Good idea - if you also cap car speeds at 15mph
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
243 points (97.6% liked)
Fuck Cars
12666 readers
2127 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The state of traffic already does that...
This makes no sense. A cyclist with a decent road bike can easily go faster than that.
I can go faster than that on the clapped out bike I bought when I was still in school. And I'm 45.
In the UK e-Bikes are limited to 15mph (in that the motor cuts out above that, so you can pedal faster if you want), and frankly that's fast enough. Plenty of idiots can't handle even that, and of course they don't use helmets either because fuck having your brain inside your skull, right?
It also depends on your definition of e-Bike, because I've also seen it applied to what are basically motorbikes with an electric engine. I think that sort of thing should require a license and test to be allowed to ride in public.
When I was younger and in better shape my average speed was 35-40kmh (about 20-25mph).
15mph seems frustratingly and uncomfortably slow. But then again, I’m not terribly familiar with e-bikes. I know that some only help you pedal and others are basically motorcycles, so lumping them all together doesn’t make sense.
Just for reference cause I was curious.
The average car speed in New York City varies greatly by location, but is generally quite slow. In Midtown Manhattan, the average speed has been recorded as low as 4.8 mph, which is slower than a brisk walk
Just build more and bigger sidewalks. In shenzhen and beijing, they often have 2 separated bike/moped lanes on either side of the road, a bike/scooter parking lane, and then like 20 feet of sidewalk you can also ride your electric moped on.
Take one or two of the traffic lanes to cover it. They have enough.
15 mph speed limit on roads? That is genuinely the dumbest thing I have read in forever. 15 on mixed use paths is still a kind of low limit, but why on earth should ebikes have a different speed limit on shared roads? Am I supposed to brake down every slight incline next time I visit NYC?
Classic legislating the out group from the in group. The idea that the justification in the text is that "ebikes are heavier than normal bikes [so less dangerous]" while at the same time having a higher speed limit for 2 ton pedestrian killers is insane.
load more comments
(3 replies)
view more: next ›