In my last post, I discussed Toronto e-bike users riding helmet-first into a wall of opposition from city officials who are empowered by the complaints of other road users. E-bikes aren’t fitting seamlessly into the existing infrastructure of road design, nor can that infrastructure be adapted to accommodate this radically distinct vehicle type – “OMG a bike with batteries!?!”

Animation of a spinning bicycle pedal (Wikipedia)

As a result, laws have been piled high to put the squeeze on e-bikes in an attempt to resolve this disharmony. No riding in bike lanes… pedals must not be removed… electric assist cannot exceed 32 km/h… blah blah blah. These may help, but I have a much neater solution; make e-bikers pedal. They’re supposed to be bikes for crying out loud! Do this by taking away hand-operated throttles and making their speed dependant on pedal movement. Full speed could be obtained at a very race-like cadence of 120 pedals per minute. Halving the cadence to a sedate 60 would halve the speed to a nice relaxing 16 km/h. Note that the pedals wouldn’t have to actually drive the wheels, they’d only need to trigger the electric motor.

Yes, this would be a restriction on e-bikes but guess what; all those other restrictions could be thrown out the window. Like sharing bike lanes. Since a pedaling requirement would clearly bring their behaviour closer in line to that of bicycles, they would be less confusing for motorists and no more dangerous to cyclists than… cyclists. No need to worry if they remove their pedals or upgrade their motors either; they would have nothing to gain as long as the level of electric assist is fixed to pedal cadence. Yet, all the existing benefits would remain, with the added benefit of forcing the user to move! Those who don’t want to pedal can go and earn their license and insurance and get the lazymobile of their choice, just like the rest of us.

The elegance of the solution is that it requires no changes to infrastructure, nor does it impose any new driving rules. It only marginally limits the technology of e-bikes but does so in a cohesive manner with respect to other transportation modes. Additionally, making e-bikers pedal distinguishes them from motorcyclists, for the sake of easing both traffic enforcement and collaboration between different road users.

Which of these e-riders is more likely to have a suspended driver’s license?

As things stand right now e-bikers are getting the best of both worlds; cheap speed for no effort at all. In fact, e-bikes in their current form have gained a reputation for giving an easy transportation solution to both alcoholics and road warriors who had previously lost their licenses. Now I hasten to point out that those types aren’t representative of the majority of e-bikers, who are undoubtedly as civil and considerate as, well, drivers (wait, did I just say that?), but it only takes a few bad apples to ruin an image for everybody.

Yes, e-bikes are the fresh-faced new kid on the block and they already need some image rehabilitation. So consider this post my pro bono image consultancy to you, e-bike world. Get your act together because I would like to see you flourish on our streets.

An electric bicycle chained on West 34th St. Manhattan. (Wikipedia)

Have you noticed them? They can be easy to miss since they look like your average bicycle or motor scooter, but they’re neither. They’re e-bikes; low-powered electrically driven bicycles, whose popularity is soaring all around the world and is only expected to accelerate.

In concept, e-bikes should be nothing more than bicycles with a limited amount of electrical drive to expand their appeal to a broader segment of the public. In principle this would provide most of the benefits of cycling over driving – reduced fuel dependency, congestion, pollution and costs – without forcing people to work up a sweat on the way to work. This seems like a laudable goal but in Toronto, and presumably in other similar markets, this surge in popularity is beginning to cause friction between e-bikers and other road users, who were beginning to give e-bikers the stink-eye for their speed and/or recklessness. This left officials with no choice but to intervene before things started to seriously degrade into outright stare downs! This article in the Toronto Sun illustrates quite nicely the frustrations from different perspectives.

So what’s going wrong?

Consider that our transportation infrastructure has been designed for generations mainly around just two modes of transportation; driving and walking. So we have streets, and sometimes we have sidewalks. The way we’ve always thought about mobility makes it very difficult for new transportation modes to be easily added to existing traffic. Road users in many developing countries have grown accustomed to sharing the road with a broad variety of vehicles, whether they be horse carts, tuk-tuks, cars, trucks, bicycles, or farm vehicles. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the conflict with e-bikes doesn’t seem to exist there.

In recent decades, there has been a trend to attempt just that (more options to get around is a very good thing) by adding finer and finer levels of segregation to our roadways for each vehicle type. These are seen in the form of dedicated streetcar lanes, exclusive bus ways, HOV lanes and bike lanes, all of which carve up the landscape alongside regular roadways and sidewalks.

This variety can be liberating in that it offers choice, but the approach has limiting side effects as it can lead to confusion about the rules, and it forces us to choose only amongst options that have been anticipated and accommodated for by urban planners. With their highly structured approach, they have the impossible task of trying to provide just the right type of road that suits each neighbourhood’s preferred travel modes, looking ahead several decades as best they can.

In effect, the transportation network is locked down, unsuited to anything new like the e-bike. City councillors have been trying to accommodate them with, of course, nothing other than their own specifically disjointed set of rules and limitations. For example, e-bikes present similar risks to road users as scooters due to their speed and weight, but they aren’t required to have licenses or insurance. Similarly, riders are supposed to follow the same rules as cyclists, but they are banned from cycling lanes. Where’s the rationale?

In a nutshell, there are three components to this transportation problem. We have first of all a fixed infrastructure, which is at odds with the second; ever changing technology, mediated by the third; layers of administration in the form of imperfect new road rules.

What matters though, is a solution. What might it be? This question will be the subject of our next post, so stay tuned!