(Title shamelessly stolen from this comment in the crossposted !micromobility@lemmy.world thread.)
Umm that’s not exactly what they’re saying.
It would update a 27-year-old law to create three new classes of electric bikes based on the type of motor and how fast they can go.
Hell the ACTUAL statute is just defining what a e-bike is. You can see it here: https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2024r1/Measures/Overview/HB4103
It does say class 1 can be operated by anyone, but 2 and 3 can be limited to 16 and older. Yes that’s more restrictive then the past, but really it’s “Defining the e-bikes” because they were poorly defined based on an almost hundred year old law.
That being said it does limit the top speed of an e-bike to 28 miles an hour, I assume above that it’s now a motocycle, and honestly, that might be a good thing, because at that speed they no will come out of no where (hell at 20-30 miles an hour they still will)
This is hardly as bad as the title.
Do they at least require insurance on anything that goes faster than 15 mph or similar?
As far as I read/understand, nope. But if it does limit the assistance to 28 miles an hour, that might be required if the bike goes above that speed. (Note: that’s only the point where the power would stop assisting, not the fastest speed the bike can do.)
Some states don’t even require insurance for motorcycles. So there’s that.
This doesn’t seem so bad. I live in the PNW and have seen people absolutely hauling ass on home-made e-bikes and scooters, easily 40mph and passing traffic in the bike lane.
I’m not against people building their own e-bikes, but at some point it’s not an e-bike, it’s a motorcycle, and they need to be in traffic and ideally have the brakes to match.
As a european, I don’t feel like I’m missing out. If a site has too many ads or popups, I’m inclined to click it away anyways.
No, it’s sites gatekeeping their dodgy tracking cookie policies.
US companies don’t want to comply with data protection rules of other territories, so they block our access, just so they can continue their exploitative tracking
Eh, often updated privacy laws (a good thing) can lead to an aweful lot of work (and confusion) for developers.
A local news company probably doesnt want to deal with privacy laws that do not effect their target audience (despite those privacy laws being a good thing).
The other option is to be a part of a global news conglomerate that ensures everything is in compliance, but that often leads to some sort of adjenda of what can & cant be published.
Or you pay a platform to host your articles. Which is awesome for anyone that doesnt have devs on staff (or retainer). But you are beholden to that platforms desires
It’s because the EU actually governs the storage and use/sale of personal data. This is the mark of a sketchy company that doesn’t want to comply with basic privacy requirements.
If you’re in the EU and you see this, it’s probably a good thing, and it means even the US viewers shouldn’t be visiting the site. Because the EU laws aren’t even that restrictive or difficult to comply with.
AKA Geotargeting
This honestly makes me furious:
A 15-year-old boy… e-bike
the teen was riding with a passenger on the back.
They were riding … on the sidewalk
The teen who died was not wearing a helmet, police said.
They were riding it on a sidewalk, through a crosswalk and someone turned into them. Of course.
One caveat I’ll say is that depending on how fast they were going the laws should be that they should be with traffic, because if I’m driving and I look right I may not notice someone going 40+ mph on a sidewalk. But even then the law should be “Where do ebikes belong” officially
Someone going 40+ MPH is doing what amounts to riding a small motorcycle down a sidewalk. That’s no longer a “bicycle” thing. Imagine the howling and pearl-clutching we would be reading if someone were caught blasting, say, a Honda Grom down a sidewalk like that. Which is already illegal, for obvious reasons.
I own an ebike and I use it on the mixed use trails in my city. Mostly I have it because I often pull my kids on a trailer bike and we have hills in town.
I fear that my riding on these trails will soon be banned because people are out there driving stupidly fast on big knobby-tired motorcycles masquerading as “e-bikes.”
There are tons of Karens pushing strollers on these trails and any election now they’re going to ban my bike.
Sad, but in a lot of places unenforceable. My city can ban whatever they want, but they don’t have the manpower to wipe after they shit. :D
I hope the Karen’s leave you alone.
So where exactly do you get the idea that motorcycles, apparently dirt bikes even, get mistaken for ebikes…?
Just to be clear, “40+ MPH” is wildly inaccurate to the point of being a strawman argument. If the e-bike the kid was on was any sort of normal – and there’s nothing in either the article about the law or the article about the collision linked from it to indicate otherwise – then it was going no more than 20 MPH, tops.
40mph is probably a bit extreme, but “20mph, tops” is also pretty low
E bike laws, terminology, and manufacturers can be kind of a wild patchwork of nonsensical bullshit but a lot of states recognize, with some degree of regulation or restrictions, what have commonly come to be called class 3 e bikes, that can go up to 28mph, and in my shopping around I’ve seen plenty that advertise that speed or even higher.
