Which seems besides the point. The reason you can't ride a motorcycle in the bike lane isn't because you haven't worked hard enough to deserve it, it's because of the top speeds and mass of the vehicles presenting a danger to others in the lane. It's the same reason cars present such a danger to cyclists - the scale of kinetic energy going around is just too high.
I think fast e-bikes are a technologically interesting thing, but from a regulatory point of view I'm much more mixed. ~30 kph seems eminently reasonable for bike infrastructure, and I'm excited about the ability for that to displace car trips - both from a sustainability perspective and a road capacity perspective. Much faster than that though?
A lot of people, adults in particular, appear to have an aversion to riding bicycles due to their inability to place both feet on the ground while seated (and I'm speaking here about the standard bicycle geometry, not recumbents, etc.).
It's too bad too because you would love to get more people out of large steel cars and into efficient e-bikes/scooters.
I wish we could lighten up a bit with regard to requiring pedals/pedalling and try saving the planet a little.
Now I’m annoyed that in the UK we use “moped” for Vespa style scooters which have no pedals.
(I was already mildly annoyed that we use “scooter” for Vespa style vehicles which you sit on and are entirely motorised, when it really describes the variant skateboard with handlebars you stand on using one foot and ‘scoot’ along using the other foot for propulsion).
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.
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.
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.
(Or if it doesn't matter from a safety perspective, what's the practical need to legislate against it?)
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.
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'.
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.
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).
Why? Seems like a pointless distinction in regards to any sort of rules. 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."