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Transportation

Amsterdam Calls For Crackdown On Menace of Souped-Up E-Bikes (theguardian.com) 141

Posted by BeauHD from the safety-first dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The Netherlands, once famed for being cycle-friendly, is facing a surprising threat: souped-up electric bikes speeding at up to 42kph (26mph). [...] Fietsersbond [is] a cyclists' union that is campaigning to crack down on speedy e-bikes and "fat bikes" -- those with extremely wide tyres. These should only use cycle paths with a maximum speed of 25kph -- but some of the bikes are designed to go faster or are being altered by the user to allow them to do so. Last June, Dutch MPs voted to ban people from boosting factory-programmed e-bike speeds, and cycling experts warn that nations rapidly adopting them, such as the UK, will soon face the same issues. Recent Dutch government research found e-bikes typically travel at almost 24kph, 3kph faster than normal bicycles, but a quarter of e-bikers exceed the limit – especially young adults. Mopeds and racers might be worse, but the Netherlands has an estimated 5m e-bikes, for a population of 17.8 million, and users include primary school children.

Esther van Garderen, director of the Fietsersbond, is campaigning for quick enforcement of the speed-boost ban and prohibiting fast e-bikes in bike lanes. "The problem is not normal e-bikes, but ever more souped-up bikes that are basically illegal mopeds," she said. "In the Netherlands, since January, moped users must wear a helmet and young people don't like this. They also need to be 16 and have a driving licence, but illegal 'fat' bikes are just sold, youngsters under 16 use them on the roads going at 40kph, without a helmet. This isn't allowed, but there is no enforcement." She added that a plan by Amsterdam-Zuid district council to research whether child cyclists should be obliged to attach a flag to their bikes to improve road safety made her blood boil: "To think that the solution is that children need to have a flag is blaming the victim to the max."

This autumn, Amsterdam will reduce speed limits from 50 to 30kph on 500 roads and the city is also researching "intelligent speed adaptation" systems to warn speeding cyclists or even force e-bikes to slow down. "Traffic safety and safe biking are areas where I really want to break ground in the coming years," said Melanie van der Horst, deputy mayor for traffic. "Two-thirds of Amsterdammers tell us they don't feel safe in the traffic. So more than 80% of roads will become a 30kph zone and we are researching a speed limit on the bike lanes. The growth of electric vehicles means there are huge speed differences on bike lanes and studies show that this creates risks." [...] The international cycling advocacy foundation BYCS believes that slightly slower cities might be better ones. "Technology is praised as progress, but it's not about progress," said Maud de Vries, the chief executive. "It's about urban health and a system where people are more active, healthy and cross each other's paths, in a good way."
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Amsterdam Calls For Crackdown On Menace of Souped-Up E-Bikes More

Amsterdam Calls For Crackdown On Menace of Souped-Up E-Bikes

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  • "Km/h", not "kph"... (Score:3)

    by fbobraga ( 1612783 ) on Monday January 16, 2023 @08:46PM (#63214734) Homepage
    ...US is a mess

  • I don't see why it's different than mopeds (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday January 16, 2023 @08:48PM (#63214742)

    I lived in Amsterdam for a while, biking regularly from the outskirts into teh main city (several times a week).

    The bike system there is awesome, lots of bikes but great bike lane support and separation from traffic, along with traffic that generally respected bikes.

    However what I did NOT love was that mopeds used these same bike lanes all the time, especially in the evening. I'd be biking along at what I think was 15-20 MPH and a moped would come right past me at a much faster rate.

    This was extremely frequent (and several years ago) so honestly I tend to think having more bikes going closer to teh speeds the mopeds are going in the bike lanes already, is maybe a good thing...

  • Not Just Amsterdam (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Arzaboa ( 2804779 ) on Monday January 16, 2023 @08:52PM (#63214754)

    We get that all over here. Where I live here in the states e-bikes zipping by you has become the norm.

    The trails we see them all were all meant for activities that were human or animal powered when built. That means generally slow. Walking, bicycling, horses. Buggies aren't allowed on these trails. No one was moving at speeds to severely injure people.

    Now, there are impatient people cruising on them at road speeds on silent bikes. By the time you hear a tire behind you, they're already zipping by. My favorite was two months ago, when we had one 55 year old lady zip in between me and my daughter to wait at the stop-light 100 feet ahead, and then tell us we were in her way when we got to the stoplight with her.

    I'm all for keeping motorized machines off of standard bike trails if they can't keep it safe. There is no shortage of roads.

    --
    It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. - Confucius

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Where I live here in the states e-bikes zipping by you has become the norm.

      Those are motorcycles. Motorcycles that local politicians don't have the balls to insist be licensed and driven as motorcycles. Because "M..m..muh bicycle friendly cities!" And violence by Critical Mass.

