Speed limits exist for safety, because cars are dangerous. Cars kill over 40,000 Americans every year, including a few thousand pedestrians and cyclists. (Illustration from ChatGPT.)
Bikes can also kill. You can die on a bike if you’re rolling downhill and hit a pothole, then fly over the handlebars and strike your head on the pavement without a helmet.
Bicycles don’t kill pedestrians, although they do injure some. An e-bike traveling at 15 mph (25 kph) may hurt you, but it won’t kill you. We know that because if a car hits you at that speed you will live, and an e-bike is lighter than a car.
These truths should be obvious to anyone wanting to regulate e-transport. But they’re not.
Instead, heavily influenced by Carheads, New Jersey has passed a law that treats all e-bikes as cars. Other states are looking to follow its lead, because there are a lot more car drivers than cyclists, and they have better lobbyists.
We got here because no one paid attention as e-motorbikes came out that called themselves e-bikes and traveled at freeway speeds. No one paid attention when these e-motorbikes were sold to teenagers, without helmets or safety instruction. No one paid attention until kids began running around at 40 mph (65 kph), popping wheelies and running into things.
What should we do? Is that my bike’s problem?
Proper Safety Management
With cars, safety begins at the manufacturer, and with the retailer. You can’t sell a car without the expensive, mandated safety features governments have authorized over the last 60 years.
It should be the same for e-bikes.
Forget the “Class” system. If it goes at the speed of traffic, it’s traffic. If it goes at the speed of a bike, it’s a bike.
The Netherlands has three paths – sidewalk (stoep), bike path (fietspad), and highway (snelweg). America has five – sidewalk, shared sidewalk, bike path, shared roadway, and roadway.
You should treat the sidewalk, when it’s shared by bikes, as a sidewalk, with pedestrians given right of way and bikes slowed to a speed acceptable to pedestrians. You should treat a shared roadway as a bike path, with bikes given right of way and cars slowed to a speed acceptable to bikes.
It’s not that hard.
What makes it hard is when you try to enforce any speed limit. We’ve seen it in my state of Georgia. Someone puts in speed cameras in school zones, meant to protect kids, and all the carheads come running out of the woodwork calling it a “money grab,” demanding that the cameras be banned.
Until we get it into our heads that speed limits should be enforced, and that technology is the only way to do that, all American roads are going to be Mad Max.
But what happens when you accept the premise? What happens with e-bikes that might run down pedestrians on the Atlanta Beltline, with kids and dogs running back-and-forth because it’s a sidewalk?
Fairness for E-Bikes and Everyone Else
We already use speed cameras to warn drivers they’re going too fast. These signs work for me on my e-bike. Put them on the Beltline. Set them to 15 mph and they will flash red at you when you pass them going faster. Treating that as a limit, and enforcing it, is a challenge for both cars and e-bikes. But it’s the same challenge and should be dealt with in the same way.
I’ve suggested having a AAA for e-bikes for several reasons. But the main reason is that we need our own lobbyists, who will represent the interests of safe e-biking and safe cyclists. We don’t have that right now. We have groups like Propel Atlanta that represent a host of interests, from transit to pedestrians, e-bikes to regular cyclists. A narrower focus would help us.
We get that narrower focus through subscription services e-bikers might want. I’d love someone to offer me a safe bicycling route from Atlanta to Birmingham, or Chattanooga, or even Charlotte. It would be great if we had a “green book” of places along those routes that are prepared to serve e-bikes, list and review hotels and restaurants that are bike-friendly, even offer information on nearby attractions that would you plan a family e-bike trip. That’s what AAA gives car drivers, and today’s e-bikers need it more.
But the primary focus of an AAA group for e-bikes, an E-BAA if you will, is to organize and then represent the interests of e-bike safety. Not only for the purpose of lobbying but for the purpose of helping e-bikers.
Where Do We Go, From Here
In my view such a group should stand for enforceable speed limits and safety defined at the manufacturer and retailer level. If you’re selling an e-motorcycle that goes at the speed of a car, its regulation should be different than for an e-bike that goes at the speed of a bike.
I will also admit that, over time, and probably not much time, most e-bikes will be going at the speed of a car. I think in many cases pedals will become vestigial. It’s already happening. The interests of e-motocyclists are different from those of an e-biker, and an E-BAA is where those interests can be defined, negotiated, then placed before government.
In just a half-decade, the e-bike industry has recapitulated the first 20 years of the car century. In the first decades of that century cars competed for space in cities with pedestrians, with horse-drawn carriages, and with bicycles. Paved roadways were rare, because dirt could at least moderate the stink of the horseshit hitting it, and it was safer for a horse’s hooves.
It was only in the 1920s, after World War I, that the car industry and car drivers came to dominate transportation discussions. The concept of jaywalking, of pedestrians being forced off the road, was one result. Only today, 100 years later, are we seeing any competition for the idea that drivers own the road, that they own all of it, and anyone interfering with my driving at the speed limit had better explain themselves or be held accountable.
The Battle
That’s the battle we’re now in, whether we know it or not. E-bikes face a political fight for our share of the road. New Jersey should be a wake-up call. (There will be others.) A concerted effort is being made to stop the E-Transport Revolution or at least slow it down. E-bikers who care about their own safety, and that of their kids, need to organize against it, but in a way that promotes the safety of everyone.
