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this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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While my knee-jerk reaction was that they're going to over regulate, all those changes are already in effect in the EU and it didn't destroy the e-bike market there. So I guess California will manage.
Class 2 and 3 requiring license plates makes sense to me.
And class 1 would be pedelecs in the EU, where they are capped at 250 Watt and 25 kmh. Class 1 being capped at 750 Watt and 16mph (25kmh) seems okay, might be inconvenient with how much further apart everything is over there, but reaction times are the same all over the globe.
I personally don't even drive the full 25kmh, in the city I'm capped by the manual cyclists in front, which I don't need to overtake. And outside I'm too worried about my battery to go full power. I will say, cargo bikes in particular could use a higher powered motor than the 250 Watts we have here, but I have no idea what a good cap would be.
Then get a more powerful electric bike and a motorcycle license? Or perhaps don't go out of your way to annoy other road users, have you considered that as an alternative?
The idea is that someone without proven traffic knowledge and experience shouldn't be able to zoom to 50 km/h in 2 seconds. Plus with that kind of speed available on tap, you become a danger to pedestrians so it makes sense to require a license plate so it'd actually be possible to find you if you fuck someone up and decide to escape.
There are basically two ways that bicyclists annoy motor vehicle drivers and wind up being threatened with deadly force on the regular:
By following the rules
By not following the rules
I hope this clears things up.
I mean if you read that particular user's other comments, I'm pretty sure they try to swerve into cars and pedestrians on purpose. There was a comment saying it's basically ok to take your 40 km/h+ e-bike into pedestrians in San Francisco because they're tourists and therefore must've taken a plane there, making them as bad as car drivers.
FWIW I'm a driver and never have I felt like running a cyclist off the road. I also used to cycle and never did anyone try to run me off the road. This whole issue is pretty USA-specific IMO.
He doesn't seem like such a nice fellow online here. I don't think that means he tries to hurt people in real life.
I'm glad you haven't experienced the rage that drivers often express towards cyclists. I don't think its exclusively a US problem.
I've been riding bikes and driving cars for 30 years. It seems to me that any circumstance that requires drivers to slow down and consider how to respond to other people's needs is a guaranteed rage trigger -- for some fraction of the driving public. That seems to be carrying over into electric bikes as well.
I never said that. I just said that if you want a vehicle that's fast enough to use as a getaway vehicle when you smash someone's window in or something, you should be prepared to live with the consequences and have a visible license plate on it. If you want zero consequences for your actions, like the ability to literally kick someone's shit in and then just leg it without anyone catching you since there's no license plate... Be prepared to be limited to a lower speed.
No, it's not. If you want a fast getaway vehicle for whatever crime you're planning, it's illegal to not have a license plate. Boo fucking hoo.
Nobody is doing 50 km/h over any real distance on a skateboard lmao
You're thinking on the right questions..
It took years, but finally I realized the appropriate threshold is simply to have people go on an exercize-bike/meter, for a 90-minute-session, & have them sustain what they can, for that duration, then multiply their RMS-output ( root-mean-square rounds-down ) by 3x, & make that THEIR motor-limit:
This means that you don't get flimsy 50-lbs children with 750-w of bike-motor, & you also don't hobble linebackers ( I think that's what they're called: NFL tackles? ) with the same limit you're putting on small/flimsy ones.
Proportionate to the strength you wield when managing your own body, see?
So, for many reasonably-strong riders, it'd be .. around 300-w, tbh..
Alot of people would hate me for making the limit sooo close to their own physical-strength, but .. live longer.
& simply make another limit, higher, & require license-plate for that category.
I'd make it so that within the 25-kph & 3x-sustained-90-minutes-wattage, no license-plate is required: you get a photo-ID card which says you don't need a plate.
More power, more speed? then you need a plate.
Some cities need 40-kph to do the parkways, & that'd have to be one of the limits.
60-kph would be needed for other parkways, but that'd be absolute-limit, & some body-armor would be reasonable at that speed ( since crash-energy goes up with the square of the speed ).
Having been a courier, I'd put an either-speed-XOR-weight limit on them, so the fast-light people can get that, but the heavy-cargo couriers get a slower-speed, .. I"m not the only courier who discovered that it's .. an experience that many couriers have had .. to discover that one has been biking, in traffic, while unconscious. Sleep-biking. And I want that NOT happening at high-speed.
So, this is all like graduated-licensing, but done vertically, instead of temporally.
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Um, no.
Hi, we're disabled.
Don't try to restrict us from using stuff that helps bypass the disability, thanks.
-- Frost
I'm not tying to restrict you from using stuff that helps bypass disability.
I'm trying to have more-likely-to-kill-someone behaviors more-licensed.
Ignore that distinction if your ideology wants..
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No, what you're doing is tying people's speed to what their specific body can produce rather than what is safe. Those are two very different things.
Not what I meant:
I'm tying power to the power that the bicyclist can naturally produce.
I'm tying speed to licensing-level, because crash-energy goes up with the square of the speed.
Physically-weak? THEN small-motor.
Linebacker? THEN huge-motor.
Speeds are tied to licensing.
I'm not tying speed to body-force, I'm tying it to licensing-level/competence-carefulness.
Don't know how I fucked-up the communication so bad, but sorry.
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Okay, but you're still talking like tying power to people's body energy output is a good thing. Speed, power, whatever, limiting our machine capability just because our body is limited (preventing working around disability) is an asshole move.