micromobility - Bikes, scooters, boards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
Ebikes, bicycles, scooters, skateboards, longboards, eboards, motorcycles, skates, unicycles, heelies, or an office chair: Whatever floats your goat, this is all things micromobility!
"Transportation using lightweight vehicles such as bicycles or scooters, especially electric ones that may be borrowed as part of a self-service rental program in which people rent vehicles for short-term use within a town or city.
micromobility is seen as a potential solution to moving people more efficiently around cities"
Recall warnings available here.
Feel free to also check out
It's a little sad that we need to actually say this, but:
Don't be an asshole or you will be permanently banned.
Respectful debate is totally OK, criticizing a product is fine, but being verbally abusive will not be tolerated.
Focus on discussing the idea, not attacking the person.
view the rest of the comments
Basically until my 30's, there were essentially three categories of 2-wheeled vehicle:
e-bikes that try to push the boundries of these rules are a problem, because they encourage unsafe behavior like riding a machine that goes as fast as a moped on a walking trail. "It's a pedal assist!" he says, having just shattered a pedestrian's leg in a 32mph head on collision on a greenway.
I don't think I personally support use of an e-bike beyond class 1 as anything but a moped. Like, a moped with a 35cc engine that can go 20mph tops is still classified as a moped, why should electric propulsion rather than gas propulsion change that?
I think it's disengenuous to compare an e-bike to a 1000cc motorcycle. An Aprilia RS50, with it's 49cc engine, 6 speed transmission and top speed of 55mph, is by North Carolina law a motorcycle. It controls like one, it behaves like one, and it should be treated like one.
A lot of these e-bikes are more like mopeds than bicycles, and should be treated as such.
My idea: More electric mopeds! And more electric motorcycles! I want an electric motorcycle with equivalent performance (and range) of my old Ninja 250. Weird thing is, nobody seems to even try to make such a thing, every electric motorcycle I'm shown is an attempt to replicate the acceleration of a 650cc bike that'll barely get you out of shouting range.
In most countries, <50cc scooters have no liscense requirements and therefore quite popular. They're not popular in the US because they also have the requirements of a 1000cc bike.
The core issue here is that motorbikes are overregulated in the US compared to cars.
My perspective is biased because I've only lived in car-hell where it was extremely dangerous to ride a motorbike, and places where riding ~<150cc motorbikes and high power electrics on bike paths or even sidewalks, at relevant speeds, was perfectly acceptable, and its not uncommon to see electric scooters doing 35 on a road or 8 on a sidewalk.
Maybe the solution is to have speed limits for sidewalks and bikelanes.
Yeah, no. That's not the solution.
I have quite a lot of hands on experience in a couple states in America regarding scooters and smaller motorcycles, at a time when scooters (the legal term used here is "moped") did not require any licensing, registration or insurance to ride on the road. Indeed, mopeds were sometimes called "liquor cycles" because you'd find them driven by those who have lost vehicles or licenses to DUIs.
Mopeds aren't popular choices for transportation in large parts of the United States because they are not suited to the transportation needs of typical Americans.
In very dense cities, you're probably better off walking and/or using public transport, because you're going to be sitting in traffic on that moped.
In your smaller urban environments, you might get by with a moped, but even then there's enough 45mph stroads that a moped is probably a poor choice. The ~150cc twist-and-go scooter that is highway capable would be a decent choice but that's legally a motorcycle.
In suburban environments or less dense, your trip to the grocery store is probably down a section of highway. A moped is dangerously slow and carries way too little cargo for a typical American grocery run.
Which is why I traded for my Aprilia RS50. Which is a rare bike in the United States, though it is (or was) common in Europe. This thing was a 6 horsepower superbike; it was built like a MotoGP race bike, because that's exactly what it is, it's used in the most junior bracket of MotoGP racing, you graduate from there to 125cc and then on up. In Britain, they're restricted to 30mph and used as, like, training bikes. A young teenager can ride one with those L plates for awhile before graduating to a higher license that allows higher speeds and more powerful engines. So, on that basis I can assert you are exactly wrong, smaller motorcycles are popular in Europe than they are in the United States because they are over-regulated; an artificial market is created for them. Said artificial market does not exist in the United States.
The distances Americans have to travel, cars are infinitely safer and more useful. I've walked this walk. I commuted by both scooter and small bore motorcycle. I've crashed every bike I've owned, single-vehicle lowsides every one. I've ridden in all weather. I rode my motorcycle around a small college campus, and with a 36 mile commute to work. I've done long distance riding. It ain't for everyone.
To get people to start riding bicycles, even electric assisted ones, as a default instead of cars in the United States? You wouldn't get it done if you rubbed Aladdin's lamp, it would take more than three wishes. You'd have to change the landscape. The absolute wrong way to do it is just insist that, somewhere else in the world, riding power bikes on the sidewalk is okay, so it should be here, too. No, what happens if you try that is some 15 year old crashes into a pregnant woman on the sidewalk going 25 mph, she miscarries on the spot and all three of you go to prison for abortion.