crush that's basically the people density of Times Square in NYC.
Sidewalks let you fill in gaps in the protected path network by riding slowly.
In my city at least you can't really go fast on the sidewalks even if they're empty (lots of uneven brick, chunky curbs, trees, buildings have stoops, etc) so it's not a big issue. If someone has to go a couple blocks on the sidewalk they'll generally get back on the path / road as soon as able
In DC it's specifically allowed except for a prohibited section near the Mall downtown. And in that section the law is widely ignored by both cyclists and police either way.
Yes. Several cities in the Bay Area have shared sidewalks; e.g. Embarcadero in San Francisco, and Foster City has a ton of them. I don't know of any cities that allow all sidewalks to be used by bikes, but I'm sure some exist.
Embarcadero's a special case since it's so wide, and barely has car traffic crossing it. (It borders the ocean on one side.) San Francisco has many protected bike lanes and if your route is on those exclusively, it's very nice.
That depends on the conditions. If you adapt to the conditions then that would be fine, if you don't then even at normal e-bike speeds you are a danger. I never got why we have 200 Mph cars but a moped that can go 30 over the legal limit gets confiscated.
My e-bike is taxed, insured and tested to the same standards as a light e-moto (in Germany, a Riese & Mueller 'charger'). The only difference with the bicycle version is the speed limiter setting.
Only a tiny handful of expensive sports cars can actually reach 200 mph. While there a few limited exceptions, in most jurisdictions anyone caught driving at 200 mph will be arrested and the car impounded.
Those speed limiters are indeed stupid, especially because on a 'regular' bike you can fairly easily outrun a normal e-bike (though probably not for as long unless you are in very good shape). Normal ones should be limited at 35 or so and speed-pedelecs at 50 Kph so you don't end up holding up other traffic. Where I live a speed-pedelec has to be in traffic but it isn't allowed to go as fast as that traffic, which creates all kinds of dangers.
I'm of the mind that it's up to every individual to decide how much risk they want to take, but I think an e-bike that can do 55 mph is significantly more dangerous than a motorcycle. Tiny amount of traction, no ability to maneuver or speed up further to get yourself out of a dangerous position. Crude/no suspension. No traction control, no turn signals, silent. Cars on the road see a pedal bike and expect you to behave like one. Rider unlikely to be wearing the correct safety gear. If you lay down a bike at 55 and you aren't wearing leathers you can literally bleed out right there on the pavement. The list goes on and on.
Again, not saying it should not be allowed, but man, at that point please just take care of yourself and get a little honda motorbike and a full face helmet/leathers.
55mph on an ebike would be insane :) even 55kph is really really fast if you're not on perfect asphalt - the slightest pebble hitting the front wheel and it's goodbye
To clarify, it's insane from a practical standpoint to allow e-bikes to go that fast, but from a technological standpoint many e-bikes are more than capable of going that fast, and much faster. I have seen e-bikes that advertise their top speed as 80 mph.
It's intentional to limit these to $regular_speed - 5km/h, same as with mopeds. I assume it's so you are converted to a real vehicle (car) by virtue of being assaulted on the roads by those driving them?
I certainly don't agree with 35km/h on bike paths. The current 25km/h is plenty and given their popularity with older ages, already producing outsized numbers of injuries and deaths.
What are the rules where you live? In France it's either a bike if the assist is limited to 25kmh (you could go above that on a nice flat road, but the gearing usually isn't designed for it) , or a "<50cc motorcycle" in which case it can go up to 50kmh (like all other <50cc vehicles). In the latter case, no bike lanes, you need a rear-view mirror and helmet, and for some bureaucratic reason the brakes have to be inversed
It means that a ciclyst on an ebike can outperform a group of friends with normal bikes on an slope but can't stay with them on the way back home and they'll have to wait. I experienced that and it's not nice. The two types of bikes mix well only in low intensity sightseeing rides.
Of course. We were slowly pedaling uphill with road bikes and our friend was speeding in front of us. But we had to wait on the way back home because we could do easily 30 km/h on the last 20 km (completely flat) and his engine cut off at 25.
> people who think that cycling is a niche hobby of rich lycra-clad yuppies
I don’t know who “those people” are, or what regional politics are at play, but that doesn’t pass my “smell test”. How about deploying “think about the children” here for something that increases exercise and happiness, mobility, fosters growth… it’s not even contentious with respect to (e.g.) civil liberties.
I suspect the answer is people just don’t care. Especially once they’re behind the wheel of an automobile, electric or otherwise.
Keep in mind that most cyclists are also drivers, and in the latter role many of them also don't seem to care. These debates often sound like we're talking about two disjoint groups of people, with one having a grievance against the other, but in reality they're just different transport modalities that people switch between.
Where I'm at there is a major project to overhaul a road, let's call it "Broadway", with conservation drainage, walkability(like 10ft wide sidewalks), medians, trees, and bike paths.
The project kept getting derailed due to bicycle special interests having a literal fit because a section of the road was too narrow to have the walkable sidewalks(priority number 1), the cycle lanes with adequate safety, and not congest the rest of the road. A consulting company made recommendations based on traffic simulations and the requirements to have the bicycle route go off onto a parallel side street through this section.
Oh man, what a shit show it turned into. But most of the pushback against what the cyclist special interests wanted(lanes through this section, fuck everything else) had to do with the practicalities of balancing the requirements. Not the meme arguments people who hate cars often throw out as scarecrows.
From my totally uninformed perspective, it seems like the thing to lose should be the cars. If you’re having 10 ft wide sidewalks on a (guessing from the name) important street so that more people can walk there, then maybe you should deliberately make it worse for cars to discourage high speeds or unnecessary journeys. Of all modes of transport, cars are best able to make detours because they are fast and require little of the drivers energy to move. But (again guessing from the name) maybe this is a North American city and so cars must be properly cared for—it seems the car advocacy group didn’t even get the chance to complain about a single lane system because there wasn’t enough width, though maybe they already lost parking spaces or traffic lanes to the project and they did complain about it.
>Traffic calming uses physical design and other measures to improve safety for motorists, pedestrians and cyclists. It has become a tool to combat speeding and other unsafe behaviours of drivers in the neighbourhoods. It aims to encourage safer, more responsible driving and potentially reduce traffic flow. Urban planners and traffic engineers have many strategies for traffic calming, including narrowed roads and speed humps. Such measures are common in Australia and Europe (especially Northern Europe), but less so in North America. Traffic calming is a calque (literal translation) of the German word Verkehrsberuhigung – the term's first published use in English was in 1985 by Carmen Hass-Klau.
>HANS MONDERMAN is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done his job. "The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says. "To my mind, it's much better to remove things."
>[...] In Denmark, the town of Christianfield stripped the traffic signs and signals from its major intersection and cut the number of serious or fatal accidents a year from three to zero. In England, towns in Suffolk and Wiltshire have removed lane lines from secondary roads in an effort to slow traffic - experts call it "psychological traffic calming." A dozen other towns in the UK are looking to do the same. A study of center-line removal in Wiltshire, conducted by the Transport Research Laboratory, a UK transportation consultancy, found that drivers with no center line to guide them drove more safely and had a 35 percent decrease in the number of accidents.
>An Urban Design London and Urban Design Group Lecture
>Hans Monderman has been one of the most significant influences on the current debate about the design of streets and spaces in the UK. A traffic engineer and road safety specialist from Northern Holland, he is celebrated as the pioneer of shared space as a means to influence speed and driver behaviour.
>Monderman has been the inspiration behind scores of towns and villages which work without road markings, traffic signs, signals, kerbs, barriers and bollards. ‘Most engineers, when faced with a problem, try to add something,’ he says. ‘My instinct has always been to take something away.’
Following a short introduction by Rob Cowan, Hans explains his approach, work and experiences.
The parallel road is not a full city block away as you might imagine. More like an ally but an actual road; the businesses have back entrances and there is foot traffic.
The congestion would not just be on that section of road, it would propogate out and cause major issues. The bikes are not going to experience congestion.
It should reduce the number of people driving. Sounds like a win.
In the gold standard countries for cycling, this sort of design is done on purpose. Pedestrians get the best route, followed by cyclists, and vehicles have what's left.
Elsewhere, doing the easy work to accommodate cycling, then ignoring anything that would cause even the slightest inconvenience to cars, is the norm.
It’s interesting to note that the cyclists in your example have the same interest as the rest of the parties: an equal and safe share of the available road space and yet, you all them “special interests” and they’re supposed to yield and take a detour.
“Think of the children” usually only works when the idea is that children could be violently harmed by something, and thus only works when deployed in cases where freedom is being restricted. It’s not a good faith argument that can be “use your enemy’s force against them”-ed for other causes.
I think people should start pushing for cycling infrastructure on fiscal responsibility grounds. A good cycle path system is an extremely cheap way to provide mobility options to a city, all considered.
Weather tends to be a factor in some areas too. But generally the damage that a vehicle does to the road is proportional to the per axle weight raised to the fourth power; bikes don’t even register in terms of road wear.
>People can cycle in to work without breaking a sweat.
This is a big one for me. Cycling into work doesn't take too much time (30 minutes), and it's good to be active. But showering at work you often need to wait, you need to bring all your clean clothes with you, and after going back you need to shower again.
It just costs too much time to cycle because of the sweating.
