- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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- [email protected]
Today is a big day for the future of e-bikes in New York City. A hearing starts at 10 a.m. You can file a written comment until 5 p.m. You can also send an email to [email protected] until 5 p.m
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Good idea - if you also cap car speeds at 15mph
Just build more and bigger sidewalks. In shenzhen and beijing, they often have 2 separated bike/moped lanes on either side of the road, a bike/scooter parking lane, and then like 20 feet of sidewalk you can also ride your electric moped on.
Canuck here. The city I live in only caps ebike speeds on the pathways at 20km/hr (Personally I only see riders going this fast when there’s no one else in sight. When they approach others on the pathways they slow right down. Most also slow right down when going around blind corners or bends). You can ride them on sidewalks but must have peddle assist disabled. When riding on the roads you must follow the rules of the road.
Could be an option for NYC. But limiting ONLY ebike speed on roads is not cool. Why should they be forced to go slower when big death traps can go flying past them??
My eBike (Turbo Levo) only does 20mph max. That’s acceptable. 15mph tho is bonkers. 18mph is fine. But 20 should be the limit.
RIght way to regulate ebikes is with speed limits in various areas. (not specs restrictions). 20mph in bike lanes with high bike and nearby pedestrian traffic seems about right.
Here in Vietnam, they have ebikes that do 115 kph (though 99% of city driving is like like 15 mph). If the rest of traffic is going that speed, shouldnt you be able to go that speed?
You can get that in America. You just have a level 3 classification and at that point it needs to be registered and insured. But has full road access.
Fellow Canuck is talking kmph, that’s approx half mph
As a long time F1 fan. I know. But I don’t see a need to lower the top speed from where it is for Level 1 e-bikes.
Step 1: Limit e-bike speed
Step 2: Enforce minimum speed limit
Step 3: Profit
That’s all it’s about. Nyc has been engaging in shady practices for a while. It’s almost like an unregulated tax on the middle class. If you can afford a car, but have to use street parking, you’re going to get tickets. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, those meter maids have their quotas to fill. They’re getting greedier. Now that public roads are tolled the next natural escalation seems to be fining ebikes…
Next you’ll pay a few dollars to walk every few blocks.
We have jaywalking already but that’s more of a gray area tbh
16mph is the limitation in germany. If your bike is faster, you have to register it an pay tax, and cant use dedicated bicycle infratructure anymore.
16mph is exactly the speed where I’m fast enough but dont feel like I would die in a crash.
Everything above would require protective clothing like on motorcycles Imo, and that kind of defeats the purpose for ebikes for me. I want to ride my bike but don’t want to have to fight against wind and going up the hill.
If an ebike is as fast as a motorcycle, it should get treated as one.
16mph is the limitation in germany.
In my experience, a typical bike-friendly city in Germany will have 30 km/h limit for cars anyway (18 mph). NYC “official” speed limit is 25mph.
Yeah this proposal is reasonable. I wouldnt want to share my bikepath with old people driving more than 25kmh. They just dont have the reaction time to safely drive at speeds like that and even that is actually waaay to fast for the oldest. If you wanna go faster, use your muscles and/or drive on the road.
if you want to go faster use your muscles
Okay but the fact that you can say this without it being a joke proves how stupid this limit is.
Not at all no. This used to be a sort of self regulating system. Peoples ability to go fast with muscles alone usually goes away around the same point where their cognitive abilities become a hazard to the rest of traffic. The difference is that most young people could easily go 18mph or more while old people wouldnt even get past 10 without e-bikes. Basically e-bikes allow people to go beyond their limits. While that sounds cool, in this case it isnt.
Yeah, much better for old uncoordinated people to go back to using cars.
Said literally nobody. 15mph is plenty fast for getting around :) The more important part is making biking more attractive by building better infrastructure for it and actively restricting car traffic by slowing it down or diverting it out of cities.
So limit cars to 15 mph. I’m down.
Or do you just hate bikes?
Whataboutism
I like being alive and not being rammed by a 200kg combination of e-bike + human at speeds higher than 25kmh while riding my bike to work.
