The ebikes that the post refers to are a menace and should be banned. Both as a cyclist and a driver.
I've almost been plowed over by some idiot sitting on what should be a motorcycle but riding on the bike path. And I've almost had my kids run over.
Also, as a driver you just don't expect someone to be going so crazy fast in the bike lane. I've had people at insane speeds just appear from behind parked cars.
I'm all for pedal assist! But there should be strict speed limits.
I also find that people just don't take these electric motorcycles seriously. They zone out because they aren't doing anything. That's also very dangerous.
And, cars are multiple orders of magnitude more dangerous than anything on 2-wheels.
I’m sure you’re right that theres room for improvement, but instead of building infrastructure (we literally shaped cities for cars after all)- we would rather ensure that cars are incumbent forever despite the harm we see them causing.
My default is my manual bike.
No amount of infrastructure will make these electric motorcycles safe in bike lanes or pedestrian paths. They should be banned.
We need to find a sensible way to regulate these bikes, which may involve some sort of license, insurance, and mandatory helmets. But it needs to be less costly/more convenient than getting a petrol motorbike (or car) if we want people choosing the more eco-friendly option.
Cycling enthusiasts don't tend to consider those who are far less fit/healthy/young when they push the pure-human-powered option.
Most fatalities of motorcycles are due to collisions with cars, not other bikes nor pedestrians.
Diligence won’t save you if a driver unexpectedly swerves into you.
Undoubtedly there are stupid people and people who are more likely to take more risks will be more likely to engage in motorcycle riding; creating an additional selection bias.
But, we’re talking about electric scooters, e-bikes and so on, the core issue remains to be that mixed use-infrastructure will have a loser. Letting cars drive on pavements isn’t permitted for the same reason e-bikes shouldn’t be in traffic (or on the pavement).
That's the point. Diligence won't save you but crumple zones might have.
It's also not obvious that most collisions being with cars isn't just because most other vehicles are cars. If two motorcycles collide with each other at high speed, the damage they do to each other isn't your problem, it's the resulting loss of control and the damage to your body when you impact the pavement.
> Letting cars drive on pavements isn’t permitted for the same reason e-bikes shouldn’t be in traffic (or on the pavement).
But then you're stuck between three bad options: You have separate roads specifically for e-bikes (implausible), you put high speed e-bikes in pedestrian zones, or you limit the top speed of e-bikes to something safe for pedestrians and then people go back to buying cars because e-bikes are too slow.
If every person was driving an articulated truck then there would be more deaths, caused not just by collisions and poor driving but by emissions too. We’d need bigger roads too- its unnecessary for everyone to do this.
To get away from this you'd have to completely redesign US cities to have people living in them instead of significant numbers commuting in from the suburbs. To begin with you'd need a massive amount of new higher density housing, the construction of which is currently inhibited by building codes where not outright prohibited by zoning. Trying to solve the rest of it before you do that is going to face massive opposition, because you'll be trying to make it harder to have a car to people who still can't realistically avoid having a car.
It is dramatically easier to screw yourself up on bicycles and motorcycles than cars. It’s frankly shocking how stupid someone can be in a modern car and survive.
It doesn’t require another car to kill someone on a motorcycle or bicycle, but the squids tend to filter themselves out pretty quickly. Many of them actively collide with cars due to their own recklessness and/or stupidity, making the statistics somewhat hard to interpret.
Was the 80 year old driving the RV ‘the cause’ of the head on collision, or the 22 year old with the 1.5l super bike illegally passing over a double yellow at 50 over the speed limit around a corner?
I can provide graphic details of who ended up winning in that situation, regardless.
If everyone had to ride instead of drive (including drunks, soccer moms, burnt out graveyard shift workers, medical workers on their second 24 hour shift, retirees, etc), you’d see a lot more dead folks overall.
Because even though cars are also more dangerous to other people, for the most part, those other people are in cars in the US, and the danger still generally cancels out.
Even head on collisions at highway speeds are more survivable than anyone should reasonably be able to expect.
Vehicle vs ped calls are still the worst though.
Protip: don’t get out of your car after an accident on the highway unless you’re really really sure you can see all other traffic. Chances are you can’t, especially at night. Especially when the drunk coming the wrong way on the highway never turned on their headlights. Wait for the firefighters to physically block the road with their rigs first. That was a gnarly call.
Population of Malmo is actually higher than Orlando, FL for example.
Yet, for Skåne (the region where Malmo is; pop: 1,421,781), 25 traffic deaths were recorded in the year 2019[0].
173 road deaths were recorded in Orange County (where Orlando is; pop: 1,429,908), during the same period.[1]
That’s a difference of 7x, and Skåne is one of the largest regions in the country, many places are car dependent - yet the major change is that urban areas are sufficiently dense so can be cycled (even during cold climates) and that there’s dedicated infrastructure for doing so, which eases the traffic burden too.
[0]: https://www.transportstyrelsen.se/globalassets/global/press/...
[1]: https://www.flhealthcharts.gov/ChartsReports/rdPage.aspx?rdR...
Seems pretty evident.
Arguably the conditions are better for personal electric vehicles and bicycles in Florida (than the comparatively frigid and rainy conditions of Sweden).
Even the topography is flat[0][1], it's literally the perfect place for cycling, but the US has chosen something else.
So, yes, if things are different they are different: comparable populations, a better climate and an equally flat topography and somehow 7x the amount of deaths; and the only difference is the approach to infrastructure by the county.
[0]: https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-c3fdcz/Orange-County/?...
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2024/02/02/discover-the...