With e-Bikes I'm able to cycle into work slightly faster (saving a few minutes when going up hill) and I'm still fresh when I arrive.
Sure it's not as sporty, but it's something, especially compared to driving.
> Proponents of efforts to make roads safer for cyclists have always gotten pushback from people who think that cycling is a niche hobby of rich lycra-clad yuppies.
i've seen this pushback come from two camps. 1) people with cars who get pissed when street parking or automobile lanes get turned into bike lanes (i prefer bike lanes, but i can at least understand this.) 2) professional users of the roads who saw early construction of bicycle infrastructure as something that would attract more cyclists and therefore make their jobs harder/riskier.
i feel like construction of bike infrastructure in many us cities is something that really blossomed in the late 00s/early 10s when urban cyclists were often more ragtag jorts with tattoos than "lycra-clad yuppies."
I support the efforts to make cities more friendly to cyclist traffic but the increased popularity of both ebikes and electric scooters in downtown areas has made life as a pedestrian and a motorist stressful, especially around closing time. All the things that annoy me about cyclists (running stop signs when driving in the street and driving on the sidewalk are my two biggest annoyances) have gotten worse.
Cycling advocates like to talk about sharing the road but I've yet to see any sort of acknowledgement that there's plenty of bad behavior on the part of cyclists that needs some curbing as well.
That's generally because of terrible infrastructure. Lanes designed for cars are everywhere. Most cities, sidewalks are just about everywhere.
What percentage of streets have physically separated lanes for biking, the way we have them for walking?
Bikes don't fit well with pedestrians or cars, and painted bike lanes are a joke -- imagine if you replaced every sidewalk with "painted walk lanes".
In places where there is good infrastructure, like the Netherlands, cyclist reputations for behaving badly are basically no different from pedestrian or motorist reputations.
You're not going to get any push back from me that bike lanes aren't plentiful or especially safe. The push back you get from me is that "the streets are dangerous" isn't an excuse to make sidewalks dangerous.
Being a pedestrian around cyclists is dangerous, but not as dangerous as being a cyclist around cars. So I find it hard to fault cyclists who go onto the sidewalk.
In the UK it's illegal to bike on the pavement. [1] says "Rule 64. You MUST NOT cycle on a pavement. Laws HA 1835 sect 72 & R(S)A sect 129" (exception: combined bike lanes and pavement, if the cyclist stays in the bike section).
Saying "the way things are is dangerous for me, so I'm going to break the law and be a danger to others instead because I'm what matters here" is not ok behaviour. If cycling is too dangerous for you, don't cycle. You don't get to say "driving in traffic is dangerous so I'm going to drive in the bus lane where there's less traffic", right?
Insisting that people risk their lives because "the law says you have to put yourself in mortal danger, therefore you're morally obliged to comply" is blind obedience of the dumbest degree.
That's definitely the preferable path if there are significant numbers of pedestrians, yes. If the sidewalk is basically empty, I think it's okay to ride. And there are some 'multi-use paths' I've seen that are basically still just sidewalks where bikes are explicitly permitted.
> "Cyclists are killed by cars all the time, whereas pedestrians dying to bikes is extraordinarily rare."
Evidence I can find suggests that's not entirely true. While pedestrians dying to bikes is extraordinarily rare, police reports of crashes in the UK in 2019 involving a (pedal cycle, pedestrian) pair happened 375 times and killed 4 pedestrians (~1%). Crashes involving a (car, bike) pair happened 13,336 times killed 48 cyclists (~0.3%).
That is (bike, pedestrian) happens 35x less often than (car, bike) but is fatal to the weaker party 3x more often when it does happen.
This dataset is particularly "accidents involving a pedal cycle and pedestrians which don't involve any other vehicles" so it excludes car -> bike + walker, kills walker situations.
(Injuries are another matter).
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/reported... looking at sheet RAS40004: Accidents, vehicle users and pedestrian casualties by severity and combination of vehicles involved (ODS, 105KB) with Vehicle A being Pedal Cycle -> Single Vehicle accident with Pedestrian and Pedal Cycle -> Two vehicle accidents with Car.
This ignores the fact that bikes are so much less dangerous than cars that most crashes that involve a bike but not a car will not be reported. Your average time a cyclist runs into a pedestrian will be only an annoyance.
Also, note that super bike-friendly Netherlands has 1/10th the pedestrian fatalities with 1/4th the population of the UK. If bikes are that dangerous, why would such a bike-focused country have radically fewer pedestrian fatalities?
From what I've seen, the data is pretty consistent, in that more car-focused countries tend to have more pedestrian fatalities.
I think that's kind of missing the GP's point. AIUI they weren't saying cyclists shouldn't move to the sidewalk when necessary. They were saying cyclists should do so with respect for the sidewalk's primary users especially with regard to safety. A sidewalk is a kind of commons, to be shared. "I need this now so you all get out of my way" isn't good sharing, and in many places (where the law explicitly gives pedestrians right of way) should deserve a ticket.
Oh, absolutely. I try to be respectful when I ride on the sidewalk.
But realistically, "cyclists should be nicer" isn't a policy prescription. We're just shouting into the void here, you can't actually accomplish anything significant with, I dunno, billboards shaming dickhead cyclists. Whereas zoning or road design changes could result in actual, meaningful change. And that would also result in cyclists being a lot nicer.
> a bad biker is a nuisance to a driver while a bad driver is...
You're leaving out an entire category of users. Not that I'm surprised, having been in many of these debates regarding the multi use path near my home. "Share the road" turns into "get off the path" rather quickly, in my experience.
> Most bikers only use the sidewalk when the road infrastructure as-is isn’t safe enough for bikers.
You have to see how this is a completely selfish position right?
The road is dangerous for cyclists so cyclists make the sidewalk dangerous for pedestrians. Sure there's a difference in degree but that's not a justification.
> And I fully agree that there are a lot of bad bikers, but a bad biker is a nuisance to a driver while a bad driver is a potential fatality to a biker.
To me, the "bad cyclist" is generally creating havoc on both the sidewalk and the street, alternating between street, sidewalk, crosswalks, alleys, etc. as it's convenient. This is really what I'm referring to when I said "especially at closing time". Those people are creating a dangerous environment for even safe drivers who may either hit them or get in an accident avoiding them.
I don't often find the hobbyist biker doing things like that which are dangerous to themselves except treating stop signs like yields.
I'm not nearly as concerned about the hobbyist as I am about the guy who thinks driving his ebike home from the bar is a great way to get home without drinking and driving. And that is definitely happening, especially with electric scooters.
> You have to see how this is a completely selfish position right?
That depends how busy the sidewalk is, and how the cyclist behaves. Conversely, I see videos of many places in North America where cycling on the road, even in dedicated cycle lanes, is a suicidal activity.
> You have to see how this is a completely selfish position right?
> The road is dangerous for cyclists so cyclists make the sidewalk dangerous for pedestrians. Sure there's a difference in degree but that's not a justification.
Have you ever tried biking on a 45/50mph road? The chance of you not being hit at the end of the day is not high. I'm not sure where else would one bike when there's such a large speed difference.
And in some US cities there really are no alternative roads with lower speeds limits to bike on.
Well, humans are selfish, regardless of their mode of transportation. That's why we need infrastructure (and laws) that ensures that the selfish choice is the socially beneficial one too.
For what it's worth, in the state I live in it is legal for bike riders to treat stop signs as yield signs. It started in Idaho in the 80s and has been adopted by a growing number of states since then.
It's also legal in my state to ride bikes on the sidewalk. That doesn't cause much of a problem for pedestrians because unfortunately there are few bike riders or pedestrians.
I only mention this to make people aware that what's legal depends on where they live.
As much as I appreciate the freedom e-bikes provide to people who wouldn't otherwise venture outside, without proper cycling infrastructure, e-bikes are quickly becoming a serious hazard to pedestrians. As a long-time runner who is usually struck by at least one cyclist on the sidewalk per year, e-bikes are in a completely different class. The other day, a kid on an e-bike was careening down a bridge while my kids and I were running up. I'm a decent judge of speed, and the cyclist was definitely going over 40 km/h with dog walkers and other children nearby. I didn't do the math, but that's a great deal of kinetic energy to transfer to a pedestrian (I assume e-bikes are heavier, and most cyclists going that fast are dedicated cyclists on the road). I caught up to another e-bike at a stop light and asked him why he wasn't on the road, "Too dangerous," was his answer - sadly typical. A non-trivial number of cyclists are adopting the "Uber" mindset - break the law until laws or infrastructure changes, but with complete disregard for fellow citizens in the meantime. I've expressed my concerns several times on local biking forums (when a "cycling on the sidewalk doesn't hurt anyone" message is raised)- it's usually met with ridicule, anger and disbelief, but I experience it practically every day.
I've ridden a bicycle before, I don't need this explained to me. Unfortunately for cyclists (including me), it being more strenuous to obey the law isn't an excuse to not obey it.
The law is there as mandate from the people. If it isn't working, or seriously inconviences a particular demographic, it can be changed. Note that cyclists have no problems with circles/roundabouts...
I find it odd that stop sign is a go to complain about cyclists, given that those do nothing for bike. And I say that as someone who drives car way more often as bike. Cyclist ignoring stop sign is not an issue at all, stop signs exists because of cars.
The red light, yes, that is valid complain. But stop sign, meh.
