[Retric]

Actually both are a problem. We got reflectors + bike helmet laws, and little else.

At a minimum any vehicle going 15+ MPH should be making enough noise to get people’s attention.

Personally I’d like to see insurance and licensing requirements on any e-bike with more than 50w of assistance. Because constantly going moderately faster means dramatically more danger as KE = V^2. So going a little bit faster and slightly less in control can be a lot more dangerous to others.

[Panzer04]

Ultimately, anything is better than driving around in a 2T vehicle. Making it harder to ride bikes increases the barrier to entry and hence discourages their use - and the alternative all too often is a car.

Cars are so much more likely to kill people that I think you'd increase road casualties by making the alternatives harder to use. Yes, an ebike is faster, heavier and less safe than a conventional bike. No, an ebike is nowhere near as dangerous as a car, and in general I don't think they should be regulated. The current thresholds most places are setting (250W/25kph or thereabouts) are plenty conservative anyway.

Tangentially, this is why it's also good to give bikes their own space. They are not pedestrians, and they shouldn't be mixing with pedestrian traffic. That's why they're on the road. They act more like a car than a pedestrian.

[Retric]

> give bikes their own space

In a 2D layout there’s going to be an intersection between pedestrians, bikes, and buses etc.

> anything is better than driving around in a 2T vehicle

While your gut feeling is that discouraging use is harmful the statistics are more questionable.

In the US, statistically E-bikes are roughly as dangerous as cars on a per mile basis. It’s got almost nothing to do with the bikes themselves and is almost totally related to the infrastructure and how people use them. The rates people on bikes ignore basic traffic safety and do things like speeding between stopped cars and then going through a red light is insane. Further, they are directly used around pedestrians with little concern for people’s safety.

PS: There’s lots of ways to slice these numbers, but we don’t actually know the exact numbers for miles biked per year.

[Panzer04]

I don't have evidence to back my claims, but it seems disingenuous to compare ebike and car miles. ebikes are predominantly used in busy areas with lots of other traffic, cars will rack up a ton of miles on highways with much reduced per-accident risk (albeit the accidents are probably more severe in that environment)

If we're going to talk anecdotally, I think we need to read between the lines. Many locations in the US don't have good support for bike riders beyond telling them to ride on the road. This is going to encourage/force many to ride (unsafely) on the footpath because they don't want to share space with cars, and thus into conflict with pedestrians.

I'd like to see a breakdown of ebike accidents between them and pedestrians vs them and cars. I would bet that the vast majority of accidents are into (or from) cars. Almost all of the fatal accidents are almost certainly from accidents with cars as well.

You could try regulating them, but that's not going to fix the core issue that in many places they are expected to share space with cars, and cars are just plain more dangerous than everything else.

Also, I will point out that even if bike riders are supposedly less law-abiding (maybe, I don't know), the consequences are almost entirely isolated to themselves for doing so. They are simply far less likely to hurt someone else. The same is not true for heavy motor vehicles.

[Retric]

With cars there’s more fatalities per mile in rural areas than urban ones. For pedestrians being killed that flips but not by a huge degree.

It seems counterintuitive that despite being human car interactions being vastly more common in urban areas you see so many rural fatalities but accidents occur in unusual situations.

> They are simply far less likely to hurt someone else.

There’s nuance here. They are more likely to injure a pedestrians in a bike pedestrian crash. However cyclists will be more likely to die because they end up in traffic after an accident.

Old people just don’t handle falls well.

[Panzer04]

Huh, interesting. I guess there's probably more accidents in urban areas, but thanks to lower speeds fewer fatalities.

I don't quite follow the second point - my presumption is that the chance of a bike hurting a pedestrian is lower than a car doing the same, and the chance of causing a fatality is, in general, reasonably low compared to getting hit by a car.

Stats would probably be hard to gather - there's probably quite a few bikes hitting pedestrians, but in all likelyhood many incidents go unreported if no one is injured.

[Retric]

A single bike accidents is less likely to cause serious injuries but statistically that’s offset by vastly more collisions.

IE the number of serious accidents depends on the number of accidents times the risk of each individual accident and bikes are far less segregated from pedestrians than cars.