The thing with pedelecs and 25km/h is complicated™
- we distinguish e-bikes and pedelecs
- self-driving electric bike
- bike with electric pedal assist
- motorized bikes are already a thing for a century
- motorbikes… (driving license; 16 years+; real number plate; but 20 years+ for >45km/h)
- moped has 45km/h limit and a kickstart pedal (driving license; 15 years+; insurance plate)
- mofa has 25km/h limit and (can have) real bike pedals (driving test; 15 years+; insurance plate)
- every motorized vehicle that can do more than 20km/h and doesn’t have a seat belt, mandates helmets
- bike paths are only for bikes
- outside of built-up area mofas were already allowed to use bike paths
- at least one state banned motorized vehicles from forests
It probably was always possible to drive them as moped/mofa, don’t think it was specified what kind of motor.
Pedal assist doesn’t just stop at 25km/h, it also decreases with higher speeds.
But the point is that pedelecs effectively count as bike and not motorized vehicles. That means somebody younger than 15 can drive them, but you have to be at least 10 to be allowed to drive on streets/roads. Helmets are only mandatory for <12 years old kids on bikes.
If you’re not limiting cars the same, you’re just anti bike. Fuck off carbrain.
It’s the same. Those are motor limits, not driving speed limits. If you don’t meet them you just have to follow the stricter regulations.
Theoretically if you get an e-bike classified as a motorbike you could do 200 km/h on the motor way, just not on bike lanes. It just needs to be registerd, insuranced, have a proper motorbike license, wear helmet etc … like it’s the case with a car where it’s seat belt instead of helmet.
The speed limits are the same, I still have to follow regular 30km/h speed limits with my pedelec when I could do 45km/h downhill otherwise. Unless there are special signs somewhere, but so far I’ve only seen those for trucks/buses. Bikes are also entitled to street parking and parking lots since those are rules for all vehicles, it’s just impracticable. There is only a general rule to park space-saving.
It’s not the same. Not exactly.
And, again, if we wanted to ditch cars completelh and have a lane for those alone, that would be cool, but we dont. So everything but cars is ghettoized, and im not okay stratifying tgat while cars are still in use.
- we distinguish e-bikes and pedelecs
Yeah but blinking bike lights are also illegal to sell in Germany because you realized that drunk drivers target fixate on them and you apparently found that ban to be a better solution than aggressively cracking down on drunks. So I don’t give much credence to the rational integrity of German vehicular law. I go faster than 16 MPH literally every time I get on my bike. A regular non-motorized bike, powered only by me.
It’s the exact same in the Netherlands. The pedal assist is capped at that speed, but nothing stops you from powering though that and going faster. Not that it makes any sense to do so for the average daily office commuter.
Right, I think most of these delivery ebikes are throttle-operated. And they’re trying to get to their destinations quickly, because a lot of people tip their delivery guys based on expediency. I wish we had curb-separated cyclepaths like in the Netherlands because it would make this debate so much more straightforward and speed-capping would be a simple yes, but in NYC delivery cyclists are usually rolling down 3-4 lane wide avenues among cars going 25-35 MPH (~40-55 km/h). Like almost all other bike problems, the issue is actually the cars.
You have hands
I dont think I follow. What’s your point?
As in like, “Damn, infinitesunrise got hands…”? :P
Yeah about 15 is fine to me but no lower. so 16 is fine and maybe over 20 gets to be a bit much but im fine anywhere along that range.
Is this for sidewalk or road? Road speed limit should be same as cars. On the road I try to go faster to be safer. If there are good bike paths, whatever the non-e-bike speed limit is, e-bike same. I don’t think bikes belong on the sidewalk in NYC, but here when I am on a sidewalk I think about 17mph is the top speed so yeah 15 seems reasonable.
This is not for sidewalk use, this is for road use. NYC has forbidden vehicles on sidewalks for a long time.
Literally never enforced, ebikes love to speed down sidewalks
Right. They should just enforce it.