But also, pretty much any transport mode features people with bed behavior: cars, pedestrians, roller skaters. Those people are not even that much demographically different, unless the transport ends up tied to politics.
Maybe because it's because within the three groups (cyclists, drivers, pedestrians), cyclists are the only ones who haven't got their own infrastructure.
If cyclists had 90% of the road, and cars were forced to share the remaining 10% with pedestrians, everyone would be complaining (with reason) that's it's incredibly dangerous
The law is that nobody goes above the speed limit as well, I hope you never do that since you seem to be an absolutist on this? Because from what I've seen, 95% of cars break the speed limit. I'd even argue it's a higher percentage than bicycles who blow through stop signs.
I cycle to work now on an ebike and it's awesome. Just need to dress warm when it's cold. One catch is there's an obvious range limitation. If it takes longer than other forms of transport, people are going to choose the other forms of transport. On the other hand, as congestion in a particular area increases, that equation shifts in favour of ebikes, meaning they can be considered organic efficiency regulators of the transport system.
Another catch is safety. Forcing bikes to share the road is dangerous. Cities really need bike lanes.
> The thing that excites me most about e-bikes is that they change the politics around cycling. Proponents of efforts to make roads safer for cyclists have always gotten pushback from people who think that cycling is a niche hobby of rich lycra-clad yuppies.
Is this even a thing outside of USA? Nobody thinks that where I live, and it's not a particularly bike-friendly country like Netherlands, just average EU country.
a 60 y/o hearing impaired unexperienced cyclist riding as fast as a fit experienced cyclist - good look with that. maybe you want to overthink your argument.
The same 60 yo might use a car instead, and drive multiples of 25kph. And energy is proportional to the square of the speed, so typical ebike will have about an order of magnitude less energy than the typical car, with also an order of magnitude less mass.
Nassim Taleb made some pretty interesting points on the magnitude of a risk vs its probability. If you get a shower of pebbles thrown on your head, you'll be sore at worst. If you get the same mass thrown as one big rock... you're dead.
Same with bikes. You're much more likely to fall (you really are). But chances are, you'll not even ruin your clothes when you do, and the risk of serious injury, while of course present, is much much smaller.
My wife and I experienced eBiking around downtown Chicago (Divvy's eBike), and it literally re-ignited my love for biking, I really recommend it if you're visiting Chicago! The bike path next to the lake is beautiful & so fun! I think we biked about 15+ miles without breaking a sweat. We did it multiple times in the summer.
I live across the border in Indiana, and have wanted to bike on the beach/dunes/trails for years. I just bought a Specialized Fatboy with a BBSHD motor, can't wait to get back out there.
I like that e-bikes are getting more people on two-wheeled transportation.
I dislike that people are effectively riding motorcycles on dedicated bike paths.
I especially dislike that companies get to profit from cluttering public spaces with bicycle and scooter litter.
My hope is that long-term we get the e-bikes into the street where they belong and combine that with traffic calming measures to make scooter commuting feasible from a safety perspective.
> I especially dislike that companies get to profit from cluttering public spaces with bicycle and scooter litter.
Then you must hate on-street parking and parking lots.
I think the speed and power limits of ebikes are actually pretty reasonable. A fit cyclist can go faster on the flats, and I don't just mean a pro, anybody young and healthy who cycles a few times a week should be able to manage it.
Bikes should have their own transport spaces, not sharing with cars. Cars should be limited access from many areas. And pedestrians should be as mindful of bikes as they are of cars.
> Then you must hate on-street parking and parking lots.
Here in Seattle we actually reclaimed on-street parking for dedicated bike-share parking because people park them so inconsiderately. Like sideways blocking entire bike paths and sidewalks.
If you are in a wheelchair you can forget about curb ramps, they’re blocked by bike shares.
Parking lots are dedicated for that purpose. And in here, if you park the car on the sidewalk, you get ticket. Shared e-scooters are regularly parked in the middle of the sidewalk, making it impossible to go around with stroller.
But to those companies credit, they do have at least token process of punishing bad parking.
I think the parent commenter is suggesting that devoting vast swathes of land to storing objects that are only used for few percent of every day could, in some ways, be considered "cluttering public space".
I certainly agree that scooters dumped in the middle of a sidewalk is very annoying. I haven't lived anywhere where rental bikes can just be dropped (they're returned to stations) so I haven't experienced littering in that sense.
As long as they're speed-limited to conventional biking speed I don't think this is much of a problem. E-bikes have similar mass to normal bikes so the forces are basically the same.
They aren't limited to conventional biking speed. The rental bikes are close but they're still significantly faster than any human-powered vehicle on the bike path.
A buddy of mine bought a Super73 which has speed limiting modes but operates purely on the honor system. In the "unlimited" mode it can do 28mph, without pedaling. In the "limited" mode it can still do 20, which is faster than most people are capable of for any extended period of time without a power assist.
A Super 73 weighs 73lbs. That's double a regular bike. Moving at 2-4x the speed. Sure the rider is more than that but e-bike numbers are a lot closer to mopeds than bicycles.
> They aren't limited to conventional biking speed.
Partially repeating my comment from another sub-thread here:
In Europe, the speed at which an ebike motor may assist one is limited to 25 km/h (~ 15.5 mph):
> pedal cycles with pedal assistance which are equipped with an auxiliary electric motor having
> a maximum continuous rated power of less than or equal to 250 W, where the output of the motor
> is cut off when the cyclist stops pedalling and is otherwise progressively reduced and finally
> cut off before the vehicle speed reaches 25 km/h;
-- REGULATION (EU) No 168/2013, Article 2, §2 (h)
There are faster pedelecs, but those need to be registered and have insurance, same as any lightweight motorbike needs to have since like ever, most common are the ones <= 50cc as those are allowed with 14 or 16 years of age, and those are not allowed on bike-only roads or lanes.
Yes, legally they are limited. Here in the real world people are riding electric mopeds at nearly 30mph on bike paths anyway. Happens all the time. There are pedestrians walking in the bike path too. Someone is going to get hurt.
And people also ride motorbikes in bike lanes, even cars sometimes - so what's your point? Legal ebikes won't make this more dangerous, and people doing illegal stuff are always more likely to not care and endanger people.
I other than e-bikes I have never seen a motorcycle on a bike path. I'm not sure you know what I am talking about when I say bike path.
I am talking about a dedicated asphalt path that runs parallel to a road with parking and/or a curb or barrier between traffic and the bike path. Next to this path is a sidewalk for pedestrians, separated by grass. In some places the pedestrian and bicycle traffic merge. They are always separated from traffic. Sometimes they take routes that do not follow roads, such as through parks.
The road itself also has a bike lane which is striped between traffic and the parked cars. Cars and bicycles sometimes share this space, sometimes it is separated by a double white line or some cones. Considerate bicycle riders that want to go faster than is safe around pedestrians use this in-the-road bike lane rather than the bike path. This is where e-bikes that can go 28mph belong.
The only motorized vehicles I have ever seen on these bicycle paths are e-bikes. I have not seen full electric motorcycles (with plates, like a Zero) or any ICE vehicle, even a moped, on these paths.
> I am talking about a dedicated asphalt path that runs parallel to a road with parking and/or a curb or barrier between traffic and the bike path. Next to this path is a sidewalk for pedestrians, separated by grass. In some places the pedestrian and bicycle traffic merge. They are always separated from traffic. Sometimes they take routes that do not follow roads, such as through parks.
Yeah, I assumed both (separate bike road and just painted bike lane) and I've seen both.. And really even a car during rush hour, granted in a bit more rural area and the bike road wasn't _that_ much used, but still...
> The only motorized vehicles I have ever seen on these bicycle paths are e-bikes. I have not seen full electric motorcycles (with plates, like a Zero) or any ICE vehicle, even a moped, on these paths.
Yeah, but as, at least where I live (in a European country) they're limited to 25 km/h it's not a issue. As said, pedelecs, which can go faster, are a thing but need a plate, more safety equipment and insurance, and I see no reason why people then would more (or less) frequently use them illegally like existing motorized vehicles.
Using Super73 as an example is like complaining about how fast cars are and citing the Tesla Plaid or a Lamborghini Aventador as an everyday example.
Super73 bikes are premium bikes that start at $1500 and can easily top $5000 with accessories. The highend RX cost $3500 base, has 750w motor that boost up to 1200w with an almost 1000 watt hour battery.
Compare that to something reasonable like the RadPower Radmission that costs $999, has a 500w Motor that cuts out at 20 mph powered by a 500 watt hour battery.
Just like regular bikes, ebikes come in all varieties and banning them all or relegating them to car lanes because a few should be classified as Mopeds isn't the answer.
Some responsible ebike companies ship their top end bikes with VINs that require they be registered as Mopeds.
I'm equating a Super73 on the bike path to a Lamborghini on the road. They aren't the norm and you don't sink the whole field because you don't like one bad actor.
Many ebikes are completely unassuming and you don't even realize they are battery powered.
Why are you speaking in absolutes? High speed e-bikes are a problem on my local bike path. They should either go slower or ride in the road. How is this controversial? E-bikes are fine if people ride them responsibly. But terrorizing the locals isn’t a good way to drive adoption.
I actually think the Super73 is great, on the road. I’d like to see something even more capable. I’m hoping they lead to light e-scooters (like a small motorcycle, not the stand-up things) that can do 45+ MPH. That should probably require a license plate and motorcycle endorsement but I’m ok with that. America needs more two wheeled transport adoption.
