Some serious problems with that bill! But looking specifically at the restrictions on Class 3 - where I live, California, Class 3 e-bikes are already banned from multi-use trails. I don’t think that’s a bad idea. 28 mph is awfully fast for places where one could easily hit a pedestrian. Pedestrians have been killed in collisions. Some of those were confirmed to be illegal e-motos, and I’d guess that most of the unconfirmed cases are too. But at least one case looks like it may have involved a Velotric Go 1 with an unlocked speed of 25 mph.

Impact energy increases with the square of speed (KE = ½mv²), so Class 3 is 40% faster than Class 1, but carries nearly double the kinetic energy (1.96x) for the same mass.

I’m inclined to agree with the take from Berm Peak: no restrictions on riding Class 1 e-bikes, but treat bikes with throttles, higher speeds, and more powerful motors with more scrutiny. That way there is one thing called an e-bike, and it’s much easier for everyone to understand. Fewer deadly accidents means reduced threat of sledgehammer legislation. We could still have start assist - some states, including California, explicitly allow start assist on Class 1.

Edit: Linkified the Berm Peak reference

With GDM it’s a gear icon in the lower right corner

Rearview radar? That is some fun fanciness! If it’s very reliable I could see myself getting hooked on that feature.

Is there a way to make this thing work with a dynamo hub? Like a shared battery for onboard electronics that the dynamo charges? Or to connect it to an e-bike battery?

You might have to learn about working the SELinux, since Fedora uses it. There are some things, like enabling custom systemd units, that require steps that aren’t needed on Debian to comply with the extra security settings.

Yeah, I agree this is reasonable. But there’s a difference between creating an alt account for experimentation vs throwing games to get to or to maintain a lower rank. My feeling is that “smurf” typically implies the latter.

Not sure if you’re looking for options, but I’ve had success with waterproof Vessi shoes. That’s combined with rain pants that cover my ankles, and the tops of the shoes.

It’s a gang. The white house has been making up stories that people they arrest are dangerous gang members, notably including Kilmar Ábrego García.

In case you haven’t tried it, you can run Steam games in native Wayland mode, and get a more stable experience. Especially with fractional scaling. There are two steps:

1. Install a GE-Proton runner, and configure the game to use it.
2. Set game launch options to, env DISPLAY="" PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 %command%

If it’s going 30+ mph on a path or a crosswalk then it’s not a regulation-compliant e-bike. You might be seeing e-motos, and mentally categorizing them as e-bikes. We all want extra requirements on vehicles that go 30+ mph.

E-bikes are regulated. They are required to max out at 20 mph, or 28 mph. (Where I live in California the class 3 28 mph bikes are not allowed on mixed use trails, and are only allowed for ages 16 and up.) We are on board with regulation exactly because we want it to go in a beneficial direction. I don’t think requiring a driver’s license and insurance, and cutting out young teenagers is a beneficial direction. No, we don’t want dangerous vehicles zooming around without accountability. That’s why e-bike advocates came up with the 20 mph limit in the first place!

We don’t want restrictions on bikes, because bikes get people outside, and reduce dependence on cars. E-bikes are bikes that work in places with hills, or in situations where long distances make unassisted cycling prohibitive for people who are not athletes.

One more note I’ll add about cargo bikes is why I don’t think of them as motor vehicles: everything you can do on a cargo e-bike you can do on a non-motorized bike - on flat ground. A cargo e-bike is a cargo bike that works on hills.

There are two groups who are hit hard by licensing and insurance requirements: people with low income, and kids.

People with low income will struggle with any additional cost. A couple hundred bucks, insurance - even if it won’t cost very much from some people’s perspective - is a burden. E-bikes can be a livelihood, like for delivery drivers in cities. Even if it’s not a livelihood, everyone needs transportation.

The New Jersey law flat-out prohibits kids under 15 years old from riding e-bikes. Kids 15 or 16 now need a motorized bike license. Kids are not getting out or socializing enough these days. E-bikes help change that. My 14-year-old rides a class 1 e-bike to school. Before getting that bike he spent most of his time on weekends at home, mostly in front of a screen. We live in a car-dependent society where everything is miles apart. Public transit in my town is crap. There are big hills that make it impractical for him to get home on an unassisted bike. My kid could only go places when my wife or I had time to drive him. But since getting the bike he goes out on the weekend, and visits friends who live a few miles away. They organize nerf battles. He’s much happier! And no, he’s not going more than 20 mph on that bike. With the NJ law there would have been two years of missing out on those benefits, and then an extra licensing and insurance process after that which is going to reduce the number of kids getting outside. Fewer parents are going to set kids up with bikes if there are extra bureaucratic steps, and if it comes with a recurring insurance cost.