= 24 kilometers/hr for those also wondering
This feels like it’s purposefully designed to kneecap the adoption of e-bikes by rendering all class 1 and 2 e-bikes illegal and making it harder/more expensive to buy new ones because they have to have bespoke detuning for the NYC market.
IMO, it should be 20mph, but it’s a software limit. It’s nothing to “tune” it.
If you want to go faster, get a motorcycle license. The higher end ebikes are getting ridiculous. Their frames, tires, and brakes are not designed for the power and speed they can put down.
IMO, it should be 20mph, but it’s a software limit. It’s nothing to “tune” it.
You’re talking about vehicles that typically aren’t open source and don’t have a firmware update mechanism. There is no reason to expect they’re even possible to change without swapping out the entire controller.
That’s just factually incorrect. This 25 km/h limit has been law for years in (most of?) Europe. And it is totally possible to “jailbreak” virtually any common platform.
The real problem is that if you get into an accident you might get sued and dropped by your insurance company, and be held liable for all damages. No thanks.
People really need to stop buying those. The companies are parasites for reasons that go far beyond this.
The people who ride these ebikes are usually immigrant delivery guys who have little to no cash and not many alternatives.
And they’ll be fucked when the company involved stops updating their app. It will happen sooner or later.
I don’t think most delivery guy ebikes have an app… They’re a battery-powered motor with a throttle, that’s about it. There are low-cost mechanics who specifically service the delivery guys, a lot of the motorized parts are custom rebuilds by those dudes.
Like a Bafang? Because those controllers are completely customizable with open source tools. That’s how I built my ebike, and it can set custom assist limits.
This is a widely supported issue where I am, mostly because bike lanes are for self propelled vehicles and ebikes are sharing the roads with far heavier and faster vehicles that require licensing and insurance.
They fall between two stools though I am for licensing and insurance of them.
I don’t know if there’s a shadier reasoning behind it, and there very well might be, but IMO it’s a pretty reasonable speed limit for using bike infrastructure. Most people on standard bikes could only ever get to those speeds with a decent amount of effort. Many wouldn’t even be able to.
If you want to go that fast, you should get in the car lanes with the other dangerous people.
Do you live or work there? I see ebikes being used on sidewalks by delivery guys all the time. Limiting speeds makes sense for NYC IMO
I lived and worked there for 15+ years, was a daily cyclist (Non-motorized). eBikers do ride onto the sidewalk at the very start or end of their trips. But they’re already not allowed to do that - NYC has long had a blanket ban on riding any vehicle on sidewalks. The city should consider actually enforcing their existing rules before making new (IMO very stupid) ones. This is just reactionary pandering.
My lowly non-NYCer opinion is that that sounds like a reason to crack down on sidewalk riding, rather than the speed.
Why not both?
For the reasons I outlined in my previous comment: forcing NYC e-bikes to be governed to a different speed than e-bikes everywhere else in the country (thus requiring selling a separate NYC-specific model) would be bad for e-bike adoption.
Why not just add speed limits to areas where higher speeds are an issue? That’s been the approach to cars – no car is limited to 140 kmh despite speeds above that are illegal pretty much everywhere…
Regular bikes can easily go above 15 mph as well, so why should this only affect e-bikes?
ebikes are frequently heavier and are frequently ridden on sidewalks in NYC.
Maybe put in some proper bike lanes so riders don’t feel they need to ride on the sidewalk? 🤔
They do so even with lanes. it’s typically delivery drivers doing this.
Its basically to define it because of where it can be used. Like motorcycles can’t be driven where bikes can.
Love it here on /c/fuckbikes
This thread is full of people who have never been to NYC and think this cap is somehow a good idea and not a death sentence both figuratively for micromobility and literally for e-bikers who have to deal with much faster car traffic.
Is it a road speed limit? or a limit on bike power? If the former, it’s not so much an attack on micromobility. Can take the road to pass or go faster. The cars can physically do 120mph, but have NYC speed limits.
It is the latter, a limit on bike power.
