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[Richard230]

FortNine thinks so. Here is his commentary comparing an electric bicycle with an ICE motorcycle as he races a 125cc Suzuki across Vancouver, Canada: 

BTW, I bought an Aniioki ebike (but not the same model shown in the video) a couple of years ago and use it for all of my trips around town. But the one that I bought is a step-though model, with just one motor and doesn't have the same design issues as the one in FortNine's video. It has been very reliable, with a 3Kwh battery pack, a 1000 watt hub motor, an 8 amp charger, a claimed range of over 100 miles and a top speed of 29 mph. I bought the bike for around $1500, no sales tax and no shipping charge, dumped on my driveway in a box. After an hour assembling the parts, it was ready to go. And, I didn't have to register the bike with the DMV or buy insurance. That makes it a really cheap way to get around as long as you only need to travel in an urban area.

[Starpower]

There is no doubt that sales of Ebikes impact the sale of non-ebikes, cars and ice bikes. Here in the U.S. and far more so in much of Europe.

Love mine!

[Specter]

I can't see where their impact is going to be huge.  for someone just looking for some how to get around, very locally and as cheap as possible, with as little energy expended as possible, welcome to e bikes.  if you need to deliver food or groceries and stuff, then you might need to step into a real motorcycle with more room, less leg pumping, or a car.  They have their very niche clientele but I can't see them being a major disruptor.

Of course there is always the can't afford anything else crowd who they will be popular with too.  Throw in the fact you don't need an id, a license, deal with dmv garbage, or insurance and yah it's a nice game changer.

E bikes DO use the roadways though, and it won't be long before some politician decides he want's a taste of their money too.  Just wait for them to start making you register them, or pay an annual fee, it's not far away, especially if more people start using them and they keep popping up in the news, getting into trouble followed by the usual hand wringing, pearl clutching, and,  somebody must do something about this problem !!!

they'll probably tie it into their money grab when they make electric cars pay an annual 'road tax' since they are no longer getting it through gasoline.

aaron

[flynnstig82r]

The kinds of things Specter mentions are already happening. You can’t ride an Onyx RCR anymore in a lot of California cities without getting pulled over, for instance. You might still get away with something equivalent that looks more “bicycle.”

I see high-powered e-bikes as a new take on old 49cc mopeds. No insurance and lax registration requirements, but you wouldn’t want to ride one on a main road unless it’s in the bike lane. Here in Sacramento, I can get around the slower streets of our neighborhood and downtown on a bicycle, moped / e-bike, or 125cc scooter / motorcycle equally well, but as soon as I go past any freeway underpasses in any direction, the 125cc is the only one that can still hang with traffic and not make me feel like I’m going to get run over.

Just like mopeds, e-bikes can technically be built or modded to hit 45+ MPH, but they’re still not safe to ride on a 45 MPH road. E-bikes aren’t safe because drivers will assume you’re going to be a slow obstacle and drive insanely aggressively to get around you*, mopeds aren’t safe because they may have the top speed but they don’t have the acceleration and also invite aggressive driving, and both aren’t safe because they don’t have the suspension, brakes, and tires to handle potholes and other conditions at those speeds, especially non-DOT e-bikes.

I do like e-bikes and see the potential, but when I got our 150cc Chinese Lambretta clone, it hit me that all the things e-bikes can do, scooters have been doing cheaper and better for decades. Acceleration, top speed, safety, storage and utility, all vastly better than an e-bike. Usually more sustainable because small-displacement scooters get 90+ MPG and don’t get ridden a huge number of miles, which makes their lifetime carbon footprint really small, probably smaller than something whose battery had to get manufactured using materials from all over the world and shipped ten thousand miles. Assuming I change the oil and adjust the valves, my Znen scooter will run just as well in 10 years as it does now, can the same be said for an AliExpress e-bike? The only real advantage in California is you don’t have to insure an e-bike and pay the usurious annual registration fee, but I don’t expect that to last forever, either. I’m not against e-bikes and have built and owned several, I just don’t think any e-bike is a serious replacement for a scooter or motorcycle over 50cc.

*I once had a guy pass me doing over double the speed limit around a blind corner in the incoming traffic lane, he’s lucky he’s still alive. Actually that was 10+ years ago so there’s a good chance he’s not, driving like that.

