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Most of the rules were already proposed and consulted on under the last government. Major difference is that all cyclists would have been able to use the footpath, not just children.
Unfortunately, it was yet another piece of legislation that was ready to be passed which Labour just sat on.
And a shame they slapped an age bracket on footpath pedalling
People get killed being hit by bikes occasionally so you can understand some hesitation, but I'm sure there could have been a reasonable compromise (e.g. a footpath speed limit).
Assuming there are no bike lanes, it should just be maths.
If the number of fatalities in car-bike collisions is more than the number of pedestrian-bike collisions then bike belong on the footpath.
This could be weighted by severity of injury instead of fatalities.
If there are bike lanes and scooters, then the matrix is just slightly larger but the maths still holds.
The point is to minimize, find the optimal solution rather than try to find the unrealistic perfect solution.
Yeah that makes sense, cycle lanes arent exactly at capacity so more use the better.
I'm kinda shocked that a 7.5 ton car can be driven by anyone, but I guess a big part of that is the stupid trucks people keep buying
Well, I think I need more info, as apparently currently a class 1 licence can drive up to 6 tonne, as per the table here.
I was shocked by that number too, but going from 6 to 7.5 tonne seems reasonable. Also as per the table, there seems to already be a class exemption for electric trucks where the diesel equivalent is under 6000kg (in the same table linked above).
I am curious why we don't have 6 tonne utes, I was under the impression there was a 3 tonne limit but maybe that's unladen or something?
You can easily get to 6 tonnes with a loaded vehicle towing a trailer. 3500kg for a loaded up ute, plus 3500kg trailer, and you're in class 2 territory.
There's also a few camper van type vehicles that would be over 6 tonne.
Ah right you've got it. Light vehicles are allowed to be up to 3500kg including load.
But a light trailer can also be up to 3500kg,
So you could drive a light vehicle and light trailer and get 7500kg, but would need a class 2 license. But the light vehicle + light trailer combo could be driven up to 6000kg on a class 1 license.
re the question in your title:
the only proper standard for judging whether any particular class of vehicles should be sharing special-lanes, is traffic-flow.
IF the flowspeed of bicycles & e-scooters is similar-enough, THEN yes.
IF the flowspeed of e-scooters is limited to be frustratingly-slow for bicyclists, THEN you're just manufacturing more bicycle-motorvehicle collisions, by forcing bicyclists out from the lanes where they had been safe.
( I'm from Canada, not NZ, but have seen enough idiocy in legislation, including that bicycling "expert" who pushed that bike-lanes be removed, because they increased the total-number-of-collisions ..
.. WHILE HE IGNORED THAT HAVING 5 COLLISIONS ON A 100,000-CAR/WEEK BIKE-LANE ROAD WAS BEING COMPARED WITH A 3-COLLISIONS/WEEK ON A 500-car/week side-road, the idiot..
CORRECT statistics-understanding MUST be required for anybody to have any input into legislation!
it is per motor-vehicle/bicycle potential-interaction that the understanding needs to be centered on.
Having 2x the collisions, on a road with 100x the cars, is a per-potential-interation drop of 50x, not a total-increase of 2x, as that activist was pushing..
unfortunately, he's a published-author, so he gets carte-blanche sway in many gov'ts )
Anyways, please earn good results, & may the benefits of properly-evolved legislation enable your communities as much as possible.
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This was actually a concern I had when I read this. e-scooters potentially travel much slower than bikes.
Let's pretend we live in a good society where we have bike lanes everywhere. So we have three speeds of traffic. Pedestrian speed, bike speed, car speed.
Now we're trying to add a new one, e-scooter speed. Do you put them on the footpath where they are too fast and could flatten or kill someone, on the road where they are too slow and might get killed by a car, or in the bike lane where they might be traveling 10-20kph slower than the bikes.
It feels like the bike lane is the right place. Yes, bikes will occasionally come up against slower e-scooter traffic, but that happens to cars behind trucks and pedestrians behind 3-across groups with no respect for other pedestrians.
The alternative seems to be to create scooter lanes. But perhaps a better idea is that when the volume becomes a problem in certain areas, we create two-lane bike lanes to allow faster traffic to pass slower traffic.
