Government proposal to double ebike power has received a mixed reception with brands questioning what it will mean for the UK bike industry
I wish I could read the comments here. Bikes here are capped at 25km/h. I think 30km/h would be nice, cause that’s also the speedlimit in many cities here.
That’s wild. City speed limits here are between 55km/h and 70km/h here.
I’ve always wondered what the commuting use case for these bikes were since they can’t keep up with traffic here. I guess now I know lol.
Why do you need to keep up with traffic?
So you don’t present a road hazard? Same reason you can’t just bicycle down the middle lane of a highway, or why minimum speed limits exist.
Here bikes are fairly common on fairly big 1 or 2 lane rural-ish roads that are around 70 km/h.
Lots of drivers get annoyed but other than that I don’t think accidents are particularly common.
In the city the traffic is often slower. Bikes are also often separated by at least a line on the road, ideally trees. Bikers can also often bike on the smaller interior roads that are one lane or even one way one lane.
Suburban environments often have completely separated bike/walk paths.
Bikes aren’t a road hazard for cars. The opposite is true though. Fortunately cars often go slightly into the oncoming car lane and/or slow down when there are bikes.
Ah, we don’t have bike lanes here, pretty much at all. That probably explains it.
Having rural roads at 70km/h is also weird to me. Ours are 90-135km/h, depending on whether there are curves, poorly maintained sections, etc. Most are 105km/h or 120km/h.
We do have plenty of city streets at 70km/h, but nobody rides on them. Like I said, no bike lanes, people will throw things at you if you try.
In my city there’s a large portion where we don’t even have sidewalks or crosswalks. You have to risk your life to cross the street without a car or motorcycle.
My city doesn’t have them most places either. Its kind of okay though, because we have massive block zoning, and nobody is walking 8km in 38C weather for a kebab.
Sucks if you’re poor though. My partner literally pays more for their car than everything else combined, because they are disabled and cannot work. The car is like $700 and their rent + groceries is $600.
What I consider to be rural or country roads can be around 70-90.
Here are images of what I consider to be rural/country roads:
This is a pretty common sight during the summer half of the year:
Another common sight is drivers complaining about them.
30 kph is fine, but the top speed in the US is 45 kph (Class I vs Class III) feels crazy fast.
Bruh, my electric skateboard can do more than that
Once you get going faster than about 25mph those things get pretty scary to ride on. The wheels are to small to maintain proper control.
It’s not just about speed though. Additional power, particularly with hub motors, can help a lot with steep hills or pulling more weight on a cargo bike etc. E-bikes are improving peoples ability to get out there and be independent as well as get some exercise where they may not have been able to in the past due to a number of different factors.
By increasing the power available can help to make the world more accessible to more people. You can still limit the top speed that is achievable on these bikes whilst also making them more usable in more situations.
Higher power motor doesn’t necessarily automatically mean top speed is the sole goal.
can help a lot with steep hills or pulling more weight on a cargo bike etc. Agreed. I live in a fairly flat area, but there’s still a few hills and one of them, I’m only going a few miles per hour even with pedaling at 750W assist (class 2 ebike in the US). Given this is just proposing 250W->500W change, its not going far enough imo.
Agreed. I live in a city with hills up to a 26% grade, where most are around 18% if they are big steep hills. I have a 750w hub motor, and I have to work pretty hard to ride up the steeper stuff even with the motor helping. I absolutely love conventional bikes for stuff like downhill mountain biking, but if you are just trying to get to a friend’s place or go swimming at the lake, taking an ebike is much more practical than finding a parking spot.
I think we need licensing for anything above 1kW or above 20mph. Similar to 49cc scooters (but maybe slower limits because of the difference in use of e-bikes.
The only downside I can see is unofficial mods removing the limit, which already happens of course but the issue becomes worse with a more powerful motor.
Whilst I agree the majority of the people I see riding those horrible Chinese “bikes” or that have put a Chinese kit on their bike are already running 1000w motors that have no restriction and they zip around at 30mph plus. People that want to go fast will do so regardless of the rules behind them. By increasing the allowed max I feel would have more benefits for the kinds of people that will be buying the more expensive, better made bikes and using them within the law.
I think the bigger issue here is that the police need to enforce some kinds of rules relating to the use of ebikes. For the record I actually don’t have any issue with an ebike that will do 30mph as long as it is used sensibly but the problem is that a lot of them aren’t.
The majority of the over powered, fast ebikes I see around near me are used by deliveroo riders and their ilk and all of them ride like absolute cunts. If you are going to use a powerful, motor driven form of transport to facilitate your work, fine, but use it properly on the fucking road and obeying traffic laws. The amount of these cunts I see zipping around on paths and through red lights on their throttle controlled “bikes” is where I think the main safety implications for more powerful motors lie.
People are dangerous enough on non motorised push bikes and being that the future of sustainable smaller distance transport seems to lie within things like ebikes I think there needs to be a push now in the earlier stages to educate people on how to operate them properly and within the rules of the road. Some people need to be made examples of to force the populace to ride in a safe predictable manner on the roads and not on the fucking path.
