Posts by BenWilson
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And lastly, of course, speed limits are a very blunt instrument too. While going 40km/h on an e-bike on the flat indicates an unusually powerful bike, I routinely go 50km/h on a normal pushbike going downhill. When I recently saw a guy coming up New North Rd to Kingsland and was clearly travelling at around 30km/h, he wasn't fooling me by pedaling hard. He was clearly riding an e-bike that was several times more powerful than anything I've ever been on.
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Also worth noting too. When the power of a vehicle is in the hundreds of kilowatts, and the weight is in thousands of kilograms, then differences in the weight of the passengers count for almost nothing. But on a bike, the weight of the rider makes a very big difference to the speeds that the power can deliver. I've had goes on lots of e-scooters that would make an acceptable form of transport for a person less than 70kg, and were utterly worthless for me, could not even go uphill at all.
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Yes, that's the law, but I think proving an e-bike was over 300 watts would be quite difficult for an officer on the side of the road. I actually registered a 300 watt e-bike I had and they were all bemused at the testing station. No idea what do do with it - in the end they pretty much had to just slap the approval on it, because they had no official tests to do. The guy made a show of testing the indicators and brakes, but it was not tested on any kind of machine because there is no law saying that it had to be. This was one of those cargo bike style ones. They certainly had no way at a testing station of checking the wattage, so you can be damned sure no traffic cop on the side of the road does.
This kind of testing is usually done by the manufacturer, but there is no mandating of any official way of even reporting the wattage rating of a motor, so there would be no law against removing/scratching off any markings that identify the manufacturer's claims of the wattage.
Furthermore there are ways of increasing the wattage. Any electric motor can be rewound either by DIY or by a professional armature winder. E-bike DIY types have been doing this for decades.
All of which makes it very difficult to actually enforce any real power limits on e-bikes unless specific testing and official stamping become law.
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Read like a fair review to me. If any bias was shown due to getting paid it was simply that you probably otherwise would not have reviewed that bike.
It's pretty rich to expect that no one can ever be paid for their opinion, because that might take away the purity somehow.
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to Worik,
Some of Russell’s blogs are long and always (almost..) interesting. To get to the bottom and to find that it was advertising copy is a crock.
Looking around for announcements like that is pretty much the first thing I do when reading any review of a commercial product. It didn't take more than a few seconds to see it in this case, after which I read the review in light of it.
This isn't some horribly unusual thing to do, to get paid to review something, and it can be interesting in its own right, as it was in this case.
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There will be times when it’s more fun to nip around on the light bike, surely. Work up a sweat. Must do that.
Yes, also there may be times when you anticipate the fear of theft as greater than the fear of sweat. Like if you have to leave the bike overnight somewhere. I would not leave a flash bike chained up overnight at University. But many is the time that riding home lacked appeal for whatever reason - weather, drunk, feeling lazy, got a lift, batteries flat in the headlight, etc.
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to Moz,
A quick look at stackexchange suggests it’s not very useful (search and maybe 10% extra range in hilly Auckland and an answer with more links)
Whereas squeezing 10% more into batteries pretty much involves having 10% more batteries, simple to manufacture, simple to control. Much better returns from better battery technology.
Also, on a good e-bike the range is good enough that who cares about getting 10% more. If you're intent on riding that far, maybe just give the electrics a bit of a rest 10% more of the time. If you're doing really big km and pedaling the whole time, essentially treating it as more of a sport than a form of transport, then you'd probably just be better off getting a very good road bike.
Not that we won't always demand more and more. But it's pretty clear e-bikes crossed a threshold into serious practicality in the last ten years as a form of commuter transport.
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Hard News: Taking the stage in Mount Albert, in reply to EE,
Yes, it's a curious question: What will National voters do? Presumably decoupled from tribalism, they vote on their consciences, send signals, or whatever it is that people are meant to do with their teaspoon of political power.
We will soon find out. My money is on Ardern winning it easily.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to stever@cs.waikato.ac.nz,
Not sure what he’ll be doing for Uber, but their days of not-very-smart programming might be ending.
I can't speak for how it operates everywhere, either. Proper road network databases may be much more developed for them elsewhere. I'm surprised they don't just buy one from Google or one of the other vendors here, though.
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Not that I probably need to tell goforit this, but for the benefit of everyone else it needs to be known that no driver is ever actually presented this contract by Uber NZ people. Nor are they ever made aware that they will be contracting to a third party. As far as anyone knows from the presentations made, they work for Uber.
The contract is first presented when you have purchased your car, got your licenses and insurance in order, been induced and trained, and are ready to go. You attempt to go online with the app (that you’ve already installed), and find that it demands you click accept on the terms and conditions.
Yes, you read right. This business contract hides behind the terms and conditions acceptance for using the app, and the first day any legal driver would have been made aware of it is many months after they were induced to drive for Uber and had spent a significant amount of money getting ready to do so.
The drivers with no compliance whatsoever find out quite a lot quicker, of course. If they read it, they will also find that their contract is automatically voided by the fact that it says in it that the drivers must comply with the laws of their jurisdiction or the contract is voided.
Hence my quip above about whether the drivers are contractors at all. Are you a contractor if your contract is actually voided simply by you doing what you were advised by the staff was your job, having followed their advice about what is legal in NZ?
ETA: Also, are you a contractor if the other party actually does not exist? The laws of Amsterdam don't apply in NZ nor vice versa. So if Uber BV has no agency in NZ, is a contract to do business with them in NZ really a contract at all?
IANAL! I don't know the answer to this. It's possible that no drivers here really have any contracts at all. But even if they do, the Uber BV contract is so completely one-sided in stripping all rights from drivers and laying all responsibilities on them, that it barely matters. Except in so far as courts are concerned, of course. They're not going to even look at a contract until the parties in the contract are present. So far Uber has never presented any party that claims to be the party to which the drivers are contracted.
I don't know how much longer they can get away with this. My bet is "not much longer".