8 ms·

With thunderstorms, you count seconds 'twixt bolt and boom. With the current golden age of electrified last-mile transport, we're seeing the gap between innova

With thunderstorms, you count seconds 'twixt bolt and boom. With the current golden age of electrified last-mile transport, we're seeing the gap between innovation and regulation opening up wide -- now several years. Real-world impact: I routinely get up to speeds on my e-bike that are, quite simply, dangerous. It's not that I never hit 25 miles an hour on my old road bike, it's that I spend so much more time hanging out at ~25mph on my ebike that potholes have gone from annoyance to mortal danger. The risk is somewhat mitigated by the enormous tires and superior build quality on the braking system, but not entirely. I'm glad to have taken a motorcycle license training course, and heartily recommend that other early adopters think about voluntarily seeking out additional training (and I imagine e-* specific courses are available now, if not soon.) Not all good ideas come with mandates :D

FpUser 4y ago
>"heartily recommend that other early adopters think about voluntarily seeking out additional training" Alternatively one can stop being an idiot and ride at safe speed. I bet that "additional training" would require at least this kind of sanity
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  Safety is conditional to a lot more than speed.
  - 1attice 4y ago
    ...and yet the future continuity of your consciousness itself depends on at least a minimum-viable level of safety! What a diabolical tradeoff :D something-something anthropic principle
- bombcar 4y ago
  People assume a "bike" is safe, and a "motorbike" can be dangerous, but there's no real difference between them. I've reached 35 MPH downhill under pedal power; if I had wiped out I would have been in a world of hurt, or dead, depending on how it had gone.
  - mrchucklepants 4y ago
    I've hit 50 mph downhill on my bike just to say I'd done it. I started thinking of all the ways it could end badly. As soon as I hit 50, I was on the brakes.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    One of my own more indelible memories is of sprinting down a sizeable hill, out of the saddle and over the front wheel, handily pulling away from my buddy whose bike computer was reading 65 kph (40 mph), wearing shorts, cleats, gloves, and a shit-eating grin. Two days later, tooling around on flat ground, my handlebars came apart in my hands, thanks to hidden long-developing stress fractures, a characteristic of aluminium alloys. (There'd been numerous previous falls.) Speed is indeed fun. But its consequences can be extreme. (I've hit 80+ kph / 50+ mph on other rides.) Another factor is rider mass. An elite cyclist at 60--65 kg (135--145 lb) can brake far more effectively than a past-their-prime 115--135 kg (250--300 lb) rider, particularly, again, on a grade. Brakes have only so much stopping power. E-bikes make higher-speeds for less-experienced and less-skilled riders far more attainable. Typical recreational cyclists spend most of their time in the 20--30 kph (12--18 mph) speed range.
  - Shared404 4y ago
    I was almost killed by a downhill max speed bike crash when I was ~12. Wearing a properly fitted helmet, I was knocked unconscious and concussed quite badly by the hit to my head.
  - FpUser 4y ago
    >"People assume a "bike" is safe" Bike is not safe. And it is not even about being hit by the car. Cyclists often fall and often it results in broken bones etc.
    - enneff 4y ago
      If you look at cities where bikes are well integrated then they are way safer than cars.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Are you saying that 25mph is inherently unsafe? What's the safe speed then, for a normal dry day? Does this speed limit apply to motorcycles too?
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    Falling from a standing position can be dangerous. "Safe" is a function of the environment you're in and device you're riding- traction, obstacles, intersections, speed of other traffic, visible distance (fog / clear sky / bend in the road), wind, all sorts of things. Motorcycles have different tire sizes, masses and centers of gravity. The speed they can "safely" travel will always be different than a bicycle.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > Falling from a standing position can be dangerous. If your definition is "nothing is safe" then there's no reason to complain about 25mph in particular. > "Safe" is a function of the environment you're in and device you're riding- traction, obstacles, intersections, speed of other traffic, visible distance (fog / clear sky / bend in the road), wind, all sorts of things. So give an example. Either specify conditions or assume generic conditions. Don't say someone else's example number is wrong without giving a rough correct number. > Motorcycles have different tire sizes, masses and centers of gravity. The speed they can "safely" travel will always be different than a bicycle. Great. That answers my second question of two.
