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.
I disagree that forcing a few cyclists to drive in cars will increase the danger. People are accustomed to cars. You can hear them coming. Even electric cars have noisemakers to continuously alert people of their presence. They are also very easy to see and don’t drive down the very edge of a city street next to parked cars where they are hard to see.
If “a few” people swiching to ebikes makes everyone safer, where is this obvious donwtick in pedestrian injuries? Instead, it’s largely the same, yet people are now also being injured by ebikes. Bikes that can go 28 MPH, weigh 50 pounds, propelling a human that weighs at least a 100 pounds, to slam into a pedestrian that didn’t see them silently cruising down the egde of a city road.
As an ebike owner and “fuck cars” supporter, [I feel like] your whole comment is nonsense. You’re making shit up to support your narrative.
In the entire US, for instance, 8,000 pedestrians were killed by cars in 2021. That’s one every 66 minutes, not “thousands every single day”. Your statement is not even defensible as hyperbole because it’s grossly wrong but not by several orders of magnitude as if you had said “millions”. You intentionally chose a misleading, arbitrary, maybe-sort-of-plausible number to make a flawed point and the makes you intellectually dishonest. Fucking stop.
If cars are so easy to see and avoid then explain those thousands? The exact number is not important in this context, it’s a rhetorical point about the difference in scale which remains true. I tried to look up the exact numbers but I couldn’t find anything on e-bike deaths—probably because it’s just a nonissue. It’s likely to be several orders of magnitude smaller than the victims of cars to use your language.
Not many people have replaced cars with e-bikes—yet, so it’s not surprising we don’t see much difference. And we never will if the dishonest campaign against them wins.
Edit: also I just found this article on traffic violence that found 1.7 million people killed annually by cars… so yes thousand per day. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692324000267#s0160
Several orders of magnitude smaller than 8,000… So… 0.08 people? I do love your skill with numbers!
Exactly! Then why are you so adamant that it would instantly become worse if they had to drive again? Those 10s of ebike riders who chose not to drive aren’t going to suddenly kill 10s of people when back in cars. Given how many cars there are on the road, and the relatively tiny number of fatalities, the change would be 0.
I’m with you, fuck cars, but don’t argue with fake stats and severe exaggeration on important issues. It just makes your argument look bad.
(I don’t recall saying anything that assumed you own an ebike.)
EDIT: Ohhhh! No, I’m the ebike owner and fuck cars supporter. I was saying that I’m on the side of ebikes, but I didnt like your arguments. I can see now how my words weren’t clear. I edited my original comment to add “I feel like”.
Oh wow I didn’t realize several was always equal to exactly 5. Learn something new every day. And you again are pedantically assuming that this is meant to be an exact comparison when I literally said I don’t have the numbers—as far as I’ve seen, no one does.
My point is we’re shutting down a potential solution to pedestrian deaths before we’ve even proven that it’s a problem at all. But I will also say that just because pedestrian deaths are not declining doesn’t prove that e-bikes are not having an impact. Deaths have been rising for a while, perhaps they would have risen faster without e-bikes. Someone needs to do a study on this to find out instead of just panicking and banning everything.
Several is at least 5. I used the smallest possible value to give you the benefit of the doubt. smh.
First, that’s just incorrect, but even if it was then your use of it above was equally incorrect. Don’t know what your issue is but this conversation has gone far beyond usefulness.
“Just incorrect” unlike literally everything you’ve said in this conversation.