E-bikes are excellent urban mobility devices. It turns out they’re also really good for catching e-bike riding crooks up to no good. This is exactly what cops are doing.
While we’re talking about vehicles where almost no one follows the traffic laws, let’s ban cars, too!
(speed limits, safe passing and following distance, indicating on turns, staying off the phone, staying off bike paths, using the horn only in emergencies, coming to a complete stop at stop signs…)
Yes, they are. All traffic users disregard traffic rules, which increases the danger for others.
The groups only differ in which traffic rules they like to ignore and which other group of traffic users they endanger by doing so.
Cities aren’t built around e-bikes and the e-bike adoption rate, availability and all those things aren’t on par with cars. It’s just not the same. Unless you simplify it to “they’re used to move around”.
To say that laws should apply more to e-bikes because cities are designed for cars is both wrong and dangerous. You realize that the bike came before the car, right? That cities actually were built around bikes, horses, and …ugh… walking, long before the assembly line was even a twinkle in young Ford’s eye?
The poster is saying that if you are going to call out the operators of one for gross negligence, then the other should be called out as well. It is a very comparable situation and pretending that because cars are more ubiquitous, they should somehow be less restricted is a leap in logic that is rather ludicrous.
I don’t think they’re saying that. They’re hoping e-bikes get banned because of the issues they cause. Cars, regular bicycles and whatnot are sorta a lost cause at this point, they’re so crucial and numerous that it’d be really hard to ban them. So you have to deal them in other ways. Not so much for e-bikes which are new and nowhere near as numerous, so could feasibly be banned without as much issues.
It’s all well and good to consider them all equal and want to treat them as such, from a fairness point of view. But there’s big differences between them and in reality you’d have to take that into account and work with those differences. Even if it means being more lenient to one method.
Unless we’re talking about just pure hypothetical or fantasy scenario. Then it’s fine, don’t have to care about the differences then. But it’s good to keep things somewhat grounded imo.
The poster is saying that if you are going to call out the operators of one for gross negligence, then the other should be called out as well.
By all means. I’m just saying it’s not the same, for the (imo) obvious and well, now mentioned reasons.
pretending that because cars are more ubiquitous, they should somehow be less restricted is a leap in logic that is rather ludicrous.
Don’t know what you mean with less restricted. I don’t care if you ban all vehicles. I’m not advocating for some policy. Just saying it was a bad comparison because of the big differences.
“If you want to use rule-breaking as reason to ban a class of vehicle, you have to apply it to all vehicles”.
But you don’t have to. And you wouldn’t treat everything the same since they aren’t the same. It’s like saying when designing traffic routes, you have to treat every class of vehicle the same. Of course you wouldn’t, you’d consider prevalence, design goals, feasibility, need, all kinds of things.
While we’re talking about vehicles where almost no one follows the traffic laws, let’s ban cars, too!
(speed limits, safe passing and following distance, indicating on turns, staying off the phone, staying off bike paths, using the horn only in emergencies, coming to a complete stop at stop signs…)
The two situations are not really comparable.
Yes, they are. All traffic users disregard traffic rules, which increases the danger for others.
The groups only differ in which traffic rules they like to ignore and which other group of traffic users they endanger by doing so.
Cities aren’t built around e-bikes and the e-bike adoption rate, availability and all those things aren’t on par with cars. It’s just not the same. Unless you simplify it to “they’re used to move around”.
To say that laws should apply more to e-bikes because cities are designed for cars is both wrong and dangerous. You realize that the bike came before the car, right? That cities actually were built around bikes, horses, and …ugh… walking, long before the assembly line was even a twinkle in young Ford’s eye?
The poster is saying that if you are going to call out the operators of one for gross negligence, then the other should be called out as well. It is a very comparable situation and pretending that because cars are more ubiquitous, they should somehow be less restricted is a leap in logic that is rather ludicrous.
I don’t think they’re saying that. They’re hoping e-bikes get banned because of the issues they cause. Cars, regular bicycles and whatnot are sorta a lost cause at this point, they’re so crucial and numerous that it’d be really hard to ban them. So you have to deal them in other ways. Not so much for e-bikes which are new and nowhere near as numerous, so could feasibly be banned without as much issues.
It’s all well and good to consider them all equal and want to treat them as such, from a fairness point of view. But there’s big differences between them and in reality you’d have to take that into account and work with those differences. Even if it means being more lenient to one method.
Unless we’re talking about just pure hypothetical or fantasy scenario. Then it’s fine, don’t have to care about the differences then. But it’s good to keep things somewhat grounded imo.
By all means. I’m just saying it’s not the same, for the (imo) obvious and well, now mentioned reasons.
Don’t know what you mean with less restricted. I don’t care if you ban all vehicles. I’m not advocating for some policy. Just saying it was a bad comparison because of the big differences.
No, I’m simplifying it to “If you want to use rule-breaking as reason to ban a class of vehicle, you have to apply it to all vehicles”.
Or even shorter: “Don’t ban e-bikes for bullshit reasons”
But you don’t have to. And you wouldn’t treat everything the same since they aren’t the same. It’s like saying when designing traffic routes, you have to treat every class of vehicle the same. Of course you wouldn’t, you’d consider prevalence, design goals, feasibility, need, all kinds of things.
Simplifying too much is a bad thing.
But the comment I answered at the beginning of this chain did.
They’re applying it to e-bikes. They said nothing about being an universal policy that affects any other vehicles the exact same way.