      - zdragnar 4y ago
        It's not that "nothing is safe" but rather nothing is "inherently" safe. I've crashed several times going roughly 12mph, with only a few scrapes and no broken bones- once because by brake line snapped, once because my tire got caught in a crack in the road I didn't see, and once because a car pulled in front of me. Any one of those could have ended in a broken neck if I'd landed wrong. Going slower might have prevented one or two of those. Going faster wouldn't have caused worse injury in the third case given that I bounced off the car rather than going straight to the ground.
- 1attice 4y ago
  Think of "idiocy" as the lack of intelligence, rather than a separate entity of its own, similarly to how high-school physics (and therefore, contemporary common sense!) understands cold as the absence of heat. This means that you can get rid of idiocy by adding intelligence to a system, in the same way that you can warm up a room with a space heater. But how do you build up intelligence? Put it this way. Your onboard wetware neural network needs to iterate on e.g. pulling out of a slide, and a bunch of other stuff that you won't know how to do unless someone trains you. No iteration means no gradient, and no gradient means 'no smart'. So if you want to defeat idiocy, you need training. Now, you can train you, but of course, you'll never know if the training was complete. Thus the obvious antidote to e-vehicle idiocy-at-scale[1] is, yes, formal lessons and deliberate practice. Just like driving. Just like piano. [1] a friend from grad school who is Korean told me that there's a word in Korean that literally means "road stupid" and this is the only fact I know about Korean and I love it. So many people are road stupid! I'm one of them! I'm trying to improve!
  - FpUser 4y ago
    >"Now, you can train you, but of course, you'll never know if the training was complete." Deliberate practice I understand. The proposed "formal training" for this specific case however would not know "if the training is complete" either. They'll just be taking your money.
    - 1attice 4y ago
      Well, they're welcome to it -- at least once a week, I use dodge-skid-stop, a specific skill I formally acquired by trying to do it and dropping the training bike a bunch while a grouchy 65yo biker glowered at my incompetence until it evaporated. Take my money
roughly 4y ago
I picked up an e-bike not too long ago and took a bit to decide between class 2 and class 3 - I didn’t have enough experience with a bike and a speedometer to gauge whether the 20mph limit on class 2 would be enough. Having ridden around for a while now, yeah, absolutely agree - anything over ~15-20mph is above my comfort zone for “able to adjust to sudden changes in the environment.” Folks who get the “class 4”s are baiting a date with a reconstructive surgeon.
- frankus 4y ago
  It's a bit of a balance. It's great to be able to keep up with the 25 mph/40 kph traffic on city streets, but small bumps in the pavement are rough and of course there's quadratically more energy to manage in the event of a crash. I think we need to normalize the idea that riding a class 3 bike requires using at a minimum a full-face helmet, motorcycle gloves, and close-toed shoes. Personally I'll likely keep riding my bike in class 3 mode since it results in zero speed penalty over driving in town (and often is faster thanks to bike lanes that bring you to the front of a line of cars stopped at a light, and can typically be parked steps away from the door of where I'm going).
  - 0_____0 4y ago
    While quite reasonable, you'd be facing an uphill battle in many places. In a lot of the United States, it's pretty common to see someone riding a 160hp 4-cyl sportbike in a t-shirt and flip-flops. Other riders call them 'squids.' EMTs call them 'road crayons.'
  - roughly 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm lucky in that my city's done a fantastic job of creating bicycle infrastructure - between dedicated trails, clear bike lanes, and streets that have been designed & designated for bikes, it's rare I have to interact with fast-moving traffic (the rare times I do are just as unpleasant as everywhere else, of course).
- 0_____0 4y ago
