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.
Why would classification come first? That's entirely backwards. Surely we should understand what characteristics of a vehicle make it safe or unsafe, and then build the classifications around that to legislate against.
If both are the same safety, why make one illegal? It seems like a law which restricts liberty for no reason (other than legislative convenience, or because 'the government decided to tie it in with pedalling because they decided to').
It seems like the argument is 'bikes with pedals which can be powered with a button can never be classified as bikes because existing laws say that they are not classified as bikes'.
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.
Why would classification come first? That's entirely backwards. Surely we should understand what characteristics of a vehicle make it safe or unsafe, and then build the classifications around that to legislate against.
If both are the same safety, why make one illegal? It seems like a law which restricts liberty for no reason (other than legislative convenience, or because 'the government decided to tie it in with pedalling because they decided to').
It seems like the argument is 'bikes with pedals which can be powered with a button can never be classified as bikes because existing laws say that they are not classified as bikes'.
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