25 kph is a speed limit for kids bikes and Sunday riders (I would support it for under-16s, but no more than that) – a lycra-gang style UCI bike is most certainly NOT a good model for what a practical human-powered vehicle can do on legs alone (much less a sit-up-bike). If you must throw speed limits around in conversation as if they were reasonable, please make sure it’s restricted to vehicles for which they are, in fact, remotely reasonable.

The proposed law lumps sit-ups and velos in the same category, which is much like saying that skateboards and shopping trolleys should face the same restrictions in shopping centres because they each have four wheels.

Overall, a 25kph speed limit does nothing for electric bikes except to make them LESS useful and practical than their unpowered cousins.

That way, there would be less serious injuries than now, when they are all crashing into each other and pedestrians at +40kph?

Also, there would be no faux-favouritism shown to one side or the other.

Until then, I will continue riding and thoroughly enjoying my legally stamped, WOT controlled, teensy-weens,y 36V 200W Bafang front hub MTB add-on kit at 30-35kph on VIC country back roads. I promise to keep smiling as I pedal-cruise into headwinds & uphill past the many “regular” or “normal” road cyclists on same roads.

60 Year Old Fart

on the bringing laws in line with Europe debate – 250W is still very low and would not change much in the way of ebike availability here. “Pedal Assist” is Eurotrash in the bureaucratic sense. It does not enhance safety, it reduces reliability and if you need to walk your ebike up a steep hill or driveway you have to push its weight up instead of it ‘walking itself’ up. Let’s only take the good aspects of the legislation please!

About the ‘laziness’ debate I side with the ebikes. Someone using an ebike every day is more environmentally friendly and healthier than someone using a push bike every couple of weeks. That comparison is realistic in Australia where hardly anyone rides a bicycle. Maybe it’s just the Australians who are lazy but an e-bike that needs a 3kg, AUD300 battery replaced every 25,000km hardly rates amongst today’s environmental woes.

Maurice

http://bicycledesign.net/2010/04/city-cycle-concept-bike/

http://vimeo.com/10421449

Electric hugs,

Guim

Maybe it’s better to have speed limits posted on the cyclepaths, and not put limits on the bikes. After all this is how highways work.

So if someone wants to limit us to 200W and 25 km/hr we should insist that cars have to be limited to 10Hp and 50 km/hr.

I like e-bikes. And I agree that 200W power limit is too low. And maybe a 32km/h limit, in line with some of the US standards would fit the Australian road system better.

However, we know that limits must be placed on one or a combination of the power, maximum assisted speed or weight of e-bikes if manufacturers aren’t going to stick pedals on e-motorbikes and sell them as e-bikes. I think limiting maximum assisted speed makes the most sense because it is the most directly safety related of the three limits. Crashing a 500W+ e-bike into a solid object at 50km/h+ is going to hurt more than doing the same thing a 25-30km/h. Sure, racing cyclists can exceed 50km/h, but they’re a tiny minority, athletes, and almost by definition, they get a lot of bike handling practice and tend to avoid the busy areas.

Arguing that you are responsible and can handle a 500W-1000W e-bike is a bit like the motor enthusiast who argues that they are responsible and therefore the government has no business telling them they can’t buy a street legal car with a top speed of 250km/h. The truth is that humans tend to abuse motor power. Legalise e-bikes with power output above 250W and no speed limiter and eventually some ideot who lost his car licence for speeding will hit a pedestrian travelling at 50km/h+ and e-bikes will become public enemy number 1.

Limit e-bike speed, and you can build all the practical hill climbing cargo bikes you want, and they can have power assist upto speeds that match there status as vehicles that require no licence or registration.

And all the e-bikes require fairly sophisticated control systems, so I don’t the the “no to mandatory cycle computers” argument holds up.

Speed Limit for Assistance
I can see the logic from a pure physics perspective: wind resistance increases exponentially with speed and for a bicycle this starts to become significant above 12km/h (there is a reason why the average Copenhagener cycles at 15km/h!).

<a href="http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/cA/page_259.shtml&quot; Without Hot Air

The laws of diminishing returns come into play above this. Proportionally more energy is required to increase the speed by a given amount so it is really a waste of electricity (and muscle power, unless you’re training) to be going above these speeds.

A speed of 25km/h is a good compromise.

Motor Limit
As with speed, the larger the motor the faster the rate at which energy is consumed, therefore for the same range you’ll need more batteries. 250W is reasonable and it takes the edge off hills, no doubt, but I think 1000W is excessive. 500W may be perfect but some study needs to be done. Australia’s current 200W limit is too low.

A chap cycled past me the other day with an illegal 1000W motor on his bicycle (worn rim brake pads, worn tyres, etc) and he accelerated up-hill to over 60km/h in a few seconds. I don’t want this sort of behaviour (if legal) to kill the idea of e-bikes before they take off.

However, with a speed limit on assistance the motor size becomes less of an issue and bigger limits may be allowed.

Throttles
I can understand how it would be of use however I can see how it could get people into trouble. Linking motor output to pedalling is intuitive. When you pedal on a bicycle, power goes to the wheels. When you stop, it stops.

Perhaps a throttle should be allowed but the default assistance uses a torque sensor and requires pedalling with a throttle override at times when required?

Any thoughts?

Regards,

Paul Martin
Brisbane

Making the throttle illegal, because some lycra snob (or some cycle-chic snob) thinks its cheating, would be a great shame.

I pedal 90% of the time on my e-bike. But it is pretty nice to have a rest and still keep moving.

So repeating what I’ve said before – get someone on a bike, let them have any near-quiet electric motor they want, or none, as they themselves see fit. Don’t make silly laws removing the throttle and require them to pedal 100% of the time if they don’t want to. Don’t set some arbitrary maximum speed. Don’t tell they can’t ride on bikeways (like in Boulder, Colorado). Let them have as much fun as they want. Let them start young, or come to it as oldies, and anything in between. Then let them have as much safe infrastructure as they need in towns and in the country. Repeat for 100s of millions of someones and the world is a better place.

@Sue, you should test ride a pedal-electric. You might enjoy it.

The EU rules are too restrictive. You may all have seen that video on Copenhagenize with the MEPs in the green jackets. That’s what underpowered e-bikes do. They make you look silly. As I wrote in this blog post at http://wellingtoncycleways.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/another-wellingtonian-gets-an-electric-bike/ the guy at Standards NZ who was asked to look at power assisted bike standards tried one out, fell in love with it, and just rode his e-bike from Wellington to Auckland. His bike goes 40km/hr. I bet he doesn’t recommend the whimpy EU rules for NZ.

Also see the story further up i reported to David about the lady in SF who rides a pink bike, regular, no motor with her saddle bags full of pink bricks. I’m not sure what she’s proving, but the guy who reported all this story, came to the conclusion he’d been too obsessed by weight.