What absolute are you accusing me of? You're the one who said all ebikes should use the road. My point is that not all ebikes are equal and relegating all of them to the road because of Super73 isn't the answer.
I’m pretty sure a super 73 IS illegal to ride on bike paths. At least where I live you aren’t allowed to ride a bike that has a thumb throttle. If it only has pedal assist, it’s a bike. If it had a thumb throttle, it’s a motorcycle.
A friend of mine also has a Super73 and it's basically an electric motorcycle.
I've passed people on Lime/Jump bikes while riding a single speed bike so I'm not sure that I'd say they're significantly faster. They can get up to speed much faster than a regular bike, which is really nice in traffic.
> cluttering public spaces with bicycle and scooter litter.
I think this is a disingenuous description of "provide a valuable service that many people appreciate".
I also don't see why speed-limited e-bikes shouldn't be on bike paths, unless you're living in an area where they are unthrottled or have a ridiculously high limit.
Here in Seattle people park them inconsiderately. Like block the entire path with the bike sideways inconsiderately.
They’re a nuisance. The city actually marked off some specific parking areas and is asking the ride share companies to require drop off in those areas. It got that bad.
I regularly see bike shares and scooter shares blocking curb ramps in crosswalks. Good luck to anyone in a wheelchair.
E-bikes might provide some value but proponents and users are ignoring the negative externalities to existing cyclists and pedestrians.
It will get better but we need to educate people on how to use these things responsibly.
How do you think people under the age of 16 should get around? For some examples, if they want to go to a friend's house a mile or two away, or from their home to a train station, or to the supermarket.
Riding on the sidewalk is a terrible idea. The sidewalk is for pedestrians, not people weaving around on bikes.
I'm massively pro-cycling, but bikes belong either in dedicated infrastructure or on the roads. Roads must not be monopolized by motor traffic — everyone pays for this infrastructure through taxation and it should serve everyone equally well.
That may be so, but being killed isn't the only thing that pedestrians are concerned with. At best it's plain annoying to have a someone on a bike squeezing around pedestrians (remember that even a slow-moving bike is likely faster than people walking), and at worst there are collisions and bumps and forcing people off the path and whatever else.
Cycling on a sidewalk is also not a good experience for the cyclist, either. When crossing a perpendicular street it's quite a pain to look behind to see if someone is about to turn into you as you cross the road. This is no problem for pedestrians because they move slowly and can usually look back without wavering too much. It's not a concern for cyclists on the road because they have the right of way. Then there are reversing cars, stuff in the way (bins, lamp posts, whatever) and myriad other reasons why cycling on a sidewalk is impractical.
I love cycling and bikes and firmly believe cycling has an important role in getting people around. But it shouldn't be at the expense of people who're walking. Bikes belong on dedicated infrastructure or on the road. If the road is deemed "not suitable" somehow this needs to be addressed by building better roads.
I mean I agree with you in that I kind of hate cars and wish I could use bike paths and public transit to get everywhere, but quite a substantial portion of the world has either no sidewalks where they live, or sidewalks like NYC or Tokyo that are so busy they are impossible to bike on.
That's ass-backwards. If you can't drive safely around children then you shouldn't be licensed to operate a 3-tonne death machine in residential areas.
What if the child doesn't know what a give way sign means? Or doesn't know what to do in a round about, or likes to run red lights to show off to their friends. Kids do dumb things sometimes and the road is a dangerous place to be.
> What if the child doesn't know what a give way sign means? Or doesn't know what to do in a round about, or likes to run red lights to show off to their friends.
Then you'd better be driving slowly and paying attention if you want to operate a heavy vehicle around where kids are.
> the road is a dangerous place to be
Roads are fine; motor vehicles being driven at speed make places dangerous.
So let's make the road safer instead of banning children. Also, parents aren't completely irresponsible and will teach their kids how to cycle before letting them run loose.
I'm not sure I agree to an outright ban, but some sort of required training before using electrical vehicles (in general, not just on roads) would be a good idea. As others say these are effectively low power motorcycles, not bicycles.
Last week in my city an electric scooter pulled out of a junction - where the light was red - in front of a bus. The bus performed an emergency stop, causing minor injuries that required hospitalization to a number of people onboard. The scooter just continued without stopping. Police are trying to track down the driver, but it seems pretty much impossible (it was privately owned, not rented from an app).
I've also seen countless accidents from people driving at 25km/h across pedestrian crossings, and the car not seeing them before it's too late. Here you are supposed to dismount from vehicles and walk across, but most people do not.
Near my office there is a junction where you can turn left - crossing a lane coming in the other direction - and go up a hill, at the same time the light is green for pedestrians to cross, and cars are supposed to give way. If a scooter is coming along the pavement at full speed, in the same direction as you are travelling before you turned, there is no way you will see it until it's right in front of you and it's too late to stop.
Because I think the road is dangerous place to be. I think we all accept that drivers should understand the road rules, have a license to drive, and should be more than 16-17 to do it.
I think its weird that we would let children of any age, with no knowledge of road rules ride a bike around in traffic.
In my small city, it's legal for kids to ride bikes on the footpaths, but in most of Australia its is not. I think its backwards.
I just built one with recycled laptop batteries... super fun to ride. It was a shit ton of work to do the batteries right, but I learned so much. Endless-Sphere is where my build thread is...
My bike is 2004 Specialized mountain bike. Bought the motor from ebay and just bolted it on. The battery lives in a home sewn bag I made which I velcro strapped to the frame. I have gone about 35mph on it. Do not recommend super high speeds unless you are a capable bike rider.
It looks like a mad max experiment. I just wanted to ride the thing and wire management is def an afterthought. I do not ride anywhere I can't take it inside with me even though I only have about $500 into it. Too much work to risk theft.
So much fun to ride. Peeling out in dirt is thrilling on bicycle.
I've been thinking about doing the same thing but am worried it will explode on me. Are there any tips you have for starting out or mistakes to be sure to avoid?
I was hoping to use this as a project to learn electricity with and it sounds like you did something similar.
This is exactly what I did. I wanted to learn DC circuits and battery technology and I did that in spades.
Batteries are really simple, just need to respect them. If you are going to use recycled batteries, I suggest you buy a Opus c3400 tester. Run them through a complete charge/discharge cycle to identify capacity and bad cells. If they get hot, take them out and properly recycle them at Autozone. Otherwise, write down the capacity on the cell.
You can use repakr once you have 100 cells or so. I went with a 13s6p configuration for a 48volt system. I learned a ton from Micah Toll's DIY Lithium Battery book. Also, register at Endless-Sphere and start reading. Eventually the information will coalesce and you can start to buy bits and bobs. Take your time and don't rush buying right away... lots to learn.
There's usually no explosions, they burn vigorously.
But before that they get too hot to hold. Cell management requires thermal cutoffs for this reason.
I really enjoyed my e-bike when I bought it in 2018 or so. The pedal assist really felt seamless: you can get to the top speed of 20mph by pedaling with as much effort as it took to get to maybe 12mph on a regular bike.
Unfortunately, the bike being worth thousands of dollars, it was a prime target for theft. My bike was stolen in San Jose and I decided to replace it with a sub-$1000 regular bike.
This really is my biggest fear with owning these. I think going to and from the office is a safe one since you can park the bike indoors, but for errands or outdoor casual riding it feels too risky!
Yes, this is a problem. I have a pretty beefy lock with my e-bike and still I don't feel comfortable leaving it outside a store for more than three minutes or so (which is probably still plenty of time to steal it).
Here in Finland best you can do is 1% depreciation a month. So after two years you’ve lost 24% value of your bike if it’s stolen. That’s a significant amount of money on top of a deductible to cough up to replace a stolen bike. Considering the probability of having it stolen is far far higher than a car too…
I know people who have had 2-3 of these bikes stolen. I use mine for commute at the moment and that’s it.
Sounds expensive to me. I ride a Decathlon Triban 100 FB that cost me 150€ (new). Better than most 1K+ gravel bikes and not a target for thieves in Paris bc it's too common.
For example around here you can get a ticket for using one on both cycle paths and also on roads with a 40 MpH speed limit. So you're more legally limited than both a cyclist but also a moped user. The biggest reason why they're popular here at all is that laws are selectively enforced.
None of this is e-bike's fault of course, and the original Segway mostly failed because it too was banned from both footpaths but also many roads. Local city and states haven't evolved much to include new modes of transport outside the traditional (although some would call that a blessing as they don't want licensing/mandatory insurance/tax on e-bikes/e-scooters).
Not a criticism of e-bikes, but I discovered an unexpected danger related to e-bikes which was much less an issue with traditional bikes: when driving a car, it's now much more difficult to judge how much time you need to pass a bike. I would say without hyperbole that it's much more dangerous now, to the cars and the bikes.
I currently live in a Dutch village, so bikes and cars share rather narrow roads. The roads are narrow enough that two cars barely fit side by side. Normally when you're approaching a bike from behind, you know you only need 2-3 seconds to pass it. If there's oncoming traffic, you can easily judge if you have time to safely pass the bike, or if instead you should slow down and wait behind it.