I think this is also a problem with the rental bike schemes a lot of cities now run too, you put people who aren’t used to operating a bicycle onto one in a city full of people and it is carnage. Riding on footpaths, ignoring road rules and generally just acting unpredictably. I see a lot of very dangerous situations involving these people almost everyday due to lack of personal awareness and ability to control the vehicle they are using.
I ride an EUC that can put down north of 15KW, and after getting used to it over the past year I could honestly use more power for riding ATV trails. I’ve pulled 16KW just hopping tree roots at low speed. But then again, it can do 50mph up a 25% grade fairly easily.
Scary for you maybe but don’t punish everybody because you’re scared.
I’m more scared of hitting an out of control bike with my car that can handle those speeds. Pedestrians are getting to ballsy imo. I don’t want to accidentally kill someone because they were dumb.
Yes. I find the 300w limit in Europe too restricting.
I have a 750w bike and at max assist up a very steep long hill, the poor thing struggles. I’m also pedalling like a madman alongside it.
More speed? No, not really.
More power? Absolutely. I bike some pretty steep hills and more power would be well used in my case.
Exactly like minimum-wage, it needs to be calibrated to the local context, not to any ruler-brained arbitrary-rule.
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in a region where it costs $10,000 per year to live, min-wage must provide that.
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in a region where it costs $200,000 per year to live, min-wage must provide that.
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the allowed power for a small 11yo child must be in-proportion to their muscle power, that their nervous-system can work-with, AND it must be in-proportion to their nervous-system’s having grown-in sufficiently ( now I remember that some jurisdictions have a minimum-age for ATV’s of 16yo, to drastically-reduce deaths … )
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The allowed power for an NFL eighthback ( or whatever the hell they have in sports ), cannot be legislated to be identical to that for a smaller/weaker person.
IOW, you need to have proportional e-assist motors, up to a certain limit, then stop, because now you’re in motorcycle-territory, too much.
Arbitrary, context-free legislation ( like that gaslighting of claiming that “poverty” means being below $2US/day, no matter what cost-of-living one is subject to ), is dishonest.
Always has been.
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Add a freaking pair of tilt sensors to kill the power from wheelies.
With a switch, cause sometimes I want to do wheelies.
I'm all for ya having fun and your right to hurt yourself.
I am a former racer, commuter, and professional Buyer for a chain of bike shops. I’m also disabled from the crash involving the 6th and 7th cars that have hit me in the last 170k+ miles of riding. I only barely survived what I simplify as a “broken neck and back.” Cars making U-turns are what will get you if you ride long enough, especially commuting. It will look like just another person turning in front of you, you’ll compensate like usual, and before your brain can even register what is really happening, what was your normal escape route will close and you’re going to crash really hard. It is the only kind of crash that your intuition is useless against.
I digress, because I care too much. My point is that I still ride on a dedicated road bike trail. I encounter children on their Power Wheels™ /s doing wheelies all the time. I even have many playing chicken. Any small head injury is likely to kill me. I’m actually not all that concerned about dying. I’ve been present for two crashes where someone died. These things haunt you for life. I’d rather not die while stressed over the impact my struggle has on you for that 30-45 minutes if I am conscious. It will change your life nearly as much as mine.
Never do anything on a bike that requires anyone else to “trust you.” Every time you have a close call in a car or on a bike due to another person’s error, and you’re mumbling to yourself “fucking idiot,” that other person is saying to themselves or others “trust me, you’re fine.” Every time you tell yourself “trust me” you’re everyone else’s “fucking idiot.”
No one is aware of all the things that can go wrong. However, I’ve been riding for a lot of miles. I know more than most what can go wrong. The most likely cause of my death on a bike right now is a naive child doing a wheelie. All it takes is a snapped chain, a fractured freehub pawl or outer bearing race, a tire blowout, a snapped spoke that causes a cascade of 3 or more spokes to break, or simple over confidence and a lack of balance. I have seen all of these things happen at least once.
The only time I appear completely fine to the casual observer is when I’m on a bike. I’m fast; likely faster than you typically ride at with lithium legs, and have a top speed in the mid thirties on flat ground without a tailwind, - if I care to try. What you can’t see is the 10 years of spending most days laying down from not being able to hold posture, my constant back pain on par with a bad bee sting that never goes away or fades to background, or how I can’t turn my head left anywhere near far enough to see over my shoulder.
The only way to help the issue of youthful irresponsibility on e-bikes is to develop a culture of shaming and shunning any fellow riders that endanger others on bike trails. That is a tough ask from youths that are notorious for a lack of well established and outspoken character capable of aligning positive traits through peer pressure. I type all this in the hopes that you are the exception to this stereotype.
Can you explain the u-turn scenario?
Which one. I've had 2 major collisions. Both were due to u-turns. Both involved vehicles that appeared to be stopped while parallel parked, and both were in areas where u-turns are illegal.
The one that broke my neck and back was from a person making a u-turn directly in front of another SUV, on a downhill, in a turn.
