Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Feel like a speed limit for the motor rather than the human would make sense. I would not mind a legal obligation for the motor to disengage (not brake) at certain speeds to classify as an e-bike.
Modding the e-bike should be fine (I'm afraid of anti-right of repair shenanigans) but if you remove the limit yourself suddenly you have a new category of vehicle.
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.
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.