That's rubbish as cyclists/bikers are not the cause of most collisions. Once you remove the majority of car drivers, the number of collisions will plummet along with the severity of those collisions.
(Sedentary disease such as heart disease and type II diabetes will also reduce if more people are using active travel - not so much if they're motorbiking).
I still don't understand how they expect to solve the occupant safety issue though. Cars travel at high speeds but have crumple zones and airbags. E-bikes travel at the same speeds but if you crash, you die. And 2-wheeled vehicles are easier to crash.
The fatality rate for motorcycles is astonishingly bad and changing the propulsion type wouldn't really affect that.
There's also the possibility of creating separated infrastructure to allow the smaller/lighter vehicle riders (e.g. two/three wheelers) to not have to tangle with car and lorry drivers. However that requires political will and infrastructure investment.
Ironically, the somewhat obvious solution to this would be smaller/lighter cars (e.g. one- or two-seaters), but they can't pass the safety standards required for cars even though they would still be dramatically safer than two-wheeled vehicles.
The whole light-vehicle thing is predicated on low speeds and relatively short distances (up to about 15 miles). Most urban areas, even fairly sprawling ones, that's enough to cover a pretty substantial % of trips.
It's about using 1/10th the weight and 1/50th the power to cover a big % of the same tasks. Personally I'd say the bike/scooter/golf-buggy, and then either an owned or shared car for the last 10% of trips where you need to use the freeway is a better optimum than high-speed light vehicles, because as soon as you get to about 25-30mph you need impact protection, and the design constraints quickly escalate to "absolutely no smaller than a Fiat 500".
There's also ofc the option of mass transit for some of the longer distance stuff, at least in cities that are able to build it.
The real problem here is that as soon as you need impact protection, you get four wheels, and then it's classified as a car instead of a motorcycle and the government safety standards for cars de facto require "absolutely no smaller than a Fiat 500".
What would be interesting is to change the definition of "motorcycle" from "has fewer than 4 wheels" to "has fewer than 3 seats" and see what happens.
The problem seems to be that for most people who can legally drive a full-scale car (i.e. they're not too young or too old) getting a do-everything vehicle on finance is more attractive at that point.
They're somewhat popular with youngsters in rural areas (cheap to insure, minimum driver age is 14 I think, whereas for cars in France it's 17) and with frailer, older people who can't walk or cycle very far and don't have the stamina for longer drives, they just want an inexpensive little runabout to get to the village shops, nearby friends and appointments.
But they're expensive enough (about $10k) that you're unlikely to buy one in addition to your regular do-it-all car, where you might buy an ebike, pedal bike or motorcycle. Maybe as a second vehicle in a childless couple where one partner does almost all the driving, but unless heavier vehicles are highly taxed or restricted (city low emission & congestion zones), there's not enough advantage in one of these for mass adoption.
I've got an ebike in central london and find it quite practical on the whole. For local journeys <2miles it's faster than anything else and you can go down mostly traffic restricted roads. For intercity you can put the bike on a train. Rain is a bit of a pain.
that could be a win for the environment and I guess they replace normal vans. And I just saw a two seater ebike taxi with a roof.
What issue? I would regularly go 50km/h down hills on my road bike. That was completely my choice and if I came off I'd suffer the consequences.
The problem isn't the occupants. Nobody is forced to travel at high speeds (except on motorways). The problem is the people around and the environment. I definitely would not ever go that fast in town, even down a hill, because it's generally not safe for the people around me.
The problem with cars is the huge imbalance of power. Every car has the capability of killing or disabling you. But you can't disable them. As far as I know, carrying a portable EMP device is neither practical nor legal. Two wheeled vehicles don't exhibit this imbalance of power, not even motorbikes. I believe this is the most important reason to get rid of cars from towns.
If you're on a bike, then you should also prioritise your own safety as you're likely to come off worse even when colliding with a pedestrian.
Anecdata time: my brother (over 60 years old and a very experienced cyclist) was heading down a hill, presumably at some speed and a young boy stepped out in front of him. They collided and my brother came off and ended up with a broken collar bone, broken rib, collapsed lung and minor concussion (he's fully recovered now). The kid received no damage apart from bruising AFAIK.
Replacing cars with bikes/scooters is unrealistic and unreasonable. You're either ignoring or unaware of the actual dependence on cars that exists and that cannot be dismissed.
I find it annoying that media outlets (BBC - I'm looking mainly at you!) will refer to EVs as being car-shaped and then, as you said, demonise e-bikes by lumping them in with the illegal e-motorbikes (see the recent Panorama program for a clear case of not making clear the distinction between e-motorbikes and e-bikes).
As I see it, the biggest problems with cars are their size and weight. With electric propulsion, the weight is a problem as they have to propel the vehicle and the batteries which obviously means even more weight (though they're typically only slightly more than ICE cars). This also leads to the problem of the vehicles taking longer to recharge and thus requiring upgraded infrastructure to allow people to charge them quickly.
However, if we get as many people to use e-bikes or e-scooters, then the size and weight issues pretty much disappear. It's often feasible to have removable batteries, so the vehicle can be "recharged" instantly by swapping the battery (I believe this is very popular in some countries for food delivery riders). This also means that the battery recharging can be performed using a normal power socket without requiring upgraded infrastructure although it may be wise to keep an eye on the batteries whilst charging to prevent house fires.
Incidentally, Mrs ndsipa_pomu recently bought a good quality e-bike (i.e. not one of the duck-taped conversions) and absolutely loves commuting on it as she sails past the traffic that she was previously trapped in. Though it's limited to assist only up to 15.5mph, she finds it powerful enough to cope with the hills.