      And then the signs that say "No motorized vehicles" will simply apply to everyone.

      • Where I live here in the states e-bikes zipping by you has become the norm.

        Those are motorcycles. Motorcycles that local politicians don't have the balls to insist be licensed and driven as motorcycles. Because "M..m..muh bicycle friendly cities!" And violence by Critical Mass.

        And then the signs that say "No motorized vehicles" will simply apply to everyone.

        Your theory doesn't hold water, bike-friendly means bike lanes, not riding on sidewalks, or going too fast on a mixed use trail.

        Motor/no-motor is a dumb way of looking at it, there needs to be classes based on speed/weight/size. Some things are fine at walking speeds on sidewalks, some are fine at bike speeds in bike lanes. Having a motor is irrelevant.

        Don't clog bike lanes with segways, don't ride bikes on sidewalks, don't ride your horse full speed down a walking path and don't even walk it on the sidew

    • I'm 100% OK with requiring e-bikes have speed limiters. As it stands today it is way too easy to get overpowered electric motorcycles that happen to have pedals, thus qualify as e-bikes.

      As a regular bike commuter and generally a fan of cycling I don't see why any electric bike should not be limited to 20-25 mph of electric assist.

      I also wish we had more driver/rider training to be allowed to get out there. The amount of driver training is a joke, and the amount of cycling specific teaching provided is non

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        "...thus qualify as e-bikes."

        False. e-bike definitions vary widely, but having pedals along does not qualify an "electric motorcycle" as an e-bike.

        "As a regular bike commuter and generally a fan of cycling I don't see why any electric bike should not be limited to 20-25 mph of electric assist."

        Depending on where you live, that may well be the case anyway, but would you argue that your bike also be limited? Conventional bicycles can exceed 25 mph, so why shouldn't e-bikes? Also, whose interest is being se

        • The point you refuse to see is "should not be limited to 20-25 mph of electric assist."; in other words the power turns off at 25 mph, or whatever speed. This would not stop you from coasting downhill at more that just like a regular bike.

          If you are a world class athlete that can pedal uphill at 25 mph more power to you, but there are so few of those they aren't a traffic hazard.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jeti ( 105266 )
        And cars need them just as much. Practically everyone is going over the speed limit. Use geofencing to restrict the speed in towns.
    • What scares me is the thought of somebody who has no business going 25 mph on a bicycle doing so anyway.

      When I was in shape I could pretty easily hit 18 mph on a straight away and I wasn't even in that good of shape. That was after months of cycling 10 to 20 hours a week. I had a lot of experience on the bike by then.

      The trouble with an e-bike going that kind of speed as you can have a novice jump on the bike and doing those kind of speeds long before they have the Handling skills let alone the comm

  • Motorcycles (Score:3)

    by John.Banister ( 1291556 ) * on Monday January 16, 2023 @09:14PM (#63214806) Homepage
    If its power is augmented by a motor and it's capable of exceeding 25 kph, just call it a motorcycle. That's exactly what it is. I reckon there's already regulations in place about diy motorcycles.
  • put up speed limit signs, have law enforcement write tickets with fines or even impound their ebike until the fine is paid,

    • Good luck catching someone with a real ebike. I converted a fat tire bike and it does 37 mph currently, if I invest another $500, it will do 55+ mph.

      • Re:Hey Amsterdam (Score:4, Funny)

        by quenda ( 644621 ) on Monday January 16, 2023 @10:04PM (#63214950)

        Good luck catching someone with a real ebike. I converted a fat tire bike and it does 37 mph currently,

        My, how could police ever catch a stolen motorcycle? Nothing can go faster than that!!!

        the only good thing about criminals is that most of them are really, really dumb.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        "if I invest another $500, it will do 55+ mph."

        Unlikely, but won't stop you from claiming it does. If you want to go faster, get rid of the "fat tires", their purpose is to tell the world what an idiot you are.

        Also, Amsterdam does care what fools like you do with your lame garbage, they face bicycle issues that you do not understand.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          does NOT care...

        • The purpose of fat bikes is offroad, especially sand and snow, but they are also fun on normal mountain bike trails.

        • You can lean over farther in a turn on fat tires, because you have more contact patch. Maybe learn something about bicycles before turning on rant mode. If skinny tires made sense on any level other than rolling resistance, then motorcycles would use them, but motorcycle tires have only gotten fatter throughout their history.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Budenny ( 888916 )

        ".... it does 37 mph currently, if I invest another $500, it will do 55+ mph..."

        And it will be completely unsafe to ride at those speeds. Even 37mph is too much for a bike. Yes, I know, Tour de France riders do far more going downhill on their tuned racing machines. That doesn't mean its safe to soup up a standard bike and routinely do the speeds you are talking about.