It’s not even about nyc. Haven’t been there in a while myself.
Its about car brains who see cars as entitled and everything else as the enemy. The mods really need to get bulk bans going.
I’m a former moderator of /r/nycbike on reddit and I can attest, a lot of cyclists hate ebikers because instead of seeing an ally against car culture they just see one more “other” with whom they have to compete for limited bike infrastructure space, who they feel goes too fast in those spaces, and they think isn’t enforced against enough. I hate to say it but just like most groups of people, a lot of cyclists aren’t able to step back and appreciate a shared struggle. They don’t realize that they’re doing the exact same thing to ebikers that car drivers do to them. They don’t realize that the limited space they’re fighting over is an arbitrary restriction. They don’t realize how legislating against ebikes is just a wedge, the tip of which is destined to cut them too once driven too far. So while I’m sure a lot of the detractors in this thread are legitimate car brains, I wouldn’t be surprised if just as many if not more of them are subscriber cyclists who maybe need a reality check.
Frustrated with the general overwhelming flood of car brains on every post here. How every comment is how bad cyclists are or the pedestrian who got turned to a fine red mist was actually at fault etc.
i bet that this would cut profits from those delivering food and stuff with an E-bike in NYC
hey many of those people are immigrants! who’d a thunk it ?
though i agree with regulation, i am a 20mph limit guy; however i dont live in new york (and have never been). if 15mph suits the city, i see no problem with it.
hopefully the mayor has taken a few days to ride around in an ebike to know what he is signing (though i highly doubt it)
15 MPH does not suit the city. I was a daily cyclist in NYC for a long time and 15 MPH is generally the minimum speed you need to be going to keep safe in traffic. Capping a small motorized vehicle to 15 MPH while cars are zooming past at 30+ is not good.
ooohhhh, i didnt realize the cars had a faster speed limit. yeah, thats kinda fucked up.
That sounds pretty fair to me. Very few regular bikers go faster than 20-25. Especially with more weight, like delivery or cargo bikes, and also especially with the e-motor support there is a lot of weight and power behind those bikes.
And bike lines are usually built for “regular” use, not high speed. All the curves, break distances etc. get planned with around that speed and not a whole lot more.
The original purpose of supporting disabled people who can’t use a regular bike is still served and people don’t have to be afraid of maniacs going 50mph in places where “common sense” would already advise them not to. If you’re using a cargo bike, that also still works and you get not so gently instructed to watch the speed with your cargo.
Maybe they could do something where to use a bike lane, it has to be speed capped. Idk.
very few[not none] regular bikers go faster than 20-25
Therefore
limit electric to 15
Uh
Therefore
So you want to go 80mph on a bike lane?! That would be crazy!
;)
Why do you like cars so much?
I don’t like cars.
But I hate people who get their basic reading comprehension and logic wrong.
Pretty sure they mean 25 kph which would be 15 mph
We were talking about mph elsewhere and no units were specified. They use mph elsewhere in same comment. Wtf is your motivation here?
Anyway, this is an okay argument for stopping multi ton steel behemoths. I support it.
My motivation is to show a possible perspective in an ambiguity. I’m like that.
This seems like a “why not both” situation. Limit e-bike speeds to those that are typical in most parts of the world and reduce city speed limits for cars to 20mph, and enforce it aggressively.
Because they’re not doing both, which will encourage people to switch from e-bikes back to cars. This rule will make NYC streets more dangerous, no doubt.
No limit for bikes without limits for cars.
NYC actually reduced local road speeds to 25MPH city-wide like 10 years or so back under Bill de Blasio. It was an uphill fight with state government since the state is who gets to set those speeds unless the locality puts speed signs on every street where there’s an exception, and even NYC didn’t have the money (Or space) to put a speed sign on literally every block in the city. So after decades of 30+ being the norm the city was able to negotiate the state down to 25. 20 would have been better but the state wouldn’t have let it happen and that’s also the pace where New York drivers lose their patience and just start habituating to breaking the rule all the time.
commenting for visibility.
