Mastodawn

A rant about electric bicycles:

* For e-bikes to be viable car replacements they need cargo-carrying and hill-climb capacity. The practicality test for an e-bike is to carry four bags of grocieries, or a child.

* The 250W and 20km/h limit for unlicensed bicycles is *far* too low. Human cyclists comfortably exceed this in both power and speed leading to e-bikes holding up traffic. When. I ride the bikeways, human-powered traffic cruises at around 35 km/h.

* The "you must pedal or the motor stops" requirement is some Calvinist bullshit.

* The perl-clutching "but the children" scare in the news about "unlicensed motorbikes" HAS to be some kind of car-industry astroturfing. From what I can see on the bikeways, commuter e-bikes and scooters are HOT items and anyone with a head can see a dent in vehicle sales coming. Users LOVE this emerging mobility sector.

* I work in an industrial area with zero public transport service. I observe large numbers of workers riding scooters in the direction of the nearest train station.

* If governments *really* want to stick to the 250w 25km/h bullshit for "bicycles" then we need URGENT legislation to create a vehicle class for say 1000W 45km/h vehicles. The Australia post electric delivery tricycles are a worked example of the practicality of this class; I don't hear *anyone* having a meltdown about "dangerous monster tricycles on our footpaths".

#MicroMobility #ebikes #solarpunk

ETA: absurd panic-fueled legislation from the fossil-fuel captured Literal Nazi Party: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-24/queensland-ebike-escooter-ban-children-licence-reforms/106487910

E-bike and e-scooter riders to require a licence in Qld under proposed laws

A raft of new rules around the use of e-mobility devices will be ushered in after the Queensland government accepted the recommendations from a parliamentary inquiry.

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Jesse 6h ago

@Unixbigot I think the 25km/h assist limit is important. The issue is that what ever the maximum speed available is then that is what the average speed will be. On a push bike it's possible to get up to 30km/h on the flat but you'll get very sweaty and waste a lot of physical effort if you need to slow down all the time
This means that average cycling speed is more like 15-20km/h which is a good speed for safe interactions with pedestrians and other bicycle riders of all ages without the need for traffic management.

E-bicycles are great, but having a lot of people riding 45km/h e-motorbikes on shared paths and places where children ride to school isn't great.

I want a bicycle city not a motorbike city.

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Jesse

@Unixbigot big bicycles cities are having huge problems with overpowered e-bikes. Amsterdam is crushing thousands of illegaly e-bikes every month. It's not just the car lobby complaining, it's people that don't want increased danger in hard won bicycle infrastructure scaring people away from riding again.

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David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)5h ago

@jessta @Unixbigot

Same with small cities. In Cambridge, a lot of food delivery companies provide subsidised e-bikes to riders. These things are heavy and big and are easy to mod to remove the speed restrictions. They’re also incentivising people to take the quickest possible path, which often involves going on the pavement. It’s illegal to ride a bike of any kind on the pavement here, but no one really minds if it’s a normal-weight bicycle cycled at a normal city-cycling speed by someone paying attention to their surroundings. When it’s a high-speed thing that looks like a motorbike and weights as much as a small motorbike, it’s not fun to have to share the pavement with them.