People of Mastodon!

I'm researching the growth of ebikes ...

... in cities around the US

I've talked to many people who love them!

But also want to include the perspective of folks who have concerns ...

... i.e. about the speed and weight of ebikes in accidents with pedestrians or other cyclists, and the like

If anyone has thoughts they wanna share, ping me! I'm all ears: [email protected]

Pass this along if you know anyone else with perspective they want to share

#fedibikes

@clive the idea I come back to is that roads, lights, stop signs, sidewalks, crosswalks, etc., are all a system. We’re asking everyone to follow the rules for everyone’s benefit. And sometimes those rules can bend for pedestrians and cyclists at low weights and speeds, but it’s still dangerous! A car swerving out of its way to avoid you going the wrong way on the road is dangerous, even if you’re not the danger. And the more weight and speed you have, the more dangerous you become.

@tim

yep yep

And all these systems were assembled and tweaked and refined for decades with the chief goal of automobile throughput ...

(... to the point where many models of intersections and traffic didn't even include pedestrians lol ...)

... so rejiggering them for things other than automobiles is hard; it goes against the grain of what the systems were created to do

@clive @tim

Chuck Marohn of #StrongTowns introduced to me the idea of “#ForgivingDesign” in the sense that our modern built environment is designed as a system to forgive errors of users operating cars (e.g. freeway exit embankments to backup cameras to anti-lock brakes).

This same concept could - and should - be applied to e-bikes.

@paninid @tim

Aha, that's such an interesting coinage -- not heard of it before! Thank you

@clive @tim

If you Google “forgiving design”, the first 2-3 pages were about golf clubs and tennis rackets (i.e. to forgive the error of the user), but the origin is in traffic engineering.