Comment by jacquesm
4 years ago
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'.
Classification comes first because that's what governments need in order to split traffic into different sets so they can create an environment that works for everybody.
S-pedelecs, and e-bikes are a new development and so fall between the cracks. Riding them on the bike paths may endanger other cyclists, riding them on the main roads endangers the users of the s-pedelecs and e-bikes. There isn't really a 'third class' and legislators all over are struggling with this classification problem.
Tieing in s-pedelecs with pedalling rather than with throttle based systems is a legal hack, but in practice the hack works quite well. The only situation where it doesn't is when you ride an s-pedelec in city traffic where you are forced to ride between the cars, who get irritated because you are measurably slower than they are. Plenty of towns are re-considering this now and are making explicit allowance for s-pedelecs to use the bike paths. But there are already so many 45kph scooters that break the law that the difference is likely negligible.
Eh, personally I don’t agree - classification is only useful if we are classifying the vehicles together to solve a problem for legislative purposes.
If we classify stuff together and then ask what legislation we want to enact it’s clearly backwards.
This is why in UK law at least classifications are generally tied into specific bits of legislation (ie definitions).