But now that bike which would normally be moving 10-15kph may actually be an e-bike doing 24-ish kph. That's quite a big difference. And if you're doing 50-70 as you approach, it's _very_ difficult to identify from a distance if that bike is going 12 or 24. It matters too, because it might take twice as long to pass as you would normally expect.
Of course we can adapt and take the safe approach, always slowing to the bike speed before deciding to pass. But not only is that rather aggravating to go from 70 to 15 and then accelerate to pass, but it's wasteful on brakes and fuel. Also, if there's any oncoming traffic further down the road, you're much more likely to now be stuck behind that bike for an agonizingly long time.
For the cyclist, they will now be more at risk of a passing car misjudging and pulling back into the lane, cutting the bike off.
Tangentially related is the (new for cars) Tesla problem. That's when you're merging or needing to pass someone, and that someone is driving a Tesla and has a bad attitude. Historically it was pretty easy to judge if you had enough speed to pass someone; but now if that someone is driving a Tesla (or other new, performance oriented electric), they can decide to not allow you to pass by simply stepping on the throttle. They can so quickly accelerate that they can fill that spot which was safely available. If you're not paying close attention (being prepared for something like that), or if you have nowhere else to go (merging, lane ending), you're at great risk of accident.
So in summary, electric vehicles are dangerous! I jest, but they do indeed present some new challenges that don't make them more welcome on the roads.
If you're used to (slow, heavy) Dutch style bikes, 12-15 km/h is reasonable. However any "road" bike (rather than commuter bike) can easily go 25+km/h on flat ground. 45km/h is not unusual of for racers.
Of course, these are easier to spot than ebikes...
As a vaguely competent cyclist, cars have frequently pulled in way too soon after overtaking and cut me off, so ebikes are making the roads much safer.
In my experience driving, the car is now more likely to misjudge and not allow enough time to pass, thereby pulling back into your space while you’re still there (if you’re on a faster e-bike).
I think one of the big challenges with e-bikes is the acceleration. An electric motor combined with the relatively light weight means they accelerate seriously quickly.
I'm not familiar with this problem since I don't ride them. But as a motorist, their ability to accelerate quickly really isn't an issue regarding me passing them on the road.
Do you mean it only takes the Tesla a very short time to close the gap between it and the car upfront? If so, won’t passing make one stuck behind the next car? What’s the point? To leave less of a gap between the car than the Tesla was doing or to continually pass all the cars?
Imagine you're merging onto a freeway. You have limited runway before you have no more lane. The lane you need to merge into has a Tesla next to you, and some cars behind it.
You could slow down and hope one of those cars behind the Tesla slows to allow you to merge, but not only is that unlikely but it screws up traffic flow. Naturally you step on it so you can speed ahead and merge. But that Tesla drive has the ability to show you that he's boss, and he's faster than you. Now you're going faster and have even less lane remaining, so you must hit the brakes hard and try to merge into the new gap behind the Tesla. That's dangerous, but it's now about your only option.
Or you simply want to change into a lane and fill in the space between the Tesla and the car some distance in front of him. Maybe you see congestion ahead in your lane, or perhaps you're about to encounter traffic merging into your lane.
There are tons of legitimate reasons you might want to get in front of that Tesla. And if you already were going faster than him, it would normally be no problem for anyone. But in angry driver traffic with the new electric capabilities, people can basically use their cars as weapons.
It may sound dramatic, but it was already a bad behavior some people would exhibit when they were angry, competitive drivers. Now they have much more ability to fight.
Whereas in the US, road bikes are the norm for adults and are typically ridden around 30kph on open road.
For many of the riders, sweaty and tired is the whole point: conditioning. They may take it easy on the way to work (only 20kph) but they'll go flat-out on the way home.
It's why we're so obsessive about helmets, where the rest of the world isn't.
I can imagine a world, maybe a generation or 2 from now, where our suburbs have shrunk to a bike-accessible scale. That would really, finally, be a step in the right direction.
I don't think it would take that long, if there were the right policies. Especially if ebikes letting you go 20 mph were the norm, most suburbs aren't so low density that you couldn't have, say, bakeries or small grocery stores within biking distance. That would often require zoning changes, in addition to adding bike paths, but it wouldn't take a whole generation to get done.
We could have bakeries, small groceries, etc. within _walking_ distance right now, if zoning allowed them to be integrated into residential areas, and people didn't expect parking.
Depends on the surburb, I've definitely seen many where walking distance wouldn't work very well, there just flat out aren't that many people. You'll have a subdevelopment where there's 50-100 houses or whatever, and it's connected to a highway and otherwise surrounded by a bunch of green space. That's not enough people to support more than a kiosk's worth of retail, probably.
I mean, that's really a self-reinforcing cycle. Car culture leads to car-centric development leads to car-dependent suburbs leads to more need for car infrastructure. Nothing said those suburbs had to be built that way, except that's what people expect (and whatever local zoning ordinances ear-marked the land for single-family homes).
Agreed. But nevertheless, those types of suburbs will be harder to convert to a more walkable or bike-friendly format.
But yes, many others would be fairly straightforward, the only blocking issue is political will. "A bakery on my street corner makes me scared for my neighborhood character" is a surprisingly common sentiment in the states. People don't want any kind of retail whatsoever.
I'm skeptical door-to-door self-driving will happen for the general case in the foreseeable future. But, if it does, certainly. An hour "being driven" to go into town for the evening is pretty tolerable compared to driving yourself (and even more so driving yourself back)--and would probably change the tradeoffs for a lot of people.
Adding a motor to a bike is like adding a GUI where previously you only had a command line interface. It increases the addressable market for bikes by at least 10X.
A major problem with electric pushbikes is that they are fast.
A few days ago I was pulling out of a side road. I was turning to go into town such that I had to first cross a lane of traffic going out of town.
I checked the crossing lane — nothing except for a guy in work clothes, no helmet, on a push bike. I checked the other direction and it was clear. I looked back towards town and got ready to start moving and…
HEY! The guy on the bike who was maybe 100 yards away before was now right in front of me. I was moments from pulling out in front of, or more like on top of him. He must have been doing 25-30mph without breaking a sweat.
It’s going to take a generation to re-learn our assumptions about what these vehicles mean. I wish, for their sake, they were speed limited to be like normal bicycles.
In Europe, the speed at which an ebike motor may assist one is limited to 25 km/h (~ 15.5 mph):
> pedal cycles with pedal assistance which are equipped with an auxiliary electric motor having
> a maximum continuous rated power of less than or equal to 250 W, where the output of the motor
> is cut off when the cyclist stops pedalling and is otherwise progressively reduced and finally
> cut off before the vehicle speed reaches 25 km/h;
-- REGULATION (EU) No 168/2013, Article 2, §2 (h)
It is way too easy to remove that limitation. At least in the Czech Republic where I live it is common and it is one of the reasons I have love-hate relationship with e-bikes. I love the idea of e-bikes replacing cars to commute but they are also causing some kind of eternal September in biking. Suddenly there are multitudes of e-bikers without technical skills passing you dangerously fast on trails that were previously accessible only to trained (and therefore experienced) bikers. It spoils the fun when you are going up the hill 15 km/h and suddenly someone passes 2cm next to your elbow at 40 km/h.
Mountain e-bikes are an entire different kind of beast and living in the alps I agree with your observation of more unskilled and untrained people getting on trails that are a bit over their head, but that already happened here when some regions opened their cable cars for (mountain) biker, e.g., ski areas in the summer.
The current regulation seems Ok to me in the sense of, its simple, and it prevents most of the danger by default and the alternative would probably be to ban ebikes completely (as any hack-prevention will be circumvented sooner or later), which well would be rather counterproductive and people get hurt in cars too, so we'd need to ban almost everything..
I'd rather see some effort in educating people on bike safety in schools. We already had a bike driver licence test in elementary, while it wasn't legally binding it had some educational value, ebikes just weren't a thing there so nothing was thought about them.
I don't necessarily think speed is an issue with e bikes, since the assistance stops at a certain speed. I commute by (non electrical) bike to work every day and can reach the same speed as e bike commuters - my acceleration is just slower and it takes more work to get there (especially on windy days)
You see regular bikes going on very high speed as well, so I wouldn't say the general speed assumption has to change
I'm a year-round non-e-bike commuter in Oregon. I love e-bikes but until you can ride without getting soaked it'll be successful only part of the year in most of the US. We need something between the e-bike and golf-cart style EVs to fill the gap, some kind of sophisticated fairing or a 3 wheel format that isn't super dorky.
i live in a place that's not quite as rainy as oregon, but the combination of proper full-coverage fenders and bike paths where i'm not getting splashed by cars means there's only a couple days a year where i'm going to get "soaked" and am going to choose not to ride.
biking in the rain mostly sucks because of splashback from the road. once you've eliminated that, it's no worse than walking in the rain.
I don't think ebikes are replacing walking trips though, but car trips. The requirement to anticipate, prepare for, and endure the weather (including cold, snow, rain) makes bikes much less appealing to people who already own cars, which is almost everyone in the US.
I think the main reasons bikes aren't popular are:
safety (perceived)
weather
cargo capacity
effort requirement
Enthusiasts don't mind the latter and reluctant cyclists will still find sufficient deterrents even if it's eliminated. So I don't think ebikes are really going to move the needle in terms of ridership, regardless of what their buyers tell themselves at time of purchase.
Right. A lot of times you see 3 wheel vehicles instead of 4 for regulatory reasons. That’s silly.
