what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Electrically assisted bikes, trikes, etc. that are legal in the UK
kwackers
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Re: what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Post by kwackers »

stodd wrote:Ah, if we limit cars to 12mph (assisted, they can go faster downhill or if you can push) and bikes to 15.5mph we get much better safety and can persuade more commuters out of their cars.

If only...

IME there has to be a fairly significant carrot OR a very large stick before people will give up their cars.
Worst example I know of was a consultant who lived over the road from me. It's a 2 mile drive to the hospital, but less than a miles walk and the walk avoids all the roads and takes a nice shortcut along the canal (paved I might add).
In the morning that 2 mile drive would take between 15 and 30 minutes sitting in almost stationary traffic yet he drove there day in day out.

You probably don't need to limit the speed. Just make it illegal to fit heaters and entertainment devices. :lol:
hemo
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Re: what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Post by hemo »

The 15.5mph limit & power limit in the UK was only aligned with Europe and other countries not too long ago as recent as April 2015 when the amendment became official , before then the UK power limit was 200w and max 12mph limit.
Last edited by hemo on 26 Jan 2021, 4:16pm, edited 2 times in total.
Jdsk
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Re: what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Post by Jdsk »

kwackers wrote:IME there has to be a fairly significant carrot OR a very large stick before people will give up their cars.

Yes. But afterwards some people find it surprisingly easy.

kwackers wrote:Worst example I know of was a consultant who lived over the road from me. It's a 2 mile drive to the hospital, but less than a miles walk and the walk avoids all the roads and takes a nice shortcut along the canal (paved I might add).
In the morning that 2 mile drive would take between 15 and 30 minutes sitting in almost stationary traffic yet he drove there day in day out.

Did he have to travel between sites during the day? Many do.

Jonathan
kwackers
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Re: what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Post by kwackers »

Jdsk wrote:Did he have to travel between sites during the day? Many do.

Jonathan

Possibly but I often cut through the hossie grounds on my way to various places and if he had gone somewhere else his car hadn't.

Obviously it's impossible to say with any certainty about an individual but it's not unusual to see people drive 400 yards to the shop and back for a pint of milk or a newspaper.
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[XAP]Bob
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Re: what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Post by [XAP]Bob »

As someone who commuted with electric assist for a few years...

I'd leave the speed limit where it is (no assistance beyond 15mph) but not limit the power significantly. The reason behind the thinking is to maintain a relatively high minimum speed (e.g. up that short sharp hill everyone seems to have at least one of on their common routes) rather than to have an electric motorcycle.

Could even specify a maximum acceleration (.5g?) along with the maximum speed, and have the controller sort that out rather than using a wimpy motor.
A shortcut has to be a challenge, otherwise it would just be the way. No situation is so dire that panic cannot make it worse.
There are two kinds of people in this world: those can extrapolate from incomplete data.
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CJ
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Re: what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Post by CJ »

hemo wrote:The 15.5mph limit & power limit in the UK was only aligned with Europe and other countries not too long ago as recent as April 2015 when the amendment became official , before then the UK power limit was 200w and max 12mph limit.

You're right about the power, that was 200W, but the motor cut-off speed was 15mph, only ½mph slower than the current 25kmph. Oh, and there wasn't any requirement to pedal in order to get power. P.S. you're still allowed power without pedalling, but only up to 5kmph, as walk-assist when pushing the heavy bike up hills too steep for the motor to tackle with rider on board.

FWIW I think UK got it right in the first place. 200W is enough. Very few people can pedal continuously with more than 200W. I can manage it for a few minutes only, when faced with a short, steep hill. When younger I could maintain a bit over 200W for maybe half an hour up a long hill, but 250W is a LOT for anyone, except in short bursts. So what you already have is more like a pedal-assisted motor-cycle. Anything over that is a moped for sure. If you want to talk about those please go find a mopeds forum!

As for the 15.5mph cut off, that's fair enough. It's a pretty good speed on the flat. True, it only requires about 150W to maintain and a strong rider on a light road bike will go a bit faster, but electrical assistance was never intended to keep you up with a group of stronger riders intent on riding as fast as they comfortably can. If it's a social group that welcomes users of e-bikes, it should moderate its speed on the flat accordingly. Downhill of course, gravity takes over and the e-bike user will go just as fast as anyone else. And uphill the e-bike will regain all the ground it lost on the flat, and then some! Perhaps that's why some people's clubmates don't wait on the flat, maybe they're sick of being overtaken on the hills?
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CJ
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Re: what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Post by CJ »

[XAP]Bob wrote:As someone who commuted with electric assist for a few years... I'd leave the speed limit where it is (no assistance beyond 15mph) but not limit the power significantly. The reason behind the thinking is to maintain a relatively high minimum speed (e.g. up that short sharp hill everyone seems to have at least one of on their common routes) rather than to have an electric motorcycle.

Could even specify a maximum acceleration (.5g?) along with the maximum speed, and have the controller sort that out rather than using a wimpy motor.