[Specter]

Are you even allowed to bring a 125 cc onto the highway?  in Florida i think 250 is the minimum CC you have to have to get on the interstates.  That's for a good reason too, the speed limits are 70 mph, often times the cops are not even going to start waking up until you are doing 85 plus.

scooters do serve a purpose, but people on both sides of the 'obstacle' need to mind their ego's.
The scooter trash who won't move over to let the cars go by is a big problem, pissing people off is not how to stay alive.
The jackass in his cadillac, who can't wait 30 seconds to get in a safe area to pass the guy on the scooter, jesus asshole, you can't wait until the road opens up in a block to go flying by at 70 mph without running the scooter off the road, WHO by the way has just as much right to be on the road as you do?

Then you got both sides who are too busy looking at their phones, and running into each other that way.   

ahh, but, you can't take a scooter on a bike trail, you'll get ticketed in a heartbeat... and that bike trail, lets you beat that 35 minutes of morning bullshit traffic jam, and 45 minute bs jam coming back home.  your e bike with it's pedals, you get on the bike trail and 5 minutes later are on the other side of the mess.

no neither the bike or scooter is really built to handle potholes.  At least on a bike you can go flying off and hopefully find a patch of grass to go rolling to a stop in.  in a golf cart or other enclosed 'vehicle' you are kind of trapped and smashing that windshield at 20 mph is going to be absolutely devastating. THAT is why the speeds are limited on those things, because past that speed you now need seat belts, and all the signaling and stuff a real vehicle needs.

now lets take a 15 yo, put them on a 'bicycle' that can do 30 plus mph and let him go flying around on the sidewalks around the shopping mall, scaring the little old ladies with his acrobatics.  but is he really any worse than the gixxer tard doing his wheelies and burnouts in the middle of the intersection waiting for the light to change?

As an interesting twist.  your little bike runs of gas.  i am surprised nobody has made a propane one yet.  it runs off those little blue or green bottles you can buy at the hardware store.  those are also very easily refillable from the bigger 15 lb bbq tanks too.  it might be arguably safer than gasoline engines, and might be easier to thwart certain regs too as it's not a 'gasoline' engine.

aaron

[Richard230]

In California the minimum ICE engine size that is legal to access a freeway is 150cc. When I first started riding, motorcycles were not regulated for freeway travel. Until the state wised up to the problem, I was able to ride my 4.9 hp Vespa on the freeway at its top speed of 50 mph. Some other kids my age would ride the 50cc Tohatsu Runpet sport (which was distributed by San Francisco based Hap Jones at the time) on the freeway at its amazing top speed of 60 mph. What they didn't realize is that it was really built for racing and at 60 mph the engine was spinning at 11K rpm. That was good for about 10 miles at freeway speeds before the engine locked up. 

The first attempt at regulating motorcycles on the freeways in 1964 required a bike to have 15 hp. But then some of the Italian manufactures lied about their bike's power and anyway cops had no idea how much power a motorcycle might have. So a few years later, the rule was revised to have an engine size of 150cc, which was something that the cops could easily check, typically by just looking at the model description on the fuel tank.

Getting back to ebikes, attached is a photo of my Aniioki ebike that I use when I go shopping. I have it fitted with a bicycle handlebar basket, fabric motorcycle saddlebags and a fabric motorcycle seat pack. With this setup I can carry a week's worth of groceries when I visit the Grocery Outlet store located 3.5 miles away at the Pacific coast.

[Specter]

That is a really cool setup.  love the bags.
im looking to do something like  a experia's bag setup but on a ribelle instead.  that'd work out very well imo and having the harder bags it would last longer at the faster speeds the ribelle can hit.

on a good day i can shove 100 lbs of coffee on my experia to deliver, or pickup the groceries in one or two trips.  really big packages like the super asshole size toilet paper packs ill bungee on the seat behind me.

i was contemplating maybe tying off a 130 bag of coffee on the back seat for transport but then thought, man if this thing shifts mid turn on or the highway or something that could be a really bad problem, so i better not 

Aaron

[princec]

Here in the UK, mopeds are rapidly vanishing from the roads as kids take to e-bikes, usually illegal ones that go too fast, for all the reasons F9 gives.