        Get a proper motorbike most importantly with proper tires and good brakes, and with lights etc. It will still be a more dangerous form of

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dougmc ( 70836 )

      even impound their ebike until the fine is paid,

      We should do this with cars too. That would be fun!

    • They already do: they’ll pull over speeding e-bikes, or set up a checkpoint and randomly stop riders, and check if the e-bike is capable of exceeding the limit. And they are well aware of all the common aftermarket modifications and the ways to hide them. If you were speeding and they cannot find the “boost” switch on your bike, they’ll simply impound it and keep looking until they do find it (or you tell them where it is). They’ve been doing this for like half a century with m

    • put up speed limit signs

      Why? There's an active speed limit on every bicycle path. You don't need signs to tell people something that they know universally.

  • be 16 and have a driving licence, but illegal 'fat' bikes are just sold, youngsters under 16 use them on the roads going at 40kph, without a helmet. This isn't allowed, but there is no enforcement." She added that a plan by Amsterdam-Zuid district council to research whether child cyclists should be obliged to attach a flag to their bikes to improve road safety made her blood boil: "To think that the solution is that children need to have a flag is blaming the victim to the max."

    So... under 16 year olds, who are driving without a helmet or license on makeshift mopeds are not the problem, and having a flag that's the equivalent of a "student driver" sticker that warns other drivers to be cautious around them is "victim blaming". Solid logic. /s

    Sounds like a gun debate in the US, it's suddenly the fault of the tool itself, the bike is at fault and not the unlicensed unexperienced user hurting themselves or others on the road.

    • The point of the flags is not to warn people to watch out for the dangerous kids, it's to shame dangerous dicks riding modified bikes illegally to maybe don't be dicks for a minute.
      Neither is anyone blaming the tool. They are specifically blaming the unlicensed, unexperienced (sic) user. People are not saying they shouldn't exist, but that they should not be ridden where they're not allowed to be ridden.

      • Also, the idea of putting flags on bikes of under-sixteens has nothing to do with the problem of fast e-bikes. It was suggested to improve visibility of kids in busy city traffic, as they are often on smaller bikes and less visible to drivers. Not that traffic in Amsterdam is particularly bad, but drivers and especially cyclists there are somewhat notorious for taking traffic laws as being optional.

  • Technical solutions to social problems often fail (Score:3)

    by couchslug ( 175151 ) on Monday January 16, 2023 @10:47PM (#63215062)

    Restricted, light motorcycles are popular for economic reasons and horsepower is popular for fun. Of course people are modding slow vehicles to go faster. Porting moped cylinders and installing bore kits is ancient history.

    If you want people to ride at the speed limit, enforce that instead of attempting a technical solution to a social problem.

  • Bike handling.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Vegan Cyclist ( 1650427 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @02:05AM (#63215432) Homepage

    One thing rarely mentioned is that most bikes handle quite differently at higher speeds..cornering at 20kph is quite different from cornering at 40kph, and can be a disaster for themselves or others.

    We have a similar scourge of illegally modded bikes here in Victoria, BC, and they're a menace on bike paths. They catch up to other users rather quickly, but seem unable to properly control their bikes and making poor decisions like trying to pass when there's oncoming cyclists.

    Since the riders are actually unable to pedal the bikes at those speeds, their 'top speed' is actually just that, and unlike on a regular bike if you need to speed up to complete a pass, etc, they're unable. As a fit cyclist, it's kind of funny to have one come up and try and pass, and I simply pick up my pace a bit, and they're stuck beside me and can't actually go any faster.

  • I have a high-speed e-bike (legal, governed to 45 km/h, classed as a moped in the Netherlands). When I have a choice between riding in a bike land and riding in the general-traffic lane, I'll choose the bike lane.
    General traffic moves at 50 km/h, I tend to cruise at 40 km/h (those last 5 km/h add a lot of effort). That means cars want to overtake me - on a road that has been narrowed to make room for a bike lane, so it's too narrow to allow safe overtaking. That makes me an obstacle in the road, which I don

    • This is like riding a bicycle on a sidewalk and complaining that the pedestrians are in the way. General traffic lanes are optimised for cars and bicycle lanes are optimised for bicycles.
      You have an electric moped which is neither.

      • well, yeah, that's part of the problem: there are more categories than traffic lanes.
        For some reason, mopeds and high-speed ebikes are limited to 45 km/h instead of 50, and high-speed ebikes are limited in motor output that practically limits them to 40 km/h, making them obstacles in general traffic lanes.
        But what I object to most is that the solution always seems to be 'make everyone go slower'. Currently, every single driving license holder in .nl gets on average one speeding ticket per year, and 0.001 ti

    • Now Amsterdam is proposing yet more speed limits. Over the past 50 years, travel has become slower and slower as speed limits were lowered, and roads were modified with speed bumps, traffic circles etc. The amount of time wasted in traffic continues to grow.

