Comment by jacquesm
4 years ago
In the USA the situation is much more risky than here.
I don't like riding in traffic mostly because drivers tend to have a short fuse for anything that isn't exactly at the limit, but on bike paths everything works just fine. The problem is that s-pedelecs are technically lumped in with the scooters, even though there is no throttle and there is absolutely no way you are going to sustain 40 Kph+ for anything but a very short period. But they're still pretty new and little by little municipalities are adapting and allowing s-pedelecs to use the bike lanes. What helps is that s-pedelec riders are extremely defensive. In town I simply reduce the assist to 'eco' and cycle with the rest of the bikes, and on the intercity bike paths I go as fast I conditions allow, typically 35 to 38 or so. On a longer trip that averages out to 33 to 35 Kph, which means a 1 hour car trip turns into a 2 hour bike trip, which is acceptable (and never traffic jams, which can turn that 1 hour car trip into a three hour car trip!).
I have an e-bike and I disagree with your assertions. I'm a fat asthmatic and I have absolutely no problem maintaining 40kph for long stretches of time on my bike. The fastest I've done on it (on a large hill but still) is 42.7MPH (~68Kph). Average cruising speed on flat land can easily be 30-33mph(48-53kph). Not all e-bikes are capable of this, but they are certainly not some kind of rare expensive impossibility - mine was less than 3000 USD.
My point is that you should be more ingenuous with your assertions of what the capabilities of these bikes are when communicating with people about it. Nothing makes people more skeptical than reading things that are just plain false from an advocate.
If something has that average speed capability, why is not licensed, registered, insured and held accountable as any vehicle would be? My 50cc scooter appears to have comparable speeds (maybe 10kph higher), and I wear proper armour & helmet, took the classes passed the test, am registered, licenses & insured.
That's my massive pet peeve & safety concern: I WANT to love e-Bikes, and all those sorts of things; and like a fellow poster, I've been riding both 500-650cc motorcycles and 50-125cc scooters for more than a decade so 2-wheelers are part of my life; but basically all the ads, shops, and salespeople over here are focusing on "You don't need license, you don't need insurance, you don't need to behave like a vehicle and obey the rules" as their main and primary sales point; and therefore the behaviour of riders is equally nonchalant. In the Toronto area (and it's important to be explicit because this is definitely different in different geographies), the relationship between cars and non-gas two-wheelers is charitably described as "strained" ("murderous/self-righteous hate" may be more accurate), and we all need to get better and understanding how we can co-exist and behave responsibly on the road.
I drive, walk, and bike often in San Francisco. I rode a 650cc motorcycle for 10 years when I was in my 20s.
In the Panhandle, for example, there is a mixed use bike / walking path. It is very dangerous for the walkers even with normal bikes, as the bikes are whizzing by the walkers at 20mph. However one day I was walking, and a HUGE mutant E-bike with massive fat tires & very heavy frame, flew by me at what seemed like 30-40mph -- and to me, it felt exactly like a near miss from a motorcycle.
There are other safety concerns with recent trends, with the Slow streets. Everyone walks in the middle of those streets & the pedestrians treat them as their exclusive domain: kids playing, etc. But the drivers long ago stopped respecting the "slow street" concept, and whiz around the traffic cones, and then go 30mph down the street. The city is still treating them as an experiment, which is a part of the problem.
I love both E-Bikes and the Slow Streets, and they should be a huge part of our future: * Cities should make the Slow Streets official and modify them to make them impractical to use for driving a car (perhaps making them have a single curving central lane). * Likewise the E-Bikes need a bit more regulation and limited strictly to bike only lanes, not the mixed biking / pedestrian paths.
As it is currently the progress of society and technology has created a bit of a dangerous situation.
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I know here in Ontario, Canada we do have regulations for ebikes. They are not allowed to exceed 32km/h (or ~20 mph). This seems like a somewhat reasonable limit. They also impose other requirements like minimum wheel widths, having two independent braking systems with stopping distance requirements. You can't even ride them if you got a criminal conviction that prohibits driving (such as a DUI).
Reference: http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/driver/electric-bicycles-fa...
I think the only problem here is that some of these things can be hard to regulate with making random enforcement stops. And people typically aren't much of a fan of random stops which is understandable, I'm not either. So I guess you'd have to happen to catch them by LIDAR, but I don't even know how accurate such a reading would be against a small bike. Not sure it would be admissible in a court.
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Should regular bicycles have to be licensed? When I studied in Vietnam I'd ride my bike amongst traffic in bursts of 55 KPH and cruise around 40kph (I had a Garmin mounted). Generally I can only do 30 kph in the countryside, but in the city & amongst traffic there is much less air resistance.
Additionally a bicycle can do Lane splitting much better than a motorcycle can.
I however don't ride my bike in the US because it's not safe to. There's not the proper infrastructure which just annoys drivers, but if there was I wouldn't have a problem sticking to riding 20kph in the city until I get to rural parts for training. Riding fast in bicycle lanes seems irresponsible if you're amongst commuters.
I suppose I just kinda answered this. There should be speed limits for bike lanes inside cities.
In part because regular bikes can go that fast with top athletes. The world record 1h speed is over 55kph on level ground, people can go significantly faster over shorter periods especially in sprints or down hill.
In the EU, they are. Ebikes are hard-limited to 25 km/hr. If you have one which is capable of more than that (manufactured or modded), it is regarded as a motor vehicle and you need a license.
I'm curious - what ebike do you have that can easily cruise at 48-53 kph for extended periods?