Cargo bikes are a great way to transport people - especially kids! For a lot of families it’s important for a parent to be able to get two kids onto the bike. But they aren’t speed demons. It’s not cargo bikes that are endangering people on the streets.

I have a cargo bike that I can get two kids on that has two wheels, and is close to the wheelbase of a typical bike: 135 cm / 53 in. Like most cargo ebikes it’s class 1, so speed limited to 20mph assisted. The extra powerful motor is for getting the thing up a hill. It’s about three times the weight of an un-motorized bike. It’s not that big, not crazy heavy, and not very fast.

Yeah, speed limits seem like a reasonable way to catch people who are not in compliance. If a bike is going faster than 30mph, and that’s in a bike lane or on a trail instead of on a road, or they don’t have a license plate, that could be cause to pull someone over. It is tricky because the 28mph limit for class 3 ebikes (in the US) is an assisted limit, and a strong cyclist might be able to go faster than that pedaling unassisted.

20km/h is the assisted limit in Europe (I think), but that limit is too low for a bike lane speed limit. Plenty of unassisted cyclists go over 30km/h.

People complying with the law already have speed limiters built into the bikes. But yes, it’s a method to spot misbehavers.

The creator of the Youtube channel Berm Peak suggested that unregulated ebikes should not be allowed to have throttles, which would eliminate class 2 ebikes. That would make it much easier to spot problem riders, because they typically use a throttle instead of pedaling. That’s also how Europe regulates ebikes (I think). You’d want some way for people with accessibility needs to get an exemption. I’ve heard throttles are nice for getting started from a stop, especially with a heavy load, or going uphill. But I’ve noticed that California law already makes a distinction between a throttle and a “start assist”, and maybe a start assist could cover that use case.

Manufacturers that comply with the class 1/2/3 classifications mostly voluntarily limit ebike power to 750W. I don’t know if there are laws regulating ebike power output - the existing laws state limits on motor-assisted speed, not power, with caps at 20mph for class 1 & 2, and 28mph for class 3. But I see that California is working on mandating a 750W max.

In reply you talked about ebikes exceeding 1650W, and going 150mph. Those are not legal ebikes. Those are the e-motos that others in this thread are talking about - vehicles that are regulated like motorcycles in most US states. They have pedals so they can pass as ebikes, and states haven’t really figured out enforcement yet. The vehicles that that people in this thread are concerned should not require licensing and insurance are proper ebikes, which are limited to 20 or 28mph (or 15mph in NYC).

The requirements they’re putting on e-bikes already applied to e-motos. In most states bikes that don’t follow the class 1/2/3 restrictions are regulated like motorcycles.

The problem is too many people don’t know the distinction, including some people buying the bikes, and many people who are concerned about dangers of e-motos. Manufacturers just want to sell bikes, and compete with each other on speed and power, and so are not incentivized to make the distinction clear. They also want to make sales to people who don’t want to follow the rules, so there’s incentive to leave plausible deniability.

Thanks!

Sounds like you’re talking about Tongo? Evade!

Lol! Avocaja for sure!

Oh, that is a fun discussion! I added my janky thing. Thanks for the suggestion!

The most affordable cargo solution to date! (If you don’t count the mounting hardware.)

More details in this post: https://leminal.space/post/30930361

There’s a pretty thorough write-up here: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/150bkal/comic_strips_so_i_think_it_makes_no_sense/

I’m not an organizer for this community. But I also find the Quikscript literature compelling. Although an advantage of Shavian is that it has an established Unicode assignment, and corresponding fonts are in circulation. For example Shavian text renders correctly for me running the Thunder Lemmy client on Android without any special setup.

The main criticism I’ve read of Shavian comes down to accommodating dialect differences. How you write "R"s and vowels is particularly issuous. You kinda have to pick a dialect as the one to canonicalize in spelling. But I think that applies to all phonetic alphabets - unless someone has come up with some very clever system of per-dialect glyph interpretation rules that I’m not aware of.