      You're looking in the wrong place. The problem isn't the traffic measures, it's the AMOUNT of traffic. The restrictions are a solution to the ever growing number of cars and journeys. London did the opposite and decided to be relentlessly pro-car until r

  • Weâ(TM)re talking about Amsterdam, people. (Score:5, Informative)

    by sonoronos ( 610381 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @04:05AM (#63215592)

    Americans responding to this story have obviously never stepped foot in Amsterdam. The matter described in this story only has relevance to Amsterdam, and really only within the city center. In addition, the rest of the Netherlands doesnâ(TM)t have the same density of bicycle riders as Amsterdamâ(TM)s city center. This is a story about something happening in a very small fraction of an entire country.

    There is a shitload of weaving and the density is insane. Itâ(TM)s like watching ants on bikes. Near collisions happen all the time. The only reason it all works is because, physiologically, the bicyclists are only able to accelerate and deaccelerate so fast. Ebikes screw up the traffic equation because they accelerate way faster than normal bikes but donâ(TM)t slow down any faster. In addition, at higher speeds, their braking distances are way longer and their ability to avoid other bicyclists is reduced significantly. Itâ(TM)s a real problem.

    American bicycle culture is nothing like Amsterdam bike culture, so mocking the whole âoeunlocked ebikeâ thing as oversensitive complaining is totally inappropriate.

    Of course, what the story doesnâ(TM)t cover is the fact that most bikes in Amsterdam just end up being stolen, abandoned in a bike rack, or thrown in the canal.

    • Everything you wrote is true! I'd just like to add my personal observation. Around Centraal Station, along the Prins Hendrikkade and both sides of the fietstunnel are constant swarms of cyclists. Until the new bike parking garages open in about a week, (with space for 22,000 bikes) I can't have a bike because there's nowhere to keep it, so I ride a skateboard, and I'm very careful and considerate of others with it.

      If I were to lose control of my skateboard, the odds of it rolling under a bike wheel, and cau

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Americans responding to this story have obviously never stepped foot in Amsterdam. The matter described in this story only has relevance to Amsterdam, and really only within the city center. In addition, the rest of the Netherlands doesnÃ(TM)t have the same density of bicycle riders as AmsterdamÃ(TM)s city center. This is a story about something happening in a very small fraction of an entire country.

      There is a shitload of weaving and the density is insane. ItÃ(TM)s like watching ants on bike

  • 42 km/h is fairly tame (Score:3)

    by unami ( 1042872 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @04:07AM (#63215598)
    You don't need a souped up bike for that - you can do that with any e-bike by adding power via the pedals - even with the ones which are regulated to 25 km/h. You can also do that with a regular bike. Afaik, cars are also able to go faster than the speed limit. That's why there is a speed limit in the first place. I have nothing against regulating speed, but why not start with cars where it should be fairly easy to implement automatic speed limiting via the built in gps or roadside units. In other news, in Vienna police stopped an e-scooter which was capable of going over 120 km/h (75 mph)

    • You don't need a souped up bike for that - you can do that with any e-bike by adding power via the pedals - even with the ones which are regulated to 25 km/h.

      No you can't. Above 25km/h the motor on any properly limited bike cuts out completely, and good luck peddling at 42km/h without any assist. That's hard enough to do on a racing bike.

      Incidentally racing bikes have different rules on cycle path compared to standard city bikes in Amsterdam as well.

      Afaik, cars are also able to go faster than the speed limit.

      Cars have mixed speed limits to deal with. Bicycles don't. The "speed limit" on every cycle path in the Netherlands is fixed, and it was a limit higher than most people are capable of reaching without assistance.

      But

  • The bottom line is that sensible, safety oriented transport planning needs to separate traffic moving at different speeds and with different weights.

    So you should never mix foot and bike traffic, never mix foot or bike and car and truck traffic. And never mix motorbikes or mopeds or fast moving e-bikes with pedal bikes or foot.

    If you do, the immediate result is a rise in accidents and injuries, or if you mix bikes and trucks, deaths. As London has found.

    Also, people don't realize that bikes are not a huge

  • That's the most ridiculously low speed limit I've heard of. It sounds like something an idiot or crook would try if they were trying to balance a budget with speeding fines.
  • In the 70s, bikes with a motor engine were all the fashion in Germany. You could buy one with a max speed of 25km/h, no license needed, very cheap insurance, free to drive if you were 15 or older. Or you could buy one going 40km/h, requiring a driving license and much more expensive insurance. They often looked identical to the slower ones.

    Or you could just modify your slow one. Consequences if you were caught: You would get convicted for driving without a license, driving without insurance, and driving
  • Fat tire bikes are great for tootling on farm roads around the villages. The disadvantage though is that they are much heavier than thin tire models.
  • Who here doesn't want cars off the road?

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