In most countries that would be far above the legal limits imposed on ebikes. As a result, the ebikes available for purchase are all limited to 25-32 kph max and typically have power limits of 250-300 W. Since ebikes are a lot heavier, exceeding 32 kph for more than a few seconds is generally very difficult.
I don't think GP is being disingenuous with any of his assertions. In the US there might be ebikes with much higher top speeds, but jacquesm doesn't live in the US and neither do most of the other people on this planet. Most ebikes sold do exactly what he's describing.
I have a JuicedBikes CrossCurrent X. They only made my particular configuration for a short amount of time around early 2018 - it has a massive battery, a 52v system, a 750W Bafang hub motor, and location tracking within the battery (though I stopped paying for it since I moved out of the city). Their newer models are just as, or even more capable.
Yeah, that is the legal limit but I turned it off in the bios. When cycling on roads I want to be going as fast as possible to keep things safer for me by moving at roughly traffic speeds and disincentivizing dangerous maneuvers by motorists. On bike trails and such I keep to 20mph or so as safe.
I actually tried to get mine registered as a moped with a license plate and insurance coverage etc. but was essentially told to take a hike by the state and insurance companies. So I did.
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The rules vary widely in the US.
Anything going faster than 25MPH (40 km/h) without cutting out in NYC is legally classified as a moped. https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/ebikes.shtml
Class 3 limits in the US (pedal assist only, no throttle allowed) are set at ~28 mph (~45 kph). Class 2 limit (throttle allowed) is ~25 mph (40 kph). I've also ridden some DIY'ed ebike conversions with unlocked controllers that'll happily hit 40 mph (65 kph) if you're feeling particularly suicidal that day.
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> I'm curious - what ebike do you have that can easily cruise at 48-53 kph for extended periods?
Those speeds sound like bogus. I can maintain about 40kph on my ebike on a flat surface, but that requires pedaling in addition to the motor and is a fairly energetic exercise.
Also, pushing beyond 45kph, you really start to feel the air resistance and it becomes exponentially harder to go beyond 45kph for any long period of time, unless going downhill.
Most ebikes don't really come with the chainring size to go up to high speeds, unless modified with a giant 50+ size, which is more apt for racing road bikes (non-electric)
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Most if not all electric bikes here in EU won't get close to those speeds, regardless of your fitness. I don't think it's even allowed.
If it's capable of doing 50KPH it should be treated as a motorcycle, away from other cyclists and pedestrians and the rider should have the same knowledge as a motorcyclist wrt to how to behave in traffic.
Almost all ebikes are limited to 25km/h here, which is a reasonable speed in my opinion. It makes cycling accessible to everyone regardless of fitness level or hills, but it also ensures that ebikes go at a similar speed as most other riders (most riders on the cycle paths go between 20 and 30 km/h (12-19MPH)
There are some people who modded their ebikes to go faster, but I've only encountered them very rarely.
I'm not sure why you would assume the author is being disingenuous. Your bike is almost certainly very different from the author's, and a more powerful motor is going to get you faster.
Fun fact/side note - power requirements generally scale with the cube of speed due to rapidly increasing air drag, so going at 50km/h is much harder (and requires a much stronger motor) than going at 30km/h.
I specifically did not choose the word disingenuous. I asked him to be more ingenuous.
His assertion was "there is absolutely no way you are going to sustain 40 Kph+ for anything but a very short period". I disagree, and I think minimizing the capabilities of these machines in the rhetoric is counterproductive to converting skeptics.
In the US it's 100% legal to go 28MPH on them for as long as you can - which for me would be nearly forever on flat ground.
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I'm sure there are other e-bikes, but those are not available where I live. The fastest here are the Stromers, they are a little bit faster but not exceptionally so and they also cut out at 45 kph, just like mine.
At a guess your bike outputs more power than is legal here.
>At a guess your bike outputs more power than is legal here.
From a brief look - no. Belgium says "4000 W 45 km/h limited "speed pedelecs", which are classed as mopeds for all requirements."
Mine has a 750W nominal motor, but seems to output around 1050W at peak.
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Anything over 45kph or 750W is illegal unless registered as a moped in California at least (and much of the rest of the US as well). Enforcement is lax in most places though.
Power assist cuts out at different points, depending on design choice (and jurisdiction). Norwegian e-bikes, for instance, disconnect their power assist above 25kph and you need to pedal like crazy to go significantly faster than that.
I hope you realize you're one pebble or pavement imperfection away from breaking every bone in your body at those speeds.
At those speeds bikes are incredibly stable. The only way a pebble of pavement imperfection will harm you is if the bicycle fails mechanically (e.g. a wheel folding in on itself).
I'm pretty sure that the risk of being hit by or hitting a vehicle is multiple orders of magnitudes higher. Which isn't exactly better, but let's at least worry about the correct sources of danger.
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Very cool project. I'm currently evaluating whether I could commute 75km per day on a pedelec. In Switzerland there is a small bike manufacturer that makes long range pedelec : https://www.speedped.com/ (German only). It's very expensive though but the battery pack can be updated to something quite impressive.
You definitely could, but .ch is a bit more mountainous than where I live to put it mildly so it's not the distance that I would worry about but the elevation change. If that's within bounds you likely would be fine in three seasons but winter would be problematic, if not downright dangerous.
Since they are registered and used as mopeds, why not get an electric moped instead? Then you don't have to pedal and can sit more comfortable, maybe even with a windscreen.
I don't really see the point of pedelecs, unless you disregard the law and just pretend they are less powerful e-bikes. But then you'll lose it if the police notice.