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.)