Comment by TacticalCoder
4 years ago
Read jacquesm's reply to my comment: there are people hacking their pedelec so that they accelerate without you pedaling and that's illegal. I think it's a good thing it's illegal. I do also believe only pedelec are allowed on bike lane in Belgium/Brussels.
A bicycle which you can use without using the pedals is, to me, not the definition of a bicycle.
> Surely where they're allowed to operate, for example, should be based on things like speed and weight, rather than "whether or not the operator is moving their legs in a circular motion."
speed / weight and acceleration. But I'm still not sure about that. Bicycle lanes were made, at first, for people cycling. In European cities it's part of an overall move to be "greener": what's green about a vehicle with can be used without doing any exercise at all? You basically took the ICE engine of a motorbike and put instead an electric motor.
KTM (motorbike company) is already in to e-bike game. These companies are going to come and game the system as much as they can if limits aren't set: they'll otherwise build ultra light full-carbon e-bike with crazy fast acceleration and the selling point is going to be "It's a motorbike you can use in a bicycle lane".
I do honestly think saying: "if you don't need to pedal at all, it's not a bicycle and hence cannot use the bicycle lanes" (like they're apparently doing in the Netherlands) ain't a bad rule.
> In European cities it's part of an overall move to be "greener": what's green about a vehicle with can be used without doing any exercise at all?
The "green" movement is about the environment, not exercise.
> You basically took the ICE engine of a motorbike and put instead an electric motor.
That's the "green" part. ICE is not "green". Electric is.
> A bicycle which you can use without using the pedals is, to me, not the definition of a bicycle.
My point is what difference does it make? Like I said, if you want to cap weight or speed, or maybe acceleration, within given areas, fine. But who cares whether or not you classify it as a "bicycle." If a person wants to exercise on their way to work or get there in a suit without having to shower, I don't care.
We do have scooters, it's just a different class of vehicle.
That and there are fixed maximum ratios between the pedal input and motor assist.
Why does it matter from a safety perspective if the locomotion is powered by a motor or a combination of a motor plus someone's legs?
(Or if it doesn't matter from a safety perspective, what's the practical need to legislate against it?)
It's not the safety perspective that drives the legislation, but trying to create meaningful classes of vehicles that then can be used to drive safety. The classification comes first. And s-pedelecs are a bit of a weird in-between thing. From a technical perspective a bike, from a speed perspective potentially as fast as a scooter (but rarely so in practice), a bit faster than a normal bike or e-bike and a lot lighter than a scooter. So it's a tricky thing to classify.
In the end the governments decided to limit the power for e-bikes, limit their speed and tie it in with pedalling. S-pedelecs have all those restrictions but they're a bit higher, so you can have more power, go a bit faster but you still have to work to get to some speed. On 'takeoff' my bike can briefly do 350 Watt bursts but that quickly falls off to 150 and at the maximum speed (45 kph) it's like driving into a wall if you want to go above, the motor cuts out completely and there is considerable drag.
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