There's nothing wimpy about 250W. I'd be delighted if I could pedal with as much power as that, for an hour rather than a couple of totally knackering minutes!

It sounds to me like you had a rather primitive e-bike with a hub-motor rather than a bottom-bracket drive, where the motor also benefits from gearing, thus maintaining the optimum rpm at which it actually produces those 250W.

The reason America allows e-bikes to have much higher power is they are still using hub-motors. As the rpm goes down the torque does not go up as much, so the motor becomes less powerful at the same time as the gradient demands more. The only way to stop the motor overheating and cutting out is to specify a vastly over-powered motor in the first place. It's like how America used to design their cars: with only three gears (because the Wilson epicyclic was easy to automate) and a huge gas-guzzling engine!
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kwackers
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Re: what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Post by kwackers »

CJ wrote:but electrical assistance was never intended to keep you up with a group of stronger riders intent on riding as fast as they comfortably can

What was it intended for?
I thought it was a generic thing, meant to apply for a wide range of purposes...

I think it's difficult to try to compare electrical motor power with leg power.
They have different torque curves and different limitations.

My issue with a long commute that I needed to be quickish is one of fatigue.
I can easily best the bike over a few miles, possibly even over the whole distance but day in day out it wears me down, I'm hot and sweaty when I get in and quickly find the car getting more and more attractive.
Most of my journey is in excess of 15mph and has very few stops, fortunately a bug in the controller means by a slightly convoluted method I can defeat the speed limit on a temporary basis.
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CJ
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Re: what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Post by CJ »

kwackers wrote:
CJ wrote:but electrical assistance was never intended to keep you up with a group of stronger riders intent on riding as fast as they comfortably can

What was it intended for?
I thought it was a generic thing, meant to apply for a wide range of purposes...

Speaking as the CTC Technical Officer and representative on BSI and CEN committees at the time of transition from the original UK regulations to the current European Standard, now recognised by ISO... Electrical assistance was conceived as something to help less able people to cycle as easily as a typical able-bodied rider, to lower the bar of entry into everyday cycling, so that less fit individuals might more easily use cycling to improve their health and to broaden the appeal of cycling from areas that are flat, also to places that are not. For it is a fact that even in cycling-friendly countries like Germany, cycling is far less popular in hilly cities like Stuttgart than flat ones like Bremen. E-bikes are changing that rapidly.

We were deliberately careful not to let EAPCs be particularly attractive to young and able-bodied people. The motor cutout speed was nevertheless set at quite a high speed compared to the typical speed of an able-bodied person riding on a flat road (in countries where cycling has NOT been boiled down to a hardcore of cycling enthusiasts, but remains an everyday movement of the masses), which is actually closer to 20kmph than 25. It was envisaged (and the Standards were written on this assumption) that the motor's contribution would taper off over those last five km per hour. I remember the difficult discussions in which specifying exctly how power should taper off turned out to be too controversial, so we ended up with a fudge of good intentions in which there is nothing actually to stop a manufacturer delivering the full 250W up to 24.9999kmph! So in general, you're already getting more push at a higher speed than you were intended to get.

Nobody, as I can recall, initially envisaged how electrical assistance would overcome the sweaty clothing problem of cycle commuting by able-bodied riders, or enable them to commute further than they already did. But I agree that's a worthy additional benefit.

It was certainly not envisaged that electrical assistance would have any particular role in group riding. But if it helps some people keep up with some groups, that's no bad thing either. The way it works with groups is that whilst the e-riders may be a bit slower on the flat, they are a whole lot faster up the hills! Whether the e-bike is faster or slower overall, depends entirely on the terrain and the level of cooperation between the e-rider and the group. If the group does not moderate its speed on the flat so you can keep up, maybe it's not the group for you! If we wanted to specify an e-bike for group riding it probably would have a higher motor cut-off speed, but also a much less powerful motor, so as not to outpace normal riders too badly uphill. Such assistance would obviously have to be geared just like human pedalling, which was hardly an option when these regulations were first envisaged, but commonplace now. A hundred watts should be plenty with a wide range of gears and a bit of input from the rider too. Is that what you want? Whatever, nobody is seriously looking at changing these basic parameters.

With the benefit of hindsight, looking at how e-bikes - even with the current restrictions - are replacing regular bicycles in the streets and on the cyclepaths of Europe, we seem to have set the motor power and cut-off speed a bit too high already. But the genie is out of the bottle and will not be put back.

So it's a good thing that recent studies show e-bikes, far from reducing the amount of excercise people take, tend rather to increase the number of hours spent cycling. Probably not the effort though. For now I'll continue to get the full workout of hauling my body up the 1:5 hill on which I happen to live; and you can't tell me that does not keep me stronger than a motor would! But I'm glad that motors are there for me when I can't do that anymore. I'm hoping to hold that off until I'm 70.
Chris Juden
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stodd
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Re: what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Post by stodd »

Thank you very much for that very informative reply.
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Re: what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Post by peterb »

CJ wrote:It was certainly not envisaged that electrical assistance would have any particular role in group riding. But if it helps some people keep up with some groups, that's no bad thing either. The way it works with groups is that whilst the e-riders may be a bit slower on the flat, they are a whole lot faster up the hills! Whether the e-bike is faster or slower overall, depends entirely on the terrain and the level of cooperation between the e-rider and the group. If the group does not moderate its speed on the flat so you can keep up, maybe it's not the group for you!

