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.