Cas

[Specter]

well, at least here in America  mopeds never were seen as being cool to ride.  E bikes now, yes they are.
 mopeds were basically scooters with pedals, and the gearing ratio, you'd not want to peddle one, youd turn 100 times to go 10 feet.
the moped, correct me if i am wrong, also needed a license etc etc.  e bikes.  not so much but that might be changing soon in florida.  several injuries got a bunch up in arms on them.

aaron

[princec]

Peds here haven't had pedals for over 40 years... and only 16yr olds had to ride them, from 17 you can have a 125 or a car.

Cas

[Richard230]

In my city ebikes are ridden by a lot of people of all ages. Young people ride them for fun and to carry their friends around on the luggage rack, but oddly not to school. (Their parents drive them to school on their way to work.) People in their 30's ride them to get from here to there, like down to the beach. Many seniors ride them to go shopping and down to the Senior Center for lunch or socializing. The cops don't even bat an eye at all of the ebike riding around here, even when they are riding on the wrong side of the street and blow stop signs, like many pedal-operated bicycle riders do. 

I believe I have heard that there are an estimated over one million ebikes in California and there was never a system to find out who bought one. So that horse has left the barn years ago. Trying to make ebike riders register their bikes and charge them a yearly fee for owning one is a non-starter in this state. Still, many local legislators seem to hate ebikes as they feel they are dangerous to ride as they go too fast and young people have too much fun riding them. So what some counties are trying to do is to put an age limit on riding ebikes, regulated by restricting parking at schools and giving kids a $25 fine for riding one if they are too young and do something that catches a cop's attention, like not wearing a helmet or breaking the speed limit. The state passed a law that went into effect this year, prohibiting children under 16 from riding an ebike with a throttle (pedal assist only) or selling an ebike in a retail store that has a motor exceeding 750 watts and can exceed 29 mph.  Presumably, if you buy an ebike like the one shown in FortNine's video, you would need to register it with the DMV as a vehicle and buy liability insurance for it. Whether anyone has actually every done that is unknown and I assume that the DMV would register it as a moped - which is something that they do know how to do. 

But I have no idea what the DMV would do if someone tried to register a mono-wheel surfboard, electric skateboard, traditional electric mono-wheel, electric skates and various other weird electric-powered devices I sometimes see around here, some of them going pretty fast, too. I suspect that the state's local legislatures would love to regulate all of these things, but don't have a clue how to do it.  And you can be sure that the DMV has bigger fish to fry than trying to enforce ebike rules. 

[Specter]

That's where you are mistaken.  if you want to be fool enough to try to register something like that, the dmv will absolutely LOVE to take your money, then tell you, sorry it's illegal, needs this fixed that fixed bla bla, come back when it's fixed, and OOH tha's 10 dollars please.... the please may or may not be said.

The rest of what you said, that's generally the way it works,  nobody really cares, police included UNTIL some jackass makes them have to care.
like... speed limit is 70, the cop and everyone else is doing 80, and you want to pass him doing 85... well if you are going to make this man have to do his job, you are not going to like his reaction to that.  He has no choice, because if he does nothing then every crybaby breaks out their phones and straight to fakebook, waah, he sped past a cop and the cop did nothing waahhh.

You may think that horse left the barn, but as soon as some politician smells a new source of money to spend, they'll be all over it.  It's actually real easy to enforce... Effective Jan 01,  all bikes need  XX sticker,  first offense 25 dollars, second 100 dollars, and then send the cops to sit at the gathering spot with ticketbook in hand.   Let one of the local news stations know the  donut patrol will be out there on such and such day, now it's the lead story for the day... now you can't say you didn't know, now they got their pound of flesh.

Aaron

[flynnstig82r]

Are you even allowed to bring a 125 cc onto the highway?  in Florida i think 250 is the minimum CC you have to have to get on the interstates.  That's for a good reason too, the speed limits are 70 mph, often times the cops are not even going to start waking up until you are doing 85 plus.

I was talking about city streets once you get past the freeway underpasses, where the lanes are wider and people go a lot faster. The 125+ cc is the only one that can still keep up. I have done some dumb things in my life, but I wouldn’t ride a 125 on the freeway .

scooters do serve a purpose, but people on both sides of the 'obstacle' need to mind their ego's.
The scooter trash who won't move over to let the cars go by is a big problem, pissing people off is not how to stay alive.
The jackass in his cadillac, who can't wait 30 seconds to get in a safe area to pass the guy on the scooter, jesus asshole, you can't wait until the road opens up in a block to go flying by at 70 mph without running the scooter off the road, WHO by the way has just as much right to be on the road as you do?