It was like the most stupid situation you could never imagine actually happening. The person was stopped, double parked. As soon as I saw the blocked lane a SUV was passing me in the second lane. I merged into the number 2 lane behind the SUV, and that is where my memory stops for 3 hours. Because of court stuff I know all the rest. The SUV in front of me never saw it coming and did not even brake as they tee boned into the double parked SUV that made a sudden u-turn in front of them from a dead stop with no warning. My GPS computer showed I dropped from 36mph to 29.7mph before the next way point was a great distance backwards where it broke off and landed. I’ve passed stuff like double parked cars many hundreds of times, but you just can’t predict someone this stupid.
The driver was a foreign national asylum seeker from somewhere around the Mediterranean I’ll refrain from mentioning. They happened to be a first generation driver and had the measured competence of a US 3rd grader. Their license was restricted to work only, but they were self employed so the restriction was meaningless. Their driving record was atrocious, and they even got a DUI 2 days later while I was still under critical watch in the hospital ICU. In other words the poster child driver for fuck cars.
Predicting just how stupid some functioning humans really are is impossible. Intuition lies to us about what we have control over in our lives. If we always held awareness of the potential catastrophes, humans would be completely non functional.
I was known for riding safe. For a couple of years I commuted to my first bike shop job that was 26 miles each way by the most direct bike route. I rode that five to six days a week, the sixth being the group rides I lead out of the shop every other Saturday, and I raced a half dozen crits a year too. Even though the 26 mile route was considerably faster, and all was technically bike route, I rode a 33 mile version that maximized my time on dedicated bike trails even though it meant more hills too. I was also the guy that would fall back in the group ride to help newbies or help people learn to ride in a group. I was very cautious, a stop at all the stop signs type of roadie. I’ve been hit in other ways, but those are insignificant. U-turns are the biggest danger for the regular rider and commuter.
Damn man, that’s rough.
U-turns are quite a dangerous manoeuvre and really need to be executed properly to ensure safety.
I remember taking my Colorado drivers licence and it wasn’t covered at all in the written/practical exam. I practiced a couple times at traffic lights with a turn arrow with my parents but that was it.
For my Dutch lesson license (we rent a car a few times a year) u-turns and 3-pt turns were covered extensively. How fast you are going and which mirrors you’re checking in which order. They also test these “special manoeuvres” in the practical exam in a very healthy way. The roads also have a lot more medians which helps blunt driver stupidity.
Cars are the worst…
I personally don’t need more, but I don’t think I can say that no one does. My bike is already fast enough that I wear leathers when I’m gonna be taking it up to max speed, it’ll do about 60km/h. It’s technically not legal in my area, I didn’t know that when I bought it, and no one seems to care about actually enforcing that, though I would imagine enforcement would like center around the selling more-so than the riding.
I think there isn’t much reason why a motorbike is ok to be on the highway, but an e-bike capable of the same speed shouldn’t be. But I do think e-bikes capable of that speed should need a motorbike class license to be driven on the road. And the same dress code should be expected. Dress for the slide, not the ride. I do also suspect the venn diagram of e-bike riders likely intersects more heavily with the safety conscious than does one for motorcyclists. So it should likely be less of a problem than the one that is already considered acceptable.
I’d like to go 35mph. I can do 30 on a longboard. A bike has to be more stable than that!
I don’t care either way, but I would like them banned on bike paths. I think once you have a motor, especially one that can travel at high speeds you belong in the street with cars, and not on the sides but fully like a motorbike. I’ve had way too many dudes clip me or others.
It should just be a speed limit.
Just because someone is fit enough to properly themselves over 20 mph without a motor doesn’t make it any safer when they crash.
Pedestrian area. Mobility scooters and pedestrians. No bikes. 5 mph
Bridal/cycle path. Weight limit on vehicles to avoid damage to paths. 15 mph limit.
Faster than 15 mph, on the road. Get a licence.
Slower than 10 mph, not allowed on the road. No cyclists or mobility scooters crawling up hills at walking pace blocking traffic.
This obviously requires roads to not be the only infrastructure built to get anywhere conveniently. But we really do need to separate commuting traffic into 2 parts and then have pedestrian areas at destinations.
In France it’s legally a bike only if the electric assistance stops once you reach 25 km/h. Anything where the motor can go higher than that (or even something where the motor can push when you’re not pedaling) is considered to be a light scooter and therefore need a license plate and can’t go on bicycle paths.
I thinks it’s pretty fair. The only issue is that some sellers advertise those little scooters as electric bikes so some people use them without being aware they’re illegal.
Here, some weaker and slower mopeds are allowed on bike paths unless explicitly forbidden. Works alright.
I think a ban would cause more travel by car which is a worse outcome IMO.
However, as a 🦵-biker, I’m not sad about 25 kph speed limiters. At least in the Dutch context.
most of them aint fast enough to replace motorbikes though
Not replace, just in the same place.
i was thinking more from a safety and range standpoint. point is i think we have to come up with some infrastructure solution to make them really shine.
Before they do that, they should make sure that ebikes and scooters no longer are a fire- and explosion hazard. Like that ebike that blew up in a London subway station.
Cars first plz
Actually, the regulation for electric cars are way more stringent than anything regarding bikes or scooters. Some bikes and scooters are basically mobile death traps.