  A new e-bike rider who suddenly is capable of 20mph and has no experience to the contrary might assume (wrongly) that they can navigate safely at that speed. Cyclists who can maintain 20+ mph on flat ground (not at all uncommon!) will have many more riding hours under their belts, and the commensurate handling skills and instincts.
ars 4y ago
I was using an e-bike on a road with some ripples (I guess they messed up during paving). I was thrown off of the bike, and my helmet prevented any serious injury. I wasn't even going very fast. The only solution to that (and the potholes) is larger wheels.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  What about this experience is specific to electric bikes?
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Smaller tires and rotating assemblies with less mass are more susceptible to uneven pavement. For example, a vehicle like a motorcycle or even a motor scooter will be able to handle imperfections on city streets more easily. If you got a bigger gyroscope under your butt, you're harder to knock over. Bicycles tend to go with smaller and less massive wheels, because it decreases rider effort required to spin them up, and it's generally a reasonable compromise for vehicles that operate at slower speeds and on smoother surfaces. Of course, if we start adding more power beyond human effort, more speed, and put those vehicles on surfaces designed for larger vehicles, it may make sense to reevaluate that compromise.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      Just to make sure we're on the same page: the answer to my question is "nothing", right?
      - kube-system 4y ago
        The opposite. The answer to your question is that electric bikes have unique handling characteristics compared to everything that isn't an electric bike. If your comparison is human powered bikes, the answer is that you have more energy at your disposal than a human powered bike, and so you may be on a different surface and at a different speed than you otherwise would be, with equipment designed for different conditions.
outworlder 4y ago
At least bicycles are stable. This onewheel thing cannot work without a computer balancing it (+ the rider). If it fails the rider falls on their face. It would be the equivalent of a bike fork breaking.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
arglebargle123 4y ago
Another commenter posted about this in a separate top level comment already but it's worth mentioning here as well since you mention speed. The people who routinely hit 25+mph on a regular road bike know how to handle one at those speeds, many ebike riders simply don't have the handling skills or the experience to ride safely (for themselves and others) at speed.
- MivLives 4y ago
  Honestly I think the cap most people can handle is 15. After that is when things start getting much harder to deal with.
  - arglebargle123 4y ago
    Yeah, you're probably right. When you start factoring in inattention and insufficient physical conditioning to control the bike (ebikes can weigh significantly more than a regular bicycle) it might even be lower.
neilv 4y ago
The speeds of the motorized scooters/bikes/etc., and seeming recklessness of their riders, has become a problem on the sidewalks of college town Cambridge, Mass. For example, at least three times in the last week alone, I've literally almost been run into by someone blasting out of, or alongside, Harvard Yard on one motorized vehicle or another. Some of the bicyclists seem similarly reckless and self-absorbed. A couple times in the last week I've almost been hit on the sidewalk by a speeding bicyclist. Also, a few nights ago, I was almost struck in the head by someone on a Blue Bikes rental bike, blowing through a crosswalk that had a walk light, and after the cars had already stopped for the red. (They were also speeding across the ambulance entrance&exit for a hospital ED, so doubly reckless, though convenient for me, had they cracked my head open.) Anecdotally, the bicyclist wtf rate seems much than it used to be, and I wonder whether some of the motorized vehicles are setting precedents for behavior. I intend to bring this up with the City, where I know they have some people who care very much about bike etc. transportation. I'm also mentally composing a concerned letter to the Harvard administration, both about public safety, and about the image of their students as reckless and self-absorbed.
rhinoceraptor 4y ago
Even on normal bicycles, most people seem to have pretty bad handling skills. The two things I think people should really practice are braking (especially emergency braking, using primarily the front brake) and very low speed riding.
mint2 4y ago
I don’t understand this aspect, just because it’s possible doesn’t mean one should. And in your case it’s clear you don’t think it’s a good idea but seem to say you do it anyway, why do you do it?