Then you got both sides who are too busy looking at their phones, and running into each other that way.   

In this case, I was actually on a pedal bike where there’s a big downhill section. It’s one of those funny, narrow and low-visibility 2-way roads through Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The speed limit is 25 MPH, but anything faster than 15-20 MPH isn’t really safe in a car because someone can come around the corner pointed right at you with no warning. On a bicycle, though, the slope means you can come down at 30 MPH, and it’s very safe because you can ride all the way on the right side of the road so there’s no oncoming vehicle risk, no intersections, or any other risk factors. This joker decided he wasn’t going to get left behind by a guy on a bike, so he took the blind 20 MPH turn at 50+ fully in the oncoming traffic lane. It’s not a busy road, but it’s not lonely, either, and cars come through all the time. I’d say he had about a 1 in 5 chance of a head-on collision that he wouldn’t have been able to avoid or survive.

ahh, but, you can't take a scooter on a bike trail, you'll get ticketed in a heartbeat... and that bike trail, lets you beat that 35 minutes of morning bullshit traffic jam, and 45 minute bs jam coming back home.  your e bike with it's pedals, you get on the bike trail and 5 minutes later are on the other side of the mess.

no neither the bike or scooter is really built to handle potholes.  At least on a bike you can go flying off and hopefully find a patch of grass to go rolling to a stop in.  in a golf cart or other enclosed 'vehicle' you are kind of trapped and smashing that windshield at 20 mph is going to be absolutely devastating. THAT is why the speeds are limited on those things, because past that speed you now need seat belts, and all the signaling and stuff a real vehicle needs.

now lets take a 15 yo, put them on a 'bicycle' that can do 30 plus mph and let him go flying around on the sidewalks around the shopping mall, scaring the little old ladies with his acrobatics.  but is he really any worse than the gixxer tard doing his wheelies and burnouts in the middle of the intersection waiting for the light to change?

As an interesting twist.  your little bike runs of gas.  i am surprised nobody has made a propane one yet.  it runs off those little blue or green bottles you can buy at the hardware store.  those are also very easily refillable from the bigger 15 lb bbq tanks too.  it might be arguably safer than gasoline engines, and might be easier to thwart certain regs too as it's not a 'gasoline' engine.

aaron

I don’t have occasion to use the separated bike trails on the levy very often, but I would definitely go e-bike over moped if I used them regularly. I wouldn’t ride a moped on those trails, that would just be a dick move. As far as regular painted bike lanes, it’s not really clear here in Sac whether you’re allowed to use them on an M2 moped, but everyone does so I wouldn’t hesitate. I wouldn’t need to use the bike lane on the slow neighborhood roads, and the bike lanes on the fast roads are empty anyway, so no one is going to care. I would definitely try a propane one if such a thing existed. I have to get the 50:1 2-stroke fuel at the hardware store, anyway.

The “sidewalk menace” debate is complicated. I have definitely seen people buzzing past pedestrians and around corners on e-bikes and e-scooters, so I get why people are upset. However, how many people are actually seriously injured or killed every year vs run over by cars or trucks? So we’re having a lot of debate about the safety of vehicles that don’t kill people and no debate whatsoever about the vehicles that do.

[Grauteufel]

Oddly the rise of e-bikes is why I stopped riding mine. I have a 1500w (very illegal with our 250w limit) mid drive cargo bike and happily rode it without hassle for years. Sure it was capable of doing 70km/h but I know stopping at that speed with bicycle brakes would be a lost cause and only used the power for hill climbing. Since the explosion in popularity and subsequent cost reduction in e-bikes allows for every dickhead with no self control to buy one, police have been educated on what is legal and subsequently cracking down on bikes. At least with motorcycles here the need for licensing filters out the least capable riders.

[Fran K]

i was at an agricultural equipment place in kind of east central Ohio.  Amish business in Amish country.  The amount of e bikes some of them huge in my opinion was shocking.  There must have been 10 or so that the folks that work there rode to work.  I can assure you they were not replacing ice motorcycles.  Regular 120 volt outlets virtually all over the place as there was some big event across the street last year.  Chances are most folks on here are not aware of this phenomenon.  Still some horse and buggies on the road.