There’s a lot of imported e bikes that play fast and loose with the regulations and their quality control, and I’m sure there’s a dedicated bunch of people tinkering with their bikes to make them go faster and remove built-in restrictions, so there’s probably a lot of people zooming around at 30+MPH
Let’s not downplay how fast 20mph is on the sidewalk. When you’re expecting people to be moving at 4mph, 5 times that is ridiculously fast.
Additionally, according to your article, they are capped at 28mph. Which is stupid fast on a sidewalk.
One of the many reasons you don’t ride anything on the sidewalk is that you cross driveways and crosswalks too quickly to be seen by drivers. Even a standard bike should be ridden in the road, because 15 mph is fast enough to “come out of nowhere” and be hit by a car. All bikes are road vehicles.
I always ride on the side walk if there is one. I’d rather get hit by someone backing up at 5mph than someone going down the road at 50mph. And I’m always watching driveways for cars backing up.
I’d rather get hit by someone backing up at 5mph than someone going down the road at 50mph.
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It’s not about cars backing out of residential driveways; it’s about cars turning onto side streets and it happens at a lot more than 5 MPH.
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Cyclists being rear-ended (at 50 MPH or otherwise) while riding in the street is much less likely to happen than them being t-boned while riding on the sidewalk. You have to factor the probability into the risk, not just the severity.
You are less safe for this. You think otherwise, but you’re wrong. Sidewalk. Side. Walk.
In NYC, maniacs ride ebikes and mopeds on both the sidewalk and the street as it benefits them. Every time I walk my dog I have to dodge the fuckers going full speed down the sidewalk. And they always glare at the pedestrians like you’re the problem.
In other words, cyclists denied appropriate infrastructure are forced to use infrastructure for other transportation modes inappropriately.
But sure, blame the “maniacs” for having no other choice.
One caveat I’ll say is that depending on how fast they were going the laws should be that they should be with traffic, because if I’m driving and I look right I may not notice someone going 40+ mph on a sidewalk. But even then the law should be “Where do ebikes belong” officially
40mph is twice as fast as the max (motor assist) speed of a normal class 2 e-bike, but yeah, the real problem here is lack of proper bike infrastructure.
It is trivial to kit-build an e-bike that will do this. Hell, I have one myself, constructed out of a Warp DS2 frame.
But the difference is, I also have an M endorsement and I treat my monster bicycle as a motorcycle. The law doesn’t – that’s actually impossible in my state, so my bike falls in between a registrable motor vehicle and a bicycle. It also has turn signals, a car horn, a headlight, and working brake lights. But I also don’t ride it like a dickhead, and that includes paths set aside for non-fire-breathing bicycles, sidewalks, etc.
My city has amazing bike infrastructure: mixed use trails with no cars, bike lanes on all streets, tunnels and bridges over major thoroughfares (really it’s pretty insanely good and yes it’s in the US of fucking A).
People still ride on the sidewalks like morons. They ride the wrong direction in the bike lanes.
Bike infrastructure is essential but also not totally sufficient. You need a significant enough number of people using them that there is a culture for it and tribal sharing of knowledge around it.
I once made a left turn through a gap in the crowd downtown, then out of the ongoing crowd zips out a bike the opposite way out of nowhere. He almost hit the side of my car and of course he got mad at me, even though he was on the sidewalk which is illegal in my city, and he was riding against traffic
I don’t know about Oregon, but I see how people ride their e-bikes here in NYC and it makes me suspect that most e-bike/car collisions are the e-bike’s fault.
I’m from Toronto, same. Also as a pedestrian, those ebikers scare me the way cars scare them. They’re not allowed on the sidewalk in my city, but you’ll be walking with your toddler and an ebike speeds past you on the sidewalk almost hitting you. And they’ll switch between sidewalk and road depending on the traffic, so I have no love for ebikers.
And they’ll switch between sidewalk and road depending on the traffic, so I have no love for ebikers.
This is the problem I have with bikes. They want the pros of pedestrians and vehicles without the cons of either.
Blame the city not the biker. An person riding an bike will always choose a protected bike lane over having to weave through pedestrians on the sidewalk. If you want to get mad at someone get mad at the city for not putting down a bike lane instead of the biker just trying to not get hit. Pedestrians and cyclist need to have solidarity to take back the road from there dominance by cars. Fighting between each other over the scraps they give us only helps them, we need to demand more.
No. The city didn’t zip past me and my kids, it was the biker. My city is filled with unused bike lanes as the bikes zip around the sidewalk
