Who should share with whom?

Should e-bikes share bikepaths (with bikes and plain people) or the road (with motocycles and cars)? No answer is pre-ordained; e-bikes are new and, e.g. California bans them from bike-paths (but allows them twice the horsepower). We need to decide who to mix with whom ride what.

One way to visualize the mix is in terms of power:


Sorry the chart is so big -- I had to stretch it to get walkers, bikes and e-bikes to show at all as google docs doesn't seem to allow exponential scales. The disproportion is obvious, and e-bikes belong with the bikes and peds. All values in horsepower as this is a unit of power drivers and motorcyclists understand and value. (350 watts doesn't impress.)

Assumptions: The e-biker has his/her own bicyclist's power plus the e-bike's .47 horsepower. The average for cars is U.S. for 1997; a 500 cc Suzuki serves as "the average motorcycle". Car should be lower for Vancouver, I suspect, but most of the motocycles I ask about (waiting for traffic) are bigger.

But speed and weight matter too.

E-bikes vs I-pods: Second thoughts on sharing the Burrard Bridge

With just two lanes typically available, bike must share with cars or pedestrians (peds?). Some mode of transport -- the slower -- loses in each case. Here in Vancouver, it's illegal to ride on the sidewalk except when designated -- typically bridges but also the Stanley Park Causeway. This seems the right call to me: bikes are closer to cars -- in terms of speed, equipment, and mindset -- than they are to peds. Even if they weren't, the worst-off -- on the streets: peds -- deserve special protection.

In a previous post, I argued against moving bikes into the street on the Burrard Bridge. Now that I've acutually used the shared bike/ped sidewalk, I'm reconsidering. The current mix is dangerous. The nominal speed limit for bikes is 15kph; I've observed no bikes complying on the downhill and few on the uphill. And most of the peds are functionally deaf due to i-pods. (At least I've learned to spot the signature white headphones as a warning that my bell or shouting "On your left" won't work. The women who walked in front of my last evening was especially clueless. My brakes saved both of us but only just.

Near disasters are good teachers. I'll slow down, get an airhorn, and get some liability insurance. (I know it's not required; that's a problem -- for a later post.)

E-bike First Commute: No sweat

I rode my new e-bike to work today. Using a BionX kit I converted an old aluminum trail bike over the weekend. Apart from my mistakes, assembly went pretty well. It's not simple, but the only special tool needed as a torque-wrench.


The ride was surprisingly simple. I rode 20 km over two bridges each way from West Vancouver to to U.B.C. This is a beautiful ride and the e-bike lets one appreciate it much more than my non-e-bike did. I climbed the Lions Gate Bridge, passing a few fast guys in tights and stopped to take pictures at the top. (I usually can't stop, as I'm rushing to catch my bus.)

Next through Stanley Park, then the West End, over the Burrard Bridge and out along the beaches to the U.B.C. bluff (over Wreck Beach).

The e-bike is fast -- just 50 minutes coming home, when I avoiding the bike paths -- and seems much safer than my non-e-bike. For one thing, I can accelerate with the traffic, so I can merge better and make fewer drivers angry when I ride in centre lane. More on the advantages of regenerative braking in a later post.

Pro-Bikes but Anti-Hybrid

I commute with a human-diesel hybrid: biking the nice bits (Stanley Park and Vancouver harbor) and busing for the busy, hilly, boring bits of Vancouver. Unfortunately, City Council is planning to make my commute much more difficult, by restricting lanes of the Burrard Bridge bottleneck to bicycles.

As a bike commuter, people think I'd favor this change. They forget that many of us that use bikes to commute a ways (20 km in my case, from the far left shore in this picture focused on UBC) often use the bus to save time and sweat.

Vancouver is beautiful in summer, attacting many tourists. My summer bus often gets stuck in tourist traffic, forcing me to hop off early to escape the crowds and heat. With the new bike lane I'll likely need to bail out even earlier. At least I'll have a lane of my own to cross the extra bridge. (To climb it, I'm thinking of buying an Bionx e-bike. Any advice?)

Lesson for Technology & Ethics: It's easy to misidentify prospective winners and losers on a change in regulation. As a bike commuter, I'm likely counted a winner from adding a bike lane. Had someone asked, I'd have self-identified on the loser side.