kwackers wrote:I'll be honest, I'm curious as to what people want from transport.
(And I don't mean all the retired folk on here that can choose when and where they get to tootle quietly and slowly around, I mean actual "Transport").
You keep being dismissive of those you consider slower than you as if they didn't count, that's me, yet for the last two years I've made most of my income on a bike, averaging over a thousand miles a month and 80% of it urban. I've heard so many times in this thread about how slow I am that I was starting to develop a complex. So I had a look - Even on the Cycling UK Strava group (Which will be all cycling enthusiasts so probably a bit faster than the average) the average speed is around 13.7mph, mine is slightly higher than that, yet on the flat in neutral conditions I'll rarely see 20mph. The idea that it's a speed that most people cycle at simply isn't true, it's borne out by daily experience and every statistic I can find.
No one disputes that your specific journey would be enhanced by a faster e-bike, but the distance is twice the national average, you have a good train service to compare it to and the use of an EV as an alternative, hardly typical is it? We can't base the law on a few extremes, at either end.
Then you say you'd be happy to be excluded from using cycle paths on such a machine, yet there's no mechanism for doing that, neither have you proposed one. Except there is of course, you just won't accept the regulation that goes with it. I doubt you're speaking for many either, the speed e-bike users in the Netherlands fought hard not to be excluded.
Several times you've bought up the danger of speed differentials with motor vehicles - yet when asked you don't say what speed you think an e-bike would need to go to eliminate that. But the idea that everyone has to go at the faster speed to reduce that danger is anything but progressive, it's a complete dead end, it just further marginalises the slower users (As in nearly all cyclists) I don't know any organisation or campaigners that are calling for that, in most urban environments it's to everyone's advantage to lower those speeds and where that's not possible to engineer an environment where those at different speeds can safely co-exist, that's progressive. But if you really want to think ahead, the question is not how you travel but why. Your're looking for solutions on how to quickly travel 40 miles to work every day, it's the wrong question, it's the one people have been asking for generations. If that's the only question you can think to ask, you're always going to be disappointed by the answer.
Lastly, this idea that making e-bikes a bit quicker will encourage people out of their cars - lets see the evidence. You're very quick to dismiss any evidence that suggests otherwise, but you've presented nothing that supports it, so lets see it. A report I read recently (It may have been a few years old so you'll reject it) surveyed (So you'll probably reject it a second time) e-bike users and those considering becoming users as to why they used/might use one. 11% of the current users gave saving time as a benefit, that isn't as the main benefit, they could choose more than one, it was just as some benefit, of the potential users that went up to 13%. The reason for that isn't hard to work out, for most journeys it's insignificant, simple as that.