FpUser 4y ago

>"heartily recommend that other early adopters think about voluntarily seeking out additional training" Alternatively one can stop being an idiot and ride at safe speed. I bet that "additional training" would require at least this kind of sanity

thomastjeffery 4y ago
Safety is conditional to a lot more than speed.
- 1attice 4y ago
  ...and yet the future continuity of your consciousness itself depends on at least a minimum-viable level of safety! What a diabolical tradeoff :D something-something anthropic principle
bombcar 4y ago
People assume a "bike" is safe, and a "motorbike" can be dangerous, but there's no real difference between them. I've reached 35 MPH downhill under pedal power; if I had wiped out I would have been in a world of hurt, or dead, depending on how it had gone.
- mrchucklepants 4y ago
  I've hit 50 mph downhill on my bike just to say I'd done it. I started thinking of all the ways it could end badly. As soon as I hit 50, I was on the brakes.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  One of my own more indelible memories is of sprinting down a sizeable hill, out of the saddle and over the front wheel, handily pulling away from my buddy whose bike computer was reading 65 kph (40 mph), wearing shorts, cleats, gloves, and a shit-eating grin. Two days later, tooling around on flat ground, my handlebars came apart in my hands, thanks to hidden long-developing stress fractures, a characteristic of aluminium alloys. (There'd been numerous previous falls.) Speed is indeed fun. But its consequences can be extreme. (I've hit 80+ kph / 50+ mph on other rides.) Another factor is rider mass. An elite cyclist at 60--65 kg (135--145 lb) can brake far more effectively than a past-their-prime 115--135 kg (250--300 lb) rider, particularly, again, on a grade. Brakes have only so much stopping power. E-bikes make higher-speeds for less-experienced and less-skilled riders far more attainable. Typical recreational cyclists spend most of their time in the 20--30 kph (12--18 mph) speed range.
- Shared404 4y ago
  I was almost killed by a downhill max speed bike crash when I was ~12. Wearing a properly fitted helmet, I was knocked unconscious and concussed quite badly by the hit to my head.
- FpUser 4y ago
  >"People assume a "bike" is safe" Bike is not safe. And it is not even about being hit by the car. Cyclists often fall and often it results in broken bones etc.
  - enneff 4y ago
    If you look at cities where bikes are well integrated then they are way safer than cars.
Dylan16807 4y ago
Are you saying that 25mph is inherently unsafe? What's the safe speed then, for a normal dry day? Does this speed limit apply to motorcycles too?
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Falling from a standing position can be dangerous. "Safe" is a function of the environment you're in and device you're riding- traction, obstacles, intersections, speed of other traffic, visible distance (fog / clear sky / bend in the road), wind, all sorts of things. Motorcycles have different tire sizes, masses and centers of gravity. The speed they can "safely" travel will always be different than a bicycle.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > Falling from a standing position can be dangerous. If your definition is "nothing is safe" then there's no reason to complain about 25mph in particular. > "Safe" is a function of the environment you're in and device you're riding- traction, obstacles, intersections, speed of other traffic, visible distance (fog / clear sky / bend in the road), wind, all sorts of things. So give an example. Either specify conditions or assume generic conditions. Don't say someone else's example number is wrong without giving a rough correct number. > Motorcycles have different tire sizes, masses and centers of gravity. The speed they can "safely" travel will always be different than a bicycle. Great. That answers my second question of two.
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      It's not that "nothing is safe" but rather nothing is "inherently" safe. I've crashed several times going roughly 12mph, with only a few scrapes and no broken bones- once because by brake line snapped, once because my tire got caught in a crack in the road I didn't see, and once because a car pulled in front of me. Any one of those could have ended in a broken neck if I'd landed wrong. Going slower might have prevented one or two of those. Going faster wouldn't have caused worse injury in the third case given that I bounced off the car rather than going straight to the ground.
1attice 4y ago
Think of "idiocy" as the lack of intelligence, rather than a separate entity of its own, similarly to how high-school physics (and therefore, contemporary common sense!) understands cold as the absence of heat. This means that you can get rid of idiocy by adding intelligence to a system, in the same way that you can warm up a room with a space heater. But how do you build up intelligence? Put it this way. Your onboard wetware neural network needs to iterate on e.g. pulling out of a slide, and a bunch of other stuff that you won't know how to do unless someone trains you. No iteration means no gradient, and no gradient means 'no smart'. So if you want to defeat idiocy, you need training. Now, you can train you, but of course, you'll never know if the training was complete. Thus the obvious antidote to e-vehicle idiocy-at-scale[1] is, yes, formal lessons and deliberate practice. Just like driving. Just like piano. [1] a friend from grad school who is Korean told me that there's a word in Korean that literally means "road stupid" and this is the only fact I know about Korean and I love it. So many people are road stupid! I'm one of them! I'm trying to improve!
- FpUser 4y ago
  >"Now, you can train you, but of course, you'll never know if the training was complete." Deliberate practice I understand. The proposed "formal training" for this specific case however would not know "if the training is complete" either. They'll just be taking your money.
  - 1attice 4y ago
    Well, they're welcome to it -- at least once a week, I use dodge-skid-stop, a specific skill I formally acquired by trying to do it and dropping the training bike a bunch while a grouchy 65yo biker glowered at my incompetence until it evaporated. Take my money

roughly 4y ago

I picked up an e-bike not too long ago and took a bit to decide between class 2 and class 3 - I didn’t have enough experience with a bike and a speedometer to gauge whether the 20mph limit on class 2 would be enough. Having ridden around for a while now, yeah, absolutely agree - anything over ~15-20mph is above my comfort zone for “able to adjust to sudden changes in the environment.” Folks who get the “class 4”s are baiting a date with a reconstructive surgeon.

