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Comment by john-h-k | Hacker News Reader

> They're fixated on cyclists running red lights and stop signs, not distinguishing between different kinds of bikes

Absolutely agree this is silly and cities should be encouraging cycling.

> We want to encourage people to bike less and drive more

assuming you meant to flip this?

An e-bike that can even do 20mph comfortably is much closer to a moped than a bicycle, partly due to weight, and partly due to "ease of speed". Obviously a person can easily cycle 20mph, but it just isn't the kind of thing you do on in a crowded area. Very different when it is just a throttle. So grouping them in with bikes, rather than mopeds or similar, is just extremely silly

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> An e-bike that can even do 20mph comfortably is much closer to a moped than a bicycle

There are pedal assist ebikes hitting the market that are nearly indistinguishable from a road bicycle and weigh as much as a kitted out steel touring bike (i.e. ~35-40 lbs) and can comfortably do 20 mph.[0] I don't really think that's treading any sort of line of being close to a moped.

Also there are absolutely people riding analog bikes capable of having an average cadence of 15-20 mph who ride with reckless abandon on crowded mixed-used paths in cities - so maybe you don't do that, but there's a pretty large subset of cyclists who are doing that because biking is more of a sport activity than strictly pragmatic form of transportation. Bad bike path etiquette extends beyond ebikes

[0] ride1up is one brand making such bikes

Getting a pedelec bike to 20mph takes real effort unless cheats are involved - it's not really a moped. However there needs to be some honest classification that's global to handle the new spectrum from traditional bike to full on motorcycle and everything in between.

Depending on the country the motor cutoff is 32km/h, which means that speed is more accessible to your average rider than on a classic bike. And the elephant in the room is how compliant many e-bikes really are. Some even advertised how easy it is to remove (raise?) the limit.

Where I live I find cyclists to be the most reckless participants in traffic, way more than drivers and pedestrians. Cyclists never have to take even the most basic course even just in school to learn legislation or general rules. They always act like they own the road whether on the sidewalk among pedestrians, or on the street among cars. E-bikes just made this worse because everyone can cycle above their natural capabilities now.

But it's also clear that the "blast radius" of a cyclist is usually very limited compared to the damage a car can cause even with banal actions like opening a door at the wrong time. So I understand why their behavior is tolerated compared to when drivers to the same.

Also, reckless behaviour is self-limiting to some degree with bike-shaped transport (and scooters) as crashing tends to hurt a lot, whereas car drivers don't have as much skin in the game.

I don't completely disagree, but as a regular cyclist with maybe only slightly above average fitness, I can drop the hammer at an intersection and be at 22mph in 10 or 15 seconds. I also own an ebike with a throttle and it's not substantially faster off the line than my muscle, it's just easier to sustain high speeds.

> Absolutely agree this is silly and cities should be encouraging cycling.

They should be encouraging cycling, but not by making red lights a free-for-all.

I once lived on the corner of a pretty busy cycling street by the beach in Florida, with a stoplight in the intersection outside my window. We had these gigantic "trains" of cyclists regularly just blowing straight through red lights, because there typically wasn't a lot of traffic coming from the cross street. I remember one occasion where a car was entering the intersection from the cross street (car had the green light, major street had the red), and a huge train of about 20 bicycles at full speed ran the red light and slammed into the side of the car with a loud "thump thump thump thump thump thump..." Total wreckage. Busted bicycles all over the street after they fucked up, and the cyclists had the nerve to be irate. If I hadn't run out and started recording, the car driver probably would have been assaulted by these raging hotheads.

These guys need to obey traffic laws, too.

Idaho has the "potato" laws for bikes, and they typically work out pretty well. The laws were made with the observation that cars kill more cyclists than cyclists kill cars. So allowing bikes more freedom in the street is typically better for bike safety.

I don't see how cold this make sense. Pedestrians kill even fewer cars, should they be safer with even fewer restrictions? Perhaps let them walk on highways if more freedom means more safety?

If you design your streets for pedestrian safety that means pedestrians will be more safe. The reason we have so many pedestrian limitations is because we design streets for cars first, and put everything else to the side, making those everything else incredibly endangered.

