New Jersey is set to pass a bill that requires electric bike and scooter owners to acquire a form of liability insurance that doesn’t really even exist. The industry-backed bill would create more obstacles to owning low-speed electric micromobility vehicles that have positively linked to less car usage and fewer carbon emissions. Which is to say this bill sucks and I hope it fails. (It probably won’t.) Other states are also considering bills that would make it harder to own an e-bike. I guess its cheaper than building protected infrastructure to make things safer for everyone on the road.
Right, but I’m highlighting these are infrastructure level concerns, that take years to unwind. Changes to ebike legislation are quick.
I’m not advocating for this approach, or apologizing for it, but those tasked with safety have no means of changing the roads.
Well if road safety can’t be improved (which I reject) then it’s better to do nothing than implement a policy that makes things worse.
It doesn’t “make things worse” from.the perspective of the safety officials, who seek to reduce ebike collisions with pedestrians.
Do not shift the topic to cars vs pedestrians as that isn’t what we are discussing. We all acknowledge cars vs pedestrians is worse, but that is not relevant regarding legislation to get ebikes of paths.
Road safety can and should be improved, but as I said, is different people, different projects, different timelines.
But the goal of safety officials is not to reduce e-bike and pedestrian collisions. This is a (poor) method for achieving the real goal, which is improving pedestrian safety. And as I’ve pointed out, by preventing people from using e-bikes as a mode of transit, you force more people to drive, and this puts pedestrians in even greater danger. This is not changing the subject, this is pointing out the consequences of these proposed policies. And they are measured in injured and dead pedestrians.
My entire point is that these things are directly interrelated. You can’t just look at a single path in isolation when instituting broad and onerous rules on e-bike riders. If your point is that “that’s not the metric we measure” then you are measuring the wrong metric.
Once the broader safety issues around motor vehicles are solved, this will change the calculus and we may find that rules on e-bikes at that time improve safety. But today it is not so.
You are assuming control of follow on actions which isn’t available. You cannot, in this space, assume the ability to affect change beyond your current job/role/position.
For the last time: the people who did this cannot act on the reality that more ebikes is overall,long-term solution. They can’t change traffic. They can’t change roads. They can’t add ebike specific paths. It’s not how government works, and it’s not how individual employees complete their workweeks.
I’m absolutely not assuming that. Ignoring the fact that many of those things are directly under government purview, if we for some reason are hyper focused on some bureaucrat whose only role is to regulate e-bikes and nothing else, it’s still a bad idea to place restrictions on them. I feel like we’re talking in circles here. If your goal is to put people in more danger then go ahead and place restrictions on e-bikes. Otherwise do nothing. Those are the options and outcomes in this weird hypothetical. Not much else to say.