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.
The solution is to make streets feel more dangerous to them: narrow streets, or at least obstacles like concrete planters that force drivers to go around them.
I’d love to see half of the width of Sunset’s streets reclaimed with wider sidewalks, planters with trees, and bike lanes. But I don’t see it happening to anywhere near the extent of Netherlands efforts, and simply narrowing the roads to Japanese or Korean neighbourhood width wouldn’t be realistic since they are already built.
i also like the dutch solution, in which entrances into these slow zones are generally with a raised crosswalk that acts as a speed bump.
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.
My average speed on the ebike only increased by 3-5 mph over my regular bike, but my distance and usage has gone up.
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.
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.