I agree it’d be super awesome to get car-like protection from rain and wind, better stability than a bike, but maintaining the very low mass (and therefore low inertia and low pedestrian risk) & low cost & low footprint & high efficiency of bikes.
Something like this, but regulated as a bike for the US would be great for me! I'm legally blind so I can't drive a full size vehicle—I'll likely get an ebike soon so I can have greater mobility than walking or bus allows. However, I live in a rainy area so having something covered and which I could use to transport my daughter would be ideal. I've found one vendor in the area that sells an ebike, but they lack a lot of convenience and safety features. The covered options I've seen don't have lockable storage so you can't leave any valuables inside without risk of theft.
Too heavy to allow driving in the bike lane, IMHO. Needs to be a weight, speed, and footprint limit. But the number of wheels shouldn’t matter, regulation-wise.
I still think they are a bit big but with smaller diameter wheels, removal of pedals for full electric kart experience (but otherwise speed limited as per usual e-bike) maaaybe they could be made small enough and lightweight enough to play with.
Yes, this seems to do it! Kind of needs more enclosure, but it’s only 50kg and seems to meet the other requirements. Work bikes can be up to 150kg (not counting rider/payload) which sounds like a good upper limit on empty weight, so something like this should be doable, even able to add a small extra seat and be fully enclosed (with heated seats?).
There seem to always be a ton of three wheel "car" companies close to making their vehicles a reality (Elio, anyone?). I hope that one of them succeeds eventually. I'd love to own one someday.
The biggest hurdles with ebikes are their high cost relative to a cheap used bike (nicer ebikes are in used car territory) and likelyhood of theft in an urban area. It would probably help a lot of commutes if people had a safe place to park their bike or ebike at a train station or business or school where it won't be stripped down for parts. Rental scooters and ebikes also suffer from this problem but it doesn't matter as much since the company already puts a shelf life of one month for these sort of vehicles and budgets for this turnover, but when its your own personal vehicle if you walk out of your home before work and its been stolen you might get fired from your job worst case scenario. A car is a much harder thing to steal but even then, catalytic converter thefts have been surging. If you get comprehensive auto insurance that crime is covered at least, but some people can only afford liability. Not sure what insurance can cover bike theft. Maybe a renters insurance policy?
I'm blown away by how expensive they are and then how many I see.
$5k-$7k for an e-bicycle?
Yes yes yes, I realize enthusiasts pay up to $10-15K for high-end frames and wheels, with full Campy gruppos[1], but eBike buyer's aren't CAT-2 qualifiers.
On a side rant, the price of bikes in general has skyrockted. With so much of the manufacturing happening in China, I would have assumed that the overall costs of bikes would go down and quality would go up since the 80's (when I was really into cycling in my 20's). But the opposite has happened: quality stayed roughly the same and prices went way, way up. (e.g., A Tom Ritchie frame went for about $1.5k in 1984, and that was hand-made.)
In Europe you find excellent normal bikes for about €300; you can also find them used, for less.
Then you can convert those to ebikes with kits that cost €500-800 depending on power of motor and range of battery.
That's what I did; I transformed a regular Btwin Rockrider bike to an ebike 3 years ago, and have now ridden about 10k km with it. Couldn't be happier. It changed my life.
I used to drive a (big) motorbike; it's now been a year since I used it; it just doesn't make any sense to use a motorbike instead of an ebike for rides under 15 km, which are most if not all rides.
I built a second ebike for travel by train. Some trains have special "seats" for bikes but most don't, and they are in very limited supply anyway. But you can put a folding bike in the luggage compartment without a problem.
So I bought a used folding bike for €50, still in excellent condition, added a (low power) hub motor and a battery for €400, and I can go almost anywhere without worrying about finding a cab at my destination. It's exhilarating.
Renter's/homeowner's insurance covers one's property at home or away from it. One can get a rider for particularly valuable property.
"Velosurance" is also an option for many with expensive cargo ebikes.
Ebikes are a pretty new technology with very little used market so far, but that will change quickly— I already managed to dig one up for 50% off MSRP last winter.
Be careful there- renters will generally cover theft with a low enough deductible to make it worth it, but homeowners deductibles can easily be near or higher than the cost of the bike.
I wonder what the batteries are going to be like in the used market. afaik this is the first part to see significant wear and also probably the most expensive part on the bike. Every few years I price out ebike kit builds to see if prices have come down and battery costs have remained pretty high. At least with a regular bike you can buy it in whatever neglected condition short of a compromised frame and pay not much at all at your local bike shop to tune it up into a great bike.
Theft is such a massive issue. I pretty much gave up cycling because there is just no way to secure a bike that actually works. Criminals come out at night with power tools, bust their way through the walls of the apartment bike storage, and cut your locks at 2AM. They have hoodies and masks so CCTV is useless. Sure I guess I could hide an airtag on one, but then I have to actually do something when it inevitably gets stolen and moves to a dangerous location.
Bike lights sold in the USA are, unfortunately, almost universally garbage, with circular flashlight beams that blind both the rider and everyone coming toward them. Battery and LED technology has not helped, it has made the situation worse. Lights like those marketed by NiteRider, that are multiple times brighter than car headlights and do not have cutoff optics, should be against the law.
Fortunately, due to the size of the European market and the good sense of European bike regulations, virtually all factory-built e-bikes are coming with good headlight optics and usually a sensible mount point for the light, lower than the handlebars.
Not surprised. They are a lot cheaper, easier to own than a car in cities, and are a lot of fun to ride.
A loud contingent view them as a scourge, calling for ebikes to be banned, or otherwise licensed, registered, and insured, which would eliminate them as a common mode of transport. Most of the people I see riding them around here are high-school aged who probably don't care enough to deal with that. The next step up (moped) licensing requirements are more onerous than those of a car.
The moped licensing process definitely has a quieting effect on the amount of mopeds you see. I tried to get one thinking I would just take a little written test since I had a drivers license already. If the state was letting me drive a multiton vehicle it should be trivial for me to be allowed to drive a vehicle I could lean back up up with my own strength. Boy was I wrong. Several hundred dollars for the moped safety course ran by a private company sanctified by the state and I would have to rent their moped for the test, since it would be illegal for me to buy my own and practice with it since I don't have a moped license. Chicken and egg. It only works with cars because literally everyone has a car you can borrow and you don't have to go to driving school once you are an adult, but with mopeds and motorcycles you are beholden to these for profit schools that have lobbied themselves into regulatory permanence.
Yes, mopeds and scooters would have been a lot more popular if it weren't for those requirements. I'm sure the class is great for safety knowledge, but seems half irrelevant to electrics and mopeds since its taught on a heavy gas bike with manual transmission. I tried to register a popular but overpowered ebike with no success. The solution for now is to ride slow, slap some pedals on and say "yes officer, it's a class 3 ebike", and hope I don't get a ticket.
I mean, they do have a motor, so I don't see why they should be less regulated than other motorized vehicles. They're just as dangerous to the user as a moped.
>They're just as dangerous to the user as a moped.
In the UK (and the EU) they are restricted to 15 mph so no different to a traditional bike. If you want a speed pedelec (28 mph) then it needs to be registered like a moped and mostly can't go on bike paths.
The speed limit is higher in the US, but I don't think the top speed per se is the main factor that contributes to danger. E bikes are dangerous because they empower novice users (teenager with a ferrari type of deal), and because they slot in somewhere between cars and normal bikes/peds in terms of speed, meaning their users wind up on roads, where they're vulnerable to cars, or on paths, which are often poorly engineered with tight/blind curves and where pedestrians aren't expecting someone to fly by at 22mph.
I find the average motorist expects to be able to save themselves from any dangerous situation by simply slamming on the brakes. With traditional bikes piloted by neophytes, this works alright since the top speed is probably ~15mph. But this doesn't work as well for two wheeled vehicles traveling at high speeds, where slamming on the brakes can cause a loss of traction and ultimately balance. Mopeds and motorcycles require special certification in the US (beyond a normal driver's license) because they are not just tiny cars, and the same should apply to ebikes.
Every time I see a cycling story, I like to do a Cmd-F for the word 'rules' to see how many rules pedants there are in the thread complaining about how cyclists don't follow the rules of the road.¹
1. Apparently, cyclists have to follow each and every rule of the road—rules which were designed with cars in mind—in order to be allowed to be on the road, or I should say even to be allowed to _live._
Timely, I just spent some time building a very large (2150 Wh) pack for my high speed e-bike. The manufacturer (Bosch) doesn't sell anything that large, I use it as my car replacement and wanted a lot more range without having to swap batteries, as well as not to murder them by deep discharging them all the time.
And the margins on e-bikes (relatively speaking) are a lot higher than on cars.
One of the riskier aspects of e-bikes is the subversion of other road-user expectations. If I see someone on (what appears to be) a bike, feet on pedals, (apparently) coasting, a few decades of biking and driving lead me to expect that person to stop, or at least slow down. On an e-bike, though, they might maintain speed, or accelerate (!) without any change in attitude.
No harder to judge than a motorcycle, of course, but it will take time for 'static person on bike' to connote 'might accelerate without warning!' to the navigational lizard brain.
I find this happens to me on a normal bike and its one of the main problems I deal with. A driver comes to a corner and looks to give way and sees a cyclist, depending on their judgement after their initial glimpse of me they might think I'm going slow only to realise I'm actually travelling much quicker. They pull out and I have to brake in order to not hit them.
