Carheads and their advocates are clever.
Having failed to slow the rise of E-Transport in the market, they’re going after it in the legislatures. The movement to demand e-bikes be registered as cars, which started in New Jersey, is spreading rapidly.
The movement comes from a good place but it’s wrong-headed. Even people in New Jersey know it, because no registration bureaucracy has yet appeared there. It’s clear there’s cause for concern, but the concern is misplaced.
As I’ve said here often, e-bikes are just part of a wider E-Transport movement. Upright scooters run on throttles. Mobility scooters, or rolling wheelchairs, run on throttles. Throttles are not the issue.
Speed is the issue.
Pressed by rising e-bike demand, many places have built shared use paths. They’re designed around a bike’s speed, generally 15 mph. (Yes, you can go faster downhill.) They’re not bike paths, they’re sidewalks, but they’re the closest thing America has to the Dutch fietspad so we use them.
As these paths become crowded, incidents happen for the same reason they do on roads, relative speed. A bike rolling at even 15 miles per hour is 5-10 times faster than the pedestrians around it. When the scenery becomes a shopping mall, as it does on the Atlanta Beltline, pedestrians stop, think, and perhaps turn around. Add children, dogs, buskers, or salesmen, and it’s obvious there’s trouble in Riverless City.
Active Traffic Management For E-Transport
The answer is an adjustable speed limit, as on Atlanta’s freeways. When the path is jammed, you reduce it. When it’s empty you raise it. On I-285, the perimeter highway that surrounds the inner city, I’ve seen posted speeds as low as 25 and as high as 65.
Cops aren’t enforcing this limit. It’s a guide to how fast you can expect to travel. Signs near where freeways meet warn drivers of how fast the freeway is going, in either direction. Drivers accommodate themselves to reality, and accidents are reduced. Cops aren’t running around handing out tickets. They’re focusing on the “super speeders” who can go 100 mph or more, weaving in-and-out, creating danger for anyone slower.
A system like this can work on bike paths. You take pictures of the egregious violators, post them, and have them identified. Cops will know who to target, and my guess is they’ll be e-moto riders.
Instead of creating a bureaucracy aimed specifically at e-bikes, advocates should focus on technology that can work against all dangerous speeders.
Speed cameras are Kryptonite to car heads. When they’re brought in now, even in school zones, drivers will scream bloody murder. They will rail against “government cash grabs” even in 25 mph zones where school children have recently been run over.
Both Sides Now
That’s the thing about speed limits. To be practical they must be enforceable. In residential neighborhoods today, they’re enforced by speed humps or “speed tables” every few hundred feet that also make e-bike riding very uncomfortable.
If e-bikes can accept the discomfort of speed tables, cars should accept enforceable speed limits.
Car heads are trying to pretend that registration will change behavior. It won’t. Enforcement will change behavior. Accept technology enforcement on E-Transport and you can force it on the carheads.
Or they can stand down.
The drive to register E-Transport can be an opportunity if we take it.