frankus 4y ago
It's a bit of a balance. It's great to be able to keep up with the 25 mph/40 kph traffic on city streets, but small bumps in the pavement are rough and of course there's quadratically more energy to manage in the event of a crash. I think we need to normalize the idea that riding a class 3 bike requires using at a minimum a full-face helmet, motorcycle gloves, and close-toed shoes. Personally I'll likely keep riding my bike in class 3 mode since it results in zero speed penalty over driving in town (and often is faster thanks to bike lanes that bring you to the front of a line of cars stopped at a light, and can typically be parked steps away from the door of where I'm going).
- 0_____0 4y ago
  While quite reasonable, you'd be facing an uphill battle in many places. In a lot of the United States, it's pretty common to see someone riding a 160hp 4-cyl sportbike in a t-shirt and flip-flops. Other riders call them 'squids.' EMTs call them 'road crayons.'
- roughly 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm lucky in that my city's done a fantastic job of creating bicycle infrastructure - between dedicated trails, clear bike lanes, and streets that have been designed & designated for bikes, it's rare I have to interact with fast-moving traffic (the rare times I do are just as unpleasant as everywhere else, of course).
0_____0 4y ago
A new e-bike rider who suddenly is capable of 20mph and has no experience to the contrary might assume (wrongly) that they can navigate safely at that speed. Cyclists who can maintain 20+ mph on flat ground (not at all uncommon!) will have many more riding hours under their belts, and the commensurate handling skills and instincts.

ars 4y ago

I was using an e-bike on a road with some ripples (I guess they messed up during paving). I was thrown off of the bike, and my helmet prevented any serious injury. I wasn't even going very fast. The only solution to that (and the potholes) is larger wheels.

jeffbee 4y ago
What about this experience is specific to electric bikes?
- kube-system 4y ago
  Smaller tires and rotating assemblies with less mass are more susceptible to uneven pavement. For example, a vehicle like a motorcycle or even a motor scooter will be able to handle imperfections on city streets more easily. If you got a bigger gyroscope under your butt, you're harder to knock over. Bicycles tend to go with smaller and less massive wheels, because it decreases rider effort required to spin them up, and it's generally a reasonable compromise for vehicles that operate at slower speeds and on smoother surfaces. Of course, if we start adding more power beyond human effort, more speed, and put those vehicles on surfaces designed for larger vehicles, it may make sense to reevaluate that compromise.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    Just to make sure we're on the same page: the answer to my question is "nothing", right?
    - kube-system 4y ago
      The opposite. The answer to your question is that electric bikes have unique handling characteristics compared to everything that isn't an electric bike. If your comparison is human powered bikes, the answer is that you have more energy at your disposal than a human powered bike, and so you may be on a different surface and at a different speed than you otherwise would be, with equipment designed for different conditions.

outworlder 4y ago

At least bicycles are stable. This onewheel thing cannot work without a computer balancing it (+ the rider). If it fails the rider falls on their face. It would be the equivalent of a bike fork breaking.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

arglebargle123 4y ago

Another commenter posted about this in a separate top level comment already but it's worth mentioning here as well since you mention speed. The people who routinely hit 25+mph on a regular road bike know how to handle one at those speeds, many ebike riders simply don't have the handling skills or the experience to ride safely (for themselves and others) at speed.

MivLives 4y ago
Honestly I think the cap most people can handle is 15. After that is when things start getting much harder to deal with.
- arglebargle123 4y ago
  Yeah, you're probably right. When you start factoring in inattention and insufficient physical conditioning to control the bike (ebikes can weigh significantly more than a regular bicycle) it might even be lower.

neilv 4y ago

The speeds of the motorized scooters/bikes/etc., and seeming recklessness of their riders, has become a problem on the sidewalks of college town Cambridge, Mass. For example, at least three times in the last week alone, I've literally almost been run into by someone blasting out of, or alongside, Harvard Yard on one motorized vehicle or another. Some of the bicyclists seem similarly reckless and self-absorbed. A couple times in the last week I've almost been hit on the sidewalk by a speeding bicyclist. Also, a few nights ago, I was almost struck in the head by someone on a Blue Bikes rental bike, blowing through a crosswalk that had a walk light, and after the cars had already stopped for the red. (They were also speeding across the ambulance entrance&exit for a hospital ED, so doubly reckless, though convenient for me, had they cracked my head open.) Anecdotally, the bicyclist wtf rate seems much than it used to be, and I wonder whether some of the motorized vehicles are setting precedents for behavior. I intend to bring this up with the City, where I know they have some people who care very much about bike etc. transportation. I'm also mentally composing a concerned letter to the Harvard administration, both about public safety, and about the image of their students as reckless and self-absorbed.

rhinoceraptor 4y ago

Even on normal bicycles, most people seem to have pretty bad handling skills. The two things I think people should really practice are braking (especially emergency braking, using primarily the front brake) and very low speed riding.

mint2 4y ago

I don’t understand this aspect, just because it’s possible doesn’t mean one should. And in your case it’s clear you don’t think it’s a good idea but seem to say you do it anyway, why do you do it?