- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
As road deaths increase and cycle lanes overflow with e-bikes, the Netherlands is considering a cycling speed limit of 12mph (20km/h).
The government has started a two-week trial in Houten, near Utrecht, to gauge whether freedom-loving Dutch cyclists are willing to slow down – and whether they have any idea how fast they are going in the first place.
That is already how it is set up in Europe.
Regular e-bikes have to have their electric assist limited to 25 km/h, but you can still pedal faster than that on your own power.
If an e-bike is not limited to 25 km/h, then it falls in the category of speed pedelec, which requires a licence plate and insurance.
However, it is trivially easy to illegally remove the limit on some models of e-bike, and many people (mostly teenagers) do remove that limit. They then recklessly cycle at excessive speeds down the bike path, without regard of other cyclists who may be cycling there.
The issue in the Netherlands (idk about other place in Europe?) is lack of enforcement of the existing rules against tuning e-bikes.
Edit: Also worth noting that this is by no means a new problem.
We used to have the exact same problem with people tuning their mopeds, back when blue-plated mopeds (which are also supposed to be limited to 25 km/h) did not yet have a helmet requirement. After helmets were made obligatory a few years ago, most of these people moved to e-bikes instead.
And again I see this claim and have to ask: Do they? My counter claim is that the average person, even if we limit it to average teenage e-bike cyclist, is surprisingly afraid to mess with electronics.
While a lot of bikes are seized by the police for driving faster than allowed, they rarely give any indication if the bikes were modified in any way - partially because there is no legal definition for tuning. In my opinion, it is far more likely that the bikes were already illegally fast when the people bough them.
The most I have seen is a police estimation that 5-10% of e-bikes on the roads are illegally tuned.
These e-bikes often don’t require you to mess with electronics to “tune” them. It is usually as simple as flicking a switch in an app. Manufacturers know what they are doing and make the process as convenient as possible.
That is 1 in 20 e-bikes on the road. Given the total amount of e-bikes on the road, those are insane numbers.
My comment didn’t say “most people”, it says “many people”.
Even the low end of that estimate is staggeringly high. 1 in 20 is an absolute distaster and total failure of oversight. 1 in 2000 is closer to acceptable.
I saw a couple just the other day. It’s not necessarily that they modify the bikes, it’s more often the case that they order a Chinese bike or a scooter from some dropshipper. Un-capped bikes aren’t hard to procure.
That is exactly my point.