Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
If you're in reasonable shape but she's untrained then you can bet she's got a lot more room for improvement!
Naturally it's the hills where the difference will be evident. That was what I always noticed when riding along keeping pace with a pushbiker. They'd get ahead on the flat, but on hills I'd be reeling them in. Quite a lot of that might have been aerodynamics, though, my bike was upright so wind friction on the flat was significant, whereas with the slower speeds on hills it's all about the watts/weights ratios. Hence the observation by the grumpy cyclist getting overtaken effortlessly on a hill that they're not really up against someone doing the same exercise as them.
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I think torque sensors make a difference – fitter riders will go faster. I pedalled hard up Chinaman’s Hill the other day and did 30km/h (although not all the way).
It did look very similar to your Pacer, although this was a few years ago now. The rider was dressed in motocross gear, all in black, with a full face visor. By the time he crested the hill right in front of me I'd guess he was going more like 40. Raced past silently like some kind of bicycle ninja.
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to Russell Brown,
And that “3000 watt race mode” looks … interesting.
I want one.
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
The one high-powered e-bike tragedy that I’m aware of doesn’t seem to have prompted any suggestion of a real crackdown.
No, although she did only kill herself. I was kind of suggesting a moral panic following an e-bike killing, say, a pedestrian. In that particular accident, there were multiple contributing factors, including very poor eyesight. Any bike at all will surely be extremely dangerous to the rider, under those conditions. Extremely sad, though, and it seems highly likely that the vehicle's power was a contributing factor too.
Perhaps the annoying noise factor of some of those conversions has something to do with the law taking an interest.
Well they do draw attention, for sure. Also you'd have to think that it's a little bit more dangerous just on account of the potential for the petrol to ignite in an accident.
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to Moz,
so you’d expect anyone in good health who rides regularly to be able to hold 300W for a couple of minutes to get up a hill.
Sure, and you could probably crack a kilowatt for a few seconds. But the e-bike delivers that wattage for hours. You have to be well trained to manage that. That's pretty much what I'm comparing to - peak output is misleading. Your 800W is over a horsepower, but that does not mean you're as strong as a horse. A horse can generate a lot more than one horsepower. It's called a horsepower because it's how much a horse can generate consistently over a long period of time (I think it was a shift of lifting water in some horrible factory or mine). That's pretty much what I was meaning by the human ability to generate power. Peak power is not a useful comparison, especially since the motor's peak power output is pretty much the same as its average, since it doesn't get tired.
I think you're right, that the 300W figure did get picked for a reason. It's like putting a strong cyclist on there with you in tandem who doesn't weigh very much. So if you just sit there, it's like they are carrying you and their own weight, and the whole thing is only going to go a little bit slower than what a strong cyclist on their own could do (depending very much on how much you weigh). 500W is more like putting Lance Armstrong on the 'roids on there with you and telling him all will be forgiven if he goes hard. Anything beyond that is inhumanly strong. At 300W If you add your own power and the motor's and you're not that strong, you're hitting the upper end of what humans are capable of. Probably most people who choose an e-bike are not super strong cyclists in the first place, quite the opposite. It's at its most appealing to those who are not.
So, essentially, what I'm suggesting is that it's an amount chosen so that the bike is still mostly like a bike (albeit with a strong rider), rather than a motorbike. For the average rider that will use it, under average conditions.
I would like to see a 1000W/25kph class, though, so that multirider and load bikes could legally use power assist. Especially when you start loading two or more kids into/onto a load bike, 300W stops being a lot of use on hills.
Interesting idea, to use mandatory speed limiting as the control. If that were effective it would probably eliminate the worst danger. But getting a bootleg controller would be something I can see being popular, particularly with 14 y.o. kids, who would absolutely fly on a 1000W bike.
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Essentially the e-bike means my partner and I can ride together and both get roughly the same exercise.
Is one of you on an e-bike and the other not?
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Yes, I don't think many are disparaging more bikes on the road. The dominance of sports oriented cycling is rapidly fading.
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There’s also something a little bit nonsensical about having pedal power available on a bike with an engine ten times more powerful than the rider. 300 watts is already well over what all but the strongest humans can consistently deliver. If you have a 1500 watt engine, what is really the point of pedaling? Exercise? You’d have an equivalent machine in which your pedaling was simply impeded by friction like on a wind-trainer, and all of the motive power provided by the engine. In fact, for the purposes of exercise it would be better because the engine would not be interfering with how much resistance you were fighting.
Which is not the craziest idea ever. If people want to pedal a wind trainer whilst commuting, far be it from me to say they should not. I think this is sort of how cycling purists see e-bikers. It’s not really a bike. It’s a bike like form of exercise that you can do on a motorbike.
ETA: And as such, it is not so prey to geography the way normal pushbiking is. In Auckland on a pushbike I'm not really in control of how hard I have to work. On a wind-trainer, it's calibrated.
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We've kind of passed through this space one time before, too. E-bikes are not the first powered pushbikes, nor are they the strongest. Mopeds are literally the petrol analog to e-bikes. Putting a little petrol engine on is something that's been done for as long as there have been motorbikes. Naturally petrol engines can range from super-weak powers in the mere hundreds of watts, to several kilowatts. Beyond that, they become pretty clearly motorbikes sized.
Faced with this kind of power range the dangers were obvious. A 3 kilowatt engine could snap a pushbike chain easily, sending it swinging a high speed. With that kind of easy power available it could be tempting to do high miles on the bike which would wear out all the parts far faster than you'd expect on a pushbike. Police have basically no tolerance for anyone they see riding one of these, even though at the low end they are effectively the same as e-bikes, just noisier, and with effectively unlimited range, since you can buy the $5 of petrol to fill them up at a servo.
I guess there will come a point where the batteries are strong enough and the motors have become miniaturized enough that it will be hard to tell an e-bike apart from something as powerful as a high end moped. If that happens then it's hard to think that we'd just let them slip through without regulation.
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to linger,
And would such moves be desirable?
So, in conclusion, that's a tough one. They sit in a strange space between lots of issues. For starters, if you're serious about safety then a bike that's effectively as powerful as a scooter should require a motorbike helmet. But this kills the whole idea of you powering it yourself, because you'd get far too hot.
On the issue of the increased danger, you could certainly argue that pushbikes are already pretty damned dangerous, and so the policy should probably be the same, but there is the issue that e-bikes may be more dangerous to people who are not the passenger than a pushbike is. I don't know of any serious evidence about this though, and I'm not optimistic about public policy being really guided by evidence, since it didn't seem to be on helmeting laws. It's more likely to be some high profile accident in which a pedestrian is seriously injured by an e-bike that turns out to be overpowered, and then there will be a moral panic. But probably nothing will actually be done, for all the reasons already given pertaining to the practical problems of e-bikes.