I think we've all done the same thing in a car as well as some point.
E-bikes themselves won't revolutionize transportation, but micromobility will. If I ever get free time and a shop to work from, I want to build miniature go-karts so low-income disabled and elderly people can move around dense cities (lots of people can't ride bikes) that are also covered from the elements. But urban infrastructure isn't designed with this in mind, so even if I build them and people can afford them, they might not be practical. The hope is that e-bikes spurn a discussion towards more micromobility solutions to create a wider impact.
I wonder which mapping platform will start to improve routing for the e-bike user. I find that currently using an e-bike I don't get a very accurate ETA since the routes are calculated for regular bicycles (at least on Google Maps!). Also with an e-bike hills are no longer as large an issue as they would be to regular bikes so route decisions could be less roundabout.
Good point. Most bike map systems (even the dedicated ones, such as the Bosch Nyon) absolutely suck at the basics, taking the shortest route, keeping up with changes and so on. UI usually also is way below what's acceptable. Even a decade old TomTom does a better job.
Have you find any cases where hills are actually faster than an equal length flat route? I've been thinking it's at least theoretically possible as you could climb at the speed limit of the pedal assist then descend faster under gravity
I do it in practice! With light hills I climb at 25kph (Steeper hills, I can’t hit the limit), and go down at 30-35. Faster than the same length flat road along the lake.
In San Francisco it can be quite brutal to go up hills even when its the shortest path to your destination. Oftentimes there are designed slow inclines for bike routes but an e-bike can change that pretty easily
I've long been of the opinion that the real winner in the EV market will be personal vehicles (such as eBikes) and electric mass transit, not larger EVs such as cars in most urban environments.
That’s unlikely. From a revenue standpoint, ebikes are cheap and you don’t need that many e-buses. Even if we go to Netherlands-level bike-friendliness, that’s only a 40% reduction in per capita car/truck ownership at best.
Doesn’t mean we won’t do a lot of miles by bike or bus, but as long as people have the money for it, they’ll still buy at least one car per household for cornercases that buses and bikes (& ride share) don’t address.
If we get really good public transit and bike infrastructure, the median American household will probably have a couple electric bikes, one or two electric cars, and at least one person will commute via electric bus or train. It’s gonna be “both and.”
But there are geographical differences that make it even harder for the US to get rid of cars even if it had the same culture/institutions as the Netherlands.
I’ve _loved_ using the publically available “YouBikes” since I’ve moved to Taipei. Because of the number of people using scooters cars pay a lot more attention then when I cycled in Los Angeles.
Not having a car and being able to bike and take transit around the city has been the most significant value add to my quality of life in a long time.
I've noticed 40% of the e-bike share use here in Big City Japan is by food-delivery-app riders, And another 40% is by people going full speed down the foot path.
I am amazed by what they have been able to do with e-mountain bikes. The battery and motor are barely discernible anymore. Not for me as I prefer to pedal but impressive nonetheless.
Meanwhile forest rangers and other land owners are extremely angry because now even more people carve lines into delicate forest grounds. Even in places the mountain bikers couldn't have reached before.
These are not 50HP/35KW motocross bikes. They instead turn a weak rider into a very strong one (~600W) while still providing a good workout. In my experience they are most often used by older people who otherwise would not be getting out at all.
I strapped a no-name Chinese kW hub motor kit and a nice battery on a $100 steel mountain bike I grabbed off Craigslist. I've ridden in downpours, through snow and ice you name it. The bike kicks butt and was way cheaper than a car, not to mention quiet and super easy maintenance. I'm not surprised they're getting more popular. I hope small electric vehicles take over.
Tip for anyone else planning on doing a conversion, milesvp mentioned in a thread a few months ago that other parts of the bike may likely need to be upgraded as well (brakes, suspension, ect):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28270121
I would suggest a steel frame with disc brakes. Suspension is a nice bonus. If it can carry a fat person it can carry a healthy person with battery and motor.
What is the solution for weather? Major cities in the US can regularly be in the 30s F (~0-5 C) in the winter. Add to that a nice 10-15 mph wind in your face from riding. And especially add snow and ice - or worse, rain or freezing rain - and I don't see many people wanting to rely on an e-bike for unavoidable trips.
As someone who lives in this part of the country and uses an ebike for nearly everything for the last 4 years, it can be pretty annoying. Especially when it's raining, as I'm going to get soaked and there's pretty much nothing I can do about it other than bring a change of clothes and find a place to warm up when I get to my destination.
I rarely use just the motor when I ride, and that helps keep me warm; I'm usually pedaling just as hard as if I were riding without a motor. The motor makes me much faster, and also a lot less of an annoyance to vehicles. :)
I use a fat bike, with studded tyres, with low inflation for extra grip. Haven't had a problem with any kind of terrain really, but I don't live in a place that gets super icy.
I bike on cold winter weather, and the solution to the cold is using a coat, a nice pair of gloves, and a cute little hat. It's really not nearly as big of a deal as it seems.
A lot of people use balaclavas for preventing cold air on their faces too.
They also don’t last as long (miles-wise, possibly time-wise as well?), so you may have the same person buying multiple bikes over time when the first one wears out or breaks or is stolen. Usually for electric cars, the vehicle enters the used market and doesn’t leave (for the junkyard) until 15-20 years and 200,000 miles later.
Most of my friends with e-bikes are already on their second e-bike.
One issue is obsolescence. The newer bikes have bigger tires, better frame designs to accommodate the motor, better controls, more battery capacity, and so forth. They are purpose built as e-bikes, rather than conventional bikes with a motor and battery strapped on.
Another is repair. Finding spare parts for the electronics is a headache. The hall sensor went out on one friend's bike motor, resulting in a new bike. Voltages and connector pinouts have to be matched unless you're a whiz with a soldering iron and can find documentation -- good luck.
Conventional bikes had similar issues with both things, but there's a brisk global market for keeping older bikes working, and a sufficient supply of aftermarket parts for obsolete bikes are available in the US. And there's a lot of shared folklore on how to keep old bikes working, along with people who cobble bikes together from old parts and sell them. I can still maintain a 1963 Schwinn. All but one of my bikes are assembled from spare parts. That kind of secondary economy hasn't emerged for e-bikes yet.
This isn’t such a problem with high end brands. I have a specialized ebike and am fairly sure I’ll get 5-10 years out of it. Only concern is the motor.
That should be do-able. And of course it's hard to say how long a bike "should" last. It's not unrealistic to get 40 years out of a conventional bike, though some parts are consumable. Since my bikes are thrown together from parts, there's a bit of survivor bias going on when I say that they're 30 to 40 years old, and there are some older technologies not worth saving such as steel rims.
What I do hope is that otherwise good bikes and their parts don't become un-salvagable because someone can't find a wiring diagram or something like that. I hope that like with conventional bikes, a cottage industry arises that shares information and recycles out-of-fashion bikes into usable vehicles for the rest of us. What do they do with old bikes in India or Africa? That's what I want to see. I don't feel bad if that 5-10 years is followed by a decent life in someone else's hands.
There are 20 year old used hybrid-electric cars, which work exactly the same way. Older Priuses are still around. I found several used 2002 Priuses (have to go to Japan to find earlier, I think). (Although Prius didn’t really start selling a lot until the 2004 refresh.) https://www.edmunds.com/inventory/srp.html?make=toyota&model...
People regular go hundreds of thousands of miles on their used Priuses.
I own a 2012 Leaf and a 2013 Tesla that I intend to drive for another 6-10 years. Both work great. (Also selling a 2012 Volt which is fantastic but doesn’t have enough seats so I’m selling.)
> ... and have the potential to transform urban transit.
Not in Germany. Biking is and will stay irrelevant for daily transport as long as the infrastructure is a joke. Electric propulsion isn't the missing link.
Interestingly you'll find holiday areas that have biking infrastructure packed with older people on e-bikes.
I was in Munich for five years and biked heavily. The bike infrastructure there far surpassed any major US city, protected bike lanes and off street bike paths within the city were common.
That said, bike lanes were still an obvious second class citizen compared to car lanes in terms of ubiquity and quality, so there's still plenty of room for improvement.
Where bike infrastructure is lacking, it is easier to integrate with urban car traffic on an ebike because you can travel at closer to urban car speeds and start/stop more quickly.
Car-oriented areas are also designed with less respect to topography than older areas designed around pedestrians, and electric propulsion makes biking up grades easier.
it might not be inviting, but it's FINE. Biking in negative temperatures with snow is easier than heavy rain (heavy rain is the worst case). The ONLY barrier to biking in snow is whether priority is given to support the infrastructure to make it safe.
Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Answer: because Finnish people have dedicated bike paths that aren't next to traffic and are cleared and maintained by the city, even in snowy weather. And in that case even elderly people still bike. It's not some extreme thing.
“Cleared” is a bit of a red herring. In reality this means ploughed. You’re still riding on compacted snow with puncture-wielding stones on top. In the capital they do “clear” some major bike lanes but it’s rather limited.
Sure, but specifically the video highlights a town that does it the best, and it might be biased but the claim is very strong that it really is used widely and quite nice.
To put it the other way, driving in the most heavy snowy weather isn't ideal either.
I am very excited about e-bikes although I don't own one yet. We need more people pushing for infrastructure and regulation changes.