More curves, lower limits, more stops. Cities that implement more bike-friendly and pedestrian-friendly design are safer for everyone, cars included.

I am sorry, I don't see how is this explaining how running red lights and stop signs makes bicycles safer. Another example - trains don't take much damage from the cars yet cars suffer catastrophic damage from trains, should cars be allowed to run through train crossing gates for more safety? If we put everything other than cars to the side, it means trains too, right? So why cars have to stop at the crossing gates, should not it be safer to remove any gates and/or traffic signals from the railroad crossings?

The excuse I've heard is that because cyclists need more energy to get back up to speed it's more acceptable for them to roll through lights / stop signs. Seems like pretty weak reasoning to me. But as long as it's a "rolling stop" I think there should be leeway given. It's very different to roll up to an empty 4 way stop and decide to roll through and deciding your "energy needs" trump everyone else trying to leverage an intersection. I'm of a similar belief with cars. A full two second pause at an empty 4 way stop is stupid. There is no safety issue with slowing down, seeing the path is clear and then proceeding.

I've personally run two red lights in the last month or so. Both were late at night where I'm literally the only visible vehicle on the road at a timed (no sensor) intersection where I was waiting for over a minute for the light to change. That's obviously a very different scenario than when you have to interact with other drivers on the road.

Yes, I don't find the "energy to start moving" explanation very rational too but whatever is the reason cyclists want to blow stops and reds, I am just confused how somebody can believe that it makes cycling safer. Especially the one given, that bikes are more fragile than cars, it just does not follow. I would not run a red light in a car for the fear of a side collision and my chances to survive one in a car are so much greater than on a bike.

They don't, my point is that if we design cities to be more friendly to bikes then those incidents go way down. The reason this is a problem is that we hyper-optimize for cars, so pedestrians and bikers are forced into worse situations.

Like, the reason pedestrians jay walk isn't that they're selfish, it's that the streets aren't designed for them and we put far too little crosswalks, with far too little protection. We can make the situation safer for everyone, a win-win.

It's not an us versus them type thing which is where I think most car design conversations go. When we de-prioritize cars, it helps everyone, including the cars.

A lot of things don't have to make sense for them to work. Idaho is solidly in the top half of states safest for bicycles. They are the 18th safest state for bicycles in the US.

You brought up some logic behind this law, so I thought you actually have seen some sense in this. Now it appears to be just the "having such a law in a low population state does not push it to the bottom of the safety so this law is great" argument. One should be able to see the fallacy of such an argument without even looking up what are the safest states for cyclists on top of Idaho and what kind of laws they have wrt stop signs and red lights...

Get on a bike in Boise, Idaho and "blow through a red light" (making sure to stop and yield to oncoming traffic, first). It's not necessarily as small as you might think. And you know, don't ride your bike on the interstate, because that would be totally stupid.

But you know, go downtown, and ride around a bit in traffic, on the greenbelt, etc. And you'll see the cyclists are typically going to make a better decision for themselves and others than cars will.

Like I said, it's fine. If you can't understand it, maybe go experience it first hand.

It could very well be that Idaho cyclists are the next step in human evolution and the laws and rules designed for mere mortals would only hinder their superior decision making, I have never been to Idaho so I would not know. Where I lived though, including such populous states as California and Texas, cyclists don't exhibit any advanced intelligence, they put themselves and others into dangerous situations all the time and fall and crash. E.g. I see someone riding on the wrong way of a double track every single time, usually it's several people riding next to each other and blocking the whole trail, but there are also solo cyclists getting on the left lane in corners. They do collide or slide off the track and fall, but it could be that they are doing something great but impossible to understand on my level of evolution.

> Obviously a person can easily cycle 20mph, but it just isn't the kind of thing you do on in a crowded area.

I've seen many road bikes do exactly this on a crowded bike path of pedestrians, scooters, and e-bikes. I've also seen e-bikes wait patiently to pass and slow down when there's traffic. I think proclaiming that e-bike riders are worse than road bike riders is patently false.

So it's not really an "e-bike" problem. It's really a speed problem.

Yea I switched my words around, thanks.

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