The New York Times is out with a screed against e-bikes that lies from its very first sentence. “E-bikes are heavy and fast — in some ways closer to a motorcycle than a manual two-wheeler — and they’ve proliferated in the last few years.”
What’s being described in that sentence is not an e-bike. What’s being described is an e-moto, an electric motorcycle.
As I predicted two years ago, manufacturers have used the term “e-bike” to build dangerous, unregulated motorcycles, which they’re selling to kids. I described this in my e-book Opa Fiets and the E-Transport Revolution, Dutch teens on e-motos blowing past my Swapfiets e-bike at 45 kph (28 mph) and more.
The differences between an e-bike like my Edison and an e-moto are the same as the differences between an unpowered bicycle and a gas-powered motorcycle, size and speed. They’re just as obvious. A “Class 3” e-bike, or e-moto, can keep up with city traffic. It has a motorcycle seat. You don’t have to pedal it.
The failure to recognize this, in law and in practice, is one of the most egregious urban policy failures of our time. We don’t want “government” messing with our “freedoms.” We take killing ourselves (and others) as being among those “freedoms.” So we use weasel words (e-bike) to justify the behavior. Anyone who protests becomes a killjoy communist.
The policy answer should be simple. If it goes faster than a bike, if it’s heavier than a bike, if the user’s feet aren’t turning a crank to move it, then it’s not a bike. I don’t care if the manufacturer put the word “bike” in the name. A lion is not a house cat, even if they’re both felines.
Threatening the E-Transport Revolution
We know how to deal with motorcycles. We have entire legal codes for motorcycles, and for their riders. Our road systems know how to deal with motorcycles. They can travel alongside cars, and they can be treated as cars, only more roughly because they’re more dangerous than cars.
The aim of this deliberate confusion, by the Times, by car-head advocates, and by government, is to conflate unregulated Class I and Class II e-bikes with motorcycles. It’s to discourage the acceptance of e-bikes by government, and to refuse the improvements that would let 20 mph e-bikes, e-trikes, cargo bikes and delivery vehicles get around safely.
The E-Transport Revolution demands a third path for urban transport, one that travels no faster than 15-20 mph (25-32 kph), and that provides the kind of safety that roads offer cars, and sidewalks offer pedestrians. In the absence of this, e-bike users are shunted onto sidewalks, becoming dangerous to walkers, or onto high-speed roads, becoming dangerous to drivers and themselves.
The benefits of the “third path” are obvious. To use a New York City example, you can get from Harlem down to Wall Street in well under an hour. You increase the available space for transport by up to 8 times (because bikes are smaller than cars). You save people time, you save them money, and (oh) you save them on health care because they’re getting some exercise.
But when you pretend an e-motorcycle is an e-bike, as we’re now doing, all those benefits go away. You have kids crashing into pedestrians at 30 mph on sidewalks and cars crashing into unlicensed vehicles, dropping un-helmeted riders into the street. You have chaos. A parked e-motorcycle can also take the same space as a car, in a garage.
The Third Path
Or you go with the solution CarHeads prefer, banning all e-bikes and forcing people to be licensed, insured, and controlled by government to move at anything faster than walking pace. (God only knows what happens when exoskeletons reach the mass market.)
A ban on E-Transport can work on the island of Manhattan, because its extensive bus and subway lines offer an alternative, assuming you’re not carrying anything heavier than a backpack or briefcase. It won’t work anywhere else, at all. It won’t even work in Queens!
We can either support the third path, adapt to the third path, and assure that only third path vehicles use that third path, or we can go on pointing fingers and killing each other, making our cities unlivable and forcing people back into the suburbs and onto the stroads.
Your choice.