The biggest obstacle I see to mass adoption is bike theft problem. Until the crime is taken very seriously by the police which will likely need aggressive policing, setting traps and putting thieves in jail for many years (the police officer told me most thefts are committed by people already caught before) you will always live in fear of waking up in the morning to your main mean of transportation being gone unable to fulfill your professional/personal commitments.
Until that starts changing I don't think there will be many takers for an e-bikes unless you already own a car.
"E-bike ownership has skyrocketed in New York since the pandemic began, and with it, e-bike fires, according to the New York City Fire Department (FDNY). There have been 75 e-bike fires so far this year, which is on pace to double last year’s total, officials said. The fires have caused 72 injuries and three deaths."
I remember a similar spike when the "hoverboard" became big. I assumed back then the cause was cheap batteries turned out fast enough to meet demand, is the same thing happening here?
The problem with e-bikes is that they have been hampered down so hard by regulations.
No throttle, only pedal assist, 250w motors maximum and no assist over 25km/h turns it from the perfect future-proof vehicle for inner-city use and suburban commuting into a weird hybrid that isn't fast enough to replace a light road bike,
But also not strong enough to haul multiple saddlebags full of groceries up hills without breaking a sweat.
The Bosch CX motor in my bike is supposedly 250w. I don't believe that for one minute. Steep hills whilst I'm loaded with shopping are no problem at all.
Around town the speed is fine although it would be nice to go a little quicker out of town.
I hope that electric motor cycles will come down in cost and weight. A little faster than ebikes, and silent, but with all the safety features of a motorcycle. And registered. And requiring a license.
Outside of ABS, I cannot think of any safety features a motorcycle has. Maybe traction control if you’re really concerned. Even then, ABS and TC is still optional.
You’re not getting forward collision warning or anything like that on two wheels. Certainly not airbags or a cage to protect you…
My local bike shop ran out of bike models due to the supply chain issues and the only bikes available were e-bikes. Add to this that e-bikes have much higher revenue/margin - most bike shops are converting shop space to sell e-bikes. I wonder if this contributed to e-bike sales?
Also I know a bunch of people waiting for legislation to promote EVs (ie, extend the tax credit) all year (may never happen).
It's so asinine to me that the commuter benefits in our tax code help subsidize car commuting while offering nothing to people that commute via bike or ebike. If the ebike tax credit or bike commuter benefits end up becoming law in the next few months, I'm almost definitely going to buy an ebike.
I'd be more open to $1000+ bikes if there's better anti-theft system/mechanism. Some sort of registered biometric/id/rfid find my bike system that makes stealing bikes unprofitable and recovery easier. Expensive bikes are just too much of a PIA to own, especially in a large city.
The bigger problem is how to adapt roads to multi-form-factors. There are going to be cars, trucks, bikes, tricycles, and other battery-cars for all kinds of needs, and separate lanes are not the solution, in fact they may make the problem worse. Roads are woefully stuck in the two-lane-car system
The politics now are about banning ice. The electric cars being more expensive makes this discriminatory against low earners. I wonder if it would be far more effective to ban large suv's (uk). Of course e bikes and scooters are the way forward in cities.
Electric cars are rapidly approaching the point where they're actually cheaper than ICE cars, due to lower operating costs. As they scale up, they may well become cheaper up front, too.
I try and follow the market closely and the numbers don't seem to make sense yet. Furthermore evs will not solve urban transport problems unless they will be unviable to many. Now, taking pointless, huge and very polluting SUV status symbols of the road (that's where they are made to go after all...) will bring vast benefits to everybody involved and guess what? It doesn't have to be the poorer people who feel the pain. But e bikes? That's a great idea. A government program to trade a car for an e bike and merits would be amazing. E scooters likewise are officially illegal, but i think police here are very wise to turn a blind eye to them.
I'd love to believe in this, but the issue is really government policy, at least in the US. Most areas have road design and zoning that's hostile to anything that's not a car, especially bikes.
We recently moved from Munich, and there we didn't even have a car, just public transport and biking for us. Now we're living in Kirkland, we have no car and will probably get another one, and biking will probably be minimal, honestly. We can bike okay to the closest grocery store/shopping center, but going further seems sketchy.
A lot of working poor people rely on being able to do low cost maintenance themselves or bringing it to a family member or close friend with experience or a very trusted repair shop. They would never get their car serviced at the dealer given the costs. If the cost of repair is too large they sell the car for scrap and buy another bottom of market car and repeat the process. What happens for these people in the EV age, when its illegal to work on your own Tesla and everything will be serviced at a first party dealership?
I think a more likely issues is the large capital cost of replacing the battery will put a floor on the affordability of EV's. Bangernomics[1] is probably on its way out.
Well, I think the idea is that while it would be difficult to work on an EV motor yourself, it's also much less necessary, as electric motors are much simpler, with far fewer moving parts. I don't know if we have enough data yet to evaluate, but EV's should be much lower maintenance in that regard.
Outside of the powertrain, seems like the rest of the car should be similar though, like tires and brakes, right?
It will be similar but who knows if you could do stuff like change rotting suspension bushings, change cabin air filters, replace rusting brake lines with third party parts or if Tesla will sell you these parts themselves directly (I'd expect not). I looked up how you change the headlight bulb on a tesla and it apparently involves removing the front wheel. Most other cars that's a thirty second job.
For Tesla that doesn't surprise me, but they're unusual in many respects. I'd be more surprised if what you're suggesting became true for EV's in general.
Biking is something that should be basically impact zero and provide you with lifelong DIY skills through simple mechanics. Get a proper bike, not a glorified scooter which will inevitably cost you a hefty fine in terms of bills, maintenance, and pollution
Bikes are too dangerous. Read too many stories about people breaking their face. Not a fan. But if they change the way cities are designed, it can perhaps be a bit more safe.
The evidence in the UK is that you gain more from the exercise than you lose to the risks. Not only that but there are some basic precautions you can take that minimise the risks.
Bikes are not that dangerous, they are less dangerous than cars. So, yes, the danger is infrastructure that puts bikes next to cars instead of giving bikes their own space.
A cursory look at the data says that bikes are more dangerous than cars in the current environment. The US Bureau of Transportation Statistics says that in 2017 806/37473 fatalities were cyclists, or 2.2%, but the NHTSA data indicates that only 1% trips are by bicycle. That is a worse percentage than pedestrians (16.2 % of fatalities but 10.5% of trips) but substantially better than motorcycles (13.9% of fatalities but only 0.2% of trips!)
I think you are trying to say these statistics would change if we created an entirely separate set of infrastructure for cyclists, but that is not the world we live in currently and can't be realized quickly in any sane and humane scenario.
Ed- I'm a big electric bike fan, but we have to work within the world we live in, not the world we'd like to see. Right now using a bike or an e-bike for most tasks is more dangerous to the user than using an automobile. Doesn't mean we shouldn't use them or encourage them (after all they in the same ballpark as walking), but there is a lot of work to do to make them "safer" than cars. BTW- I don't think this was always the case- there were 5x as many fatalities per mile traveled in automobile in the 1960s then there are today, primarily due to the addition of vehicle safety features. I wonder what sort of active and passive safety features could be incorporated into cycles now?
Yeah, but the point is: It's not bikes that are dangerous, it's the biking situation with bikes mixed with cars.
Of that fatality number for cyclists, how much of that is because of cars? I suspect near 100%. Almost every cycling fatality I've ever heard of is because of a cyclist hit by a car. So, it doesn't make sense to say that bikes are dangerous. It's the cars that are dangerous to cyclists.
And the reason it's worse than pedestrians is because proportionally less of the time that pedestrians are out walking are they in conflict-zone with cars. It remains the case that cars are dangerous. It's not walking that's dangerous. Walking in car traffic is dangerous.
On a side note, I think collisions between bikes and collisions with a bike and a pedestrian are less often fatal than collisions with cars. If I were to get hit by someone running a red light while I'm walking across the street, I'd prefer to get hit by a cyclist than by an SUV.
We in Asia have figured the urban transit riddle long ago: Motorbikes or the more sustainable option; electric scooters [1]. If we are going to share the road, might as well everyone becomes capable of reaching similar speeds. E-bikes necessitate a cyclist lane for no good reason.
E-bikes allow a wider range of people to exercise and travel quickly. That’s their advantage over both electric scooters and traditional bicycles. As such they are really worth incorporating into the urban landscape.
Also, it’s not obvious but the highest throughput per unit area at street level is sidewalks, bike lanes, and then the least efficient traffic lanes. Sidewalks need skyscrapers and a massive subway system to really scale, but bike lanes are mostly limited by adoption which again makes E-Bikes really useful.
Going to the gym takes time. Even if you’re just walking for 20 minutes each way that’s still 40 minutes of light exercise 5 days a week for 40 years. Which from a public health standpoint is quite significant as few people go to the gym every week for their entire working life.
E-bikes combine that basic level of exercise with being able to travel significant distances or across steep hills. Driving is faster but takes longer to park and doesn’t scale nearly as well in terms of infrastructure so it’s not a major time saver compared to short bike commutes. Granted, bike infrastructure is often unused in the US but it’s often a question of critical mass. There needs to be enough in place to get to everything safely and it needs to be around long enough for people to start using it.
http://web.archive.org/web/20211108112001/https://www.nytime...