255
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
255 points (100.0% liked)
Fuck Cars
13495 readers
1 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
16mph is the limitation in germany. If your bike is faster, you have to register it an pay tax, and cant use dedicated bicycle infratructure anymore.
16mph is exactly the speed where I'm fast enough but dont feel like I would die in a crash.
Everything above would require protective clothing like on motorcycles Imo, and that kind of defeats the purpose for ebikes for me. I want to ride my bike but don't want to have to fight against wind and going up the hill.
If an ebike is as fast as a motorcycle, it should get treated as one.
Yeah this proposal is reasonable. I wouldnt want to share my bikepath with old people driving more than 25kmh. They just dont have the reaction time to safely drive at speeds like that and even that is actually waaay to fast for the oldest. If you wanna go faster, use your muscles and/or drive on the road.
Not at all no. This used to be a sort of self regulating system. Peoples ability to go fast with muscles alone usually goes away around the same point where their cognitive abilities become a hazard to the rest of traffic. The difference is that most young people could easily go 18mph or more while old people wouldnt even get past 10 without e-bikes. Basically e-bikes allow people to go beyond their limits. While that sounds cool, in this case it isnt.
Yeah, much better for old uncoordinated people to go back to using cars.
Said literally nobody. 15mph is plenty fast for getting around :) The more important part is making biking more attractive by building better infrastructure for it and actively restricting car traffic by slowing it down or diverting it out of cities.
I like being alive and not being rammed by a 200kg combination of e-bike + human at speeds higher than 25kmh while riding my bike to work.
And you're a troll, this isn't a zero sum game, making bikes safe matters, you complete weirdo.
In a city with buses, subways, ferries, light rail... Shut up.
"drat my bike won't go at unreasonable speeds, my only solution must be abandoning my still perfectly functional bike and laying down several grand on the single least practical means of transportation in the city. What's a MetroCard?"
Shut. Up.
Whataboutism
The thing with pedelecs and 25km/h is complicated™
It probably was always possible to drive them as moped/mofa, don’t think it was specified what kind of motor.
Pedal assist doesn’t just stop at 25km/h, it also decreases with higher speeds.
But the point is that pedelecs effectively count as bike and not motorized vehicles. That means somebody younger than 15 can drive them, but you have to be at least 10 to be allowed to drive on streets/roads. Helmets are only mandatory for <12 years old kids on bikes.
It’s the same. Those are motor limits, not driving speed limits. If you don’t meet them you just have to follow the stricter regulations.
Theoretically if you get an e-bike classified as a motorbike you could do 200 km/h on the motor way, just not on bike lanes. It just needs to be registerd, insuranced, have a proper motorbike license, wear helmet etc … like it’s the case with a car where it’s seat belt instead of helmet.
The speed limits are the same, I still have to follow regular 30km/h speed limits with my pedelec when I could do 45km/h downhill otherwise. Unless there are special signs somewhere, but so far I’ve only seen those for trucks/buses. Bikes are also entitled to street parking and parking lots since those are rules for all vehicles, it’s just impracticable. There is only a general rule to park space-saving.
This proposal is for the road, which is why it's crazy. 25kmh limit on a bike path is fine. A speed limit on roads that is lower for bikes than cars is insane, when the justification for pedal bikes having a higher speed limit is that they're lighter than ebikes. Cars should have a 5 mph limit in that case.
In my experience, a typical bike-friendly city in Germany will have 30 km/h limit for cars anyway (18 mph). NYC "official" speed limit is 25mph.
Yeah but blinking bike lights are also illegal to sell in Germany because you realized that drunk drivers target fixate on them and you apparently found that ban to be a better solution than aggressively cracking down on drunks. So I don't give much credence to the rational integrity of German vehicular law. I go faster than 16 MPH literally every time I get on my bike. A regular non-motorized bike, powered only by me.
It’s the exact same in the Netherlands. The pedal assist is capped at that speed, but nothing stops you from powering though that and going faster. Not that it makes any sense to do so for the average daily office commuter.
Right, I think most of these delivery ebikes are throttle-operated. And they're trying to get to their destinations quickly, because a lot of people tip their delivery guys based on expediency. I wish we had curb-separated cyclepaths like in the Netherlands because it would make this debate so much more straightforward and speed-capping would be a simple yes, but in NYC delivery cyclists are usually rolling down 3-4 lane wide avenues among cars going 25-35 MPH (~40-55 km/h). Like almost all other bike problems, the issue is actually the cars.
You have hands
I dont think I follow. What's your point?
As in like, "Damn, infinitesunrise got hands..."? :P
Yeah about 15 is fine to me but no lower. so 16 is fine and maybe over 20 gets to be a bit much but im fine anywhere along that range.