- in a perfect world, yes, the group should and will adjust it's speed 'to the speed of the slowest rider'- assisted or not. In reality it's difficult if you are the only rider not able to ride at the speed of the group - especially if in the past you had no problems keeping up and taking one's turn on the front. Most people I rode with were understanding but I found it awkward to expect the group to slow down on my behalf every ride. That's life, of course, but from a purely selfish point of view another 2 or3 mph assistance would have been helpful.
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Re: what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Post by kwackers »

CJ wrote:Nobody, as I can recall, initially envisaged how electrical assistance would overcome the sweaty clothing problem of cycle commuting by able-bodied riders, or enable them to commute further than they already did. But I agree that's a worthy additional benefit.
<snip>
So it's a good thing that recent studies show e-bikes, far from reducing the amount of excercise people take, tend rather to increase the number of hours spent cycling. Probably not the effort though. For now I'll continue to get the full workout of hauling my body up the 1:5 hill on which I happen to live; and you can't tell me that does not keep me stronger than a motor would! But I'm glad that motors are there for me when I can't do that anymore. I'm hoping to hold that off until I'm 70.

Unintended consequences.
Two extremes: Assume everyone will want one, assume nobody will want one and plan accordingly.

I'm a fan of small, lightweight EV's. For example I think 30mph quadricycles should have as much red tape stripped away as possible to make them attractive and get people out of cars.
Best case, everyone has one and if nobody wants one then it doesn't matter that the red tape has been stripped away.

The problem with my commute was it was 42 miles and at 60 years old unless I did it every day then my fitness would slide back and it'd be a chore that quickly ends up as needing a day or two rest between trips, and once I rest my fitness spirals downwards...
So I very quickly got to a point where I was doing it once a week, then once a fortnight, once a month and then just now and again.
I still cycled perhaps 4 miles a day to the station and back.

When I converted my tourer to etourer status I could do the whole distance again, it still took a couple of months to get a level of fitness that allowed me to do it without feeling knackered at the end of the day but suddenly those 4 miles became 42 miles and I did push myself moderately hard over the distance.
Am I as fit as I would be had I cycled without the motor? Of course not, but that's unrealistic. But I'm a lot fitter than when I was just cycling 4 miles.


Having said that I think my bike has been out twice in the last year, exercise is now jogging and the ebike is unlikely to be needed until I'm old and frail so is in the process of being converted back.
Even if the assist limit was removed I wouldn't benefit but having had the experience I still think it's by far the best option.
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CJ
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Re: what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Post by CJ »

kwackers wrote:
CJ wrote:Nobody, as I can recall, initially envisaged how electrical assistance would overcome the sweaty clothing problem of cycle commuting by able-bodied riders, or enable them to commute further than they already did. But I agree that's a worthy additional benefit.

...The problem with my commute was it was 42 miles...

:shock:
Even if that's the round trip, it's an unreasonably long commute for cycling, even with electrical assistance.

I count myself a keen cyclist but when CTC relocated the office twice as far from where I lived, making the round trip 25 miles, I went from every single day including snow, to become a fair-weather commuter - and not every day even then. Had I got an e-bike, I might have gone that far every day, but no further. And if that's the limit for someone as keen as me, I can't imagine the non-enthusiast general public going further.

Forty-two miles is a driving distance, always will be. The appropriate low-carbon technology for people who want or need to live that far from their work is a more comprehensive, fully electrified train network and light electric vehicles of various descriptions. For those who want to pedal at the same time that could be speed-pedelecs. But these should always be regulated as they already are, as mopeds, and not regarded as some kind of pedal cycle. The facts that one has to move one's legs to turn the motor on or that a tiny number of elite athletes may be able to pedal a racing bike just as fast, do not make them the same kind of traffic as pedal cycles.
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Re: what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Post by SA_SA_SA »

hemo wrote:The 15.5mph limit & power limit in the UK was only aligned with Europe and other countries not too long ago as recent as April 2015 when the amendment became official , before then the UK power limit was 200w and max 12mph limit.

Even Northern Ireland has finally got round to legalising E bikes as bicycles...in May 2020.. .
https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/electric-bikes-electrically-assisted-pedal-cycles
:)
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Re: what power/speed would you like if no regulations

Post by SA_SA_SA »

cj wrote:...
We were deliberately careful not to let EAPCs be particularly attractive to young and able-bodied people. ....


Wouldn't an electric bike and trailer mean lots of people who wouldn't otherwise consider it, would be happy to try towingtheir weekly shop home etc rather than use the sledge hammer of an electricity guzzling electric car? And thus perhaps not consider they 'need' a car.
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