[buran77]

> should easily be handled by regular market forces

I think we've heard this blurb so many times it should be a joke to be ridiculed by now. It usually prefaces a story about some abusive, exploitative action.

> But at that point you're breaking the speed limit either way, so I'm still not convinced a peak power limit is reasonable.

That's why I said that enforcement at rider level is impossible. The burden to check if someone removed some governor is so high that it might as well not be regulated in any way. Or you heavily strengthen and give an even broader mandate to LEO, and I hear that's what everyone wants more of these days.

So the easy way around this is to regulate the manufacturing or sales. You limit the power of the motor, you implicitly limit how fast the bike can realistically go, and how much weight it can carry at speed. This makes things a little bit safer. If you need more, choose a different vehicle. You don't buy a Fiesta and then shout in the wind that it's not allowed to have 18 wheels and carry 35t.

> That nobody is enforcing the speed limit on bike lanes is an enforcement issue, and it doesn't get solved by having unnecessarily tangential laws

I get that you really want something but this isn't an argument. The laws aren't "tangential" they are very much on point, trying to keep a balance between usability and safety faced with practical reality. Not the wishy-washy "the market will handle it" or "I should get it because I want it and anyone stopping me is stupid". The law allows every kind of vehicle for every need, under the appropriate conditions. You just think your conditions for your needs come first. Some people ride like that so the "tangential laws" exist to protect others from them.

[trollbridge]

The “market handling it” would mean liability lawsuits followed by mandatory liability insurance, with insurers installing telemetry devices on an ebike to decide how much to charge you or even just drop you as an uninsurable risk altogether.

[throwaway173738]

In other words enough people would have to get hit and killed that there would be a huge series of lawsuits. In that scenario those people are still dead.

“The market handling it” is why there are hordes of cars with purposefully loud mufflers blasting past my house at many hours of the day. My state chose to make it illegal to build something like that but it’s perfectly legal to sell the parts. So the market did what the market does.

[close04]

> The “market handling it” would mean liability lawsuits

Amazon and Temu sell so much illegal and dangerous junk and no lawsuit changed this. People still get hurt or killed by battery fires, malfunctioning products, intoxication with all kinds of chemicals.

> followed by mandatory liability insurance

People complain that they have to wear a helmet. They won't be fine with mandatory liability insurance. The level of bike theft shows that bikes are notoriously untraceable, it's very hard or prohibitively expensive to enforce this.

> with insurers installing telemetry devices on an ebike

Raises costs, requires cloud services and connectivity, and the owner can still hack the antenna off or shield it and the bike is now permanently offline but with no way to detect that on the street.

[trollbridge]

Amazon and Temu aren't allowed to sell cars, because we still regulate our cars somewhat, so the cars that are sold in America and Australia and other places have to meet certain safety requirements. The manufacturer is also 100% liable for things like recalls or safety defects, regardless of which dealer sold it to you or if you bought car used.

You can say people "won't be fine with mandatory liability insurance". That's what it's "mandatory". If you get caught operating a vehicle without one, you might just well lose your vehicle and have it impounded on the spot, have to pay a hefty fine, and have to prove you have insurance before you're allowed to drive again.

Insurers can and do detect if your telemetry stops transmitting - for example, State Farm offers a substantial discount if you transmit telemetry. If you sign up for this and then yank the device out, they simply charge you a higher rate.

We also have things like "helmet laws". You can't (for example) operate a motorcycle in California without a helmet. If you do, you'll get pulled over and ticketed and are stuck being unable to ride it away until someone either brings you a ticket or you go for a nice long walk and get one yourself, with a high chance your bike gets impounded from the side of the road.

I don't know why the attitude persists that the government can't regulate things and enforce laws. They certainly can.

[close04]

Sorry but your post is all over the place. It's not nice to introduce random things in a conversation and force anyone who wants to respond to you to address all that randomness.

> I don't know why the attitude persists that the government can't regulate things and enforce laws. They certainly can.

Who said anything about government regulation? The latest part of the thread was about "the market" handling it, you yourself even said "with liability lawsuits", now you talk government regulation which is the opposite of that.

> Amazon and Temu aren't allowed to sell cars

Who said anything about cars? We're talking bicycles and other things people want to stay unregulated. They sell bad products and "the market" didn't handle it, not with lawsuits or regulation or enforcement. So many ebikes were catching fire in my complex while charging that the administration banned even storing ebikes in the underground parking or the individual storage units. The importer of the bikes (Amazon store?) was of course dissolved by that time.

> because we still regulate our cars somewhat

Who said anything about car regulations? That's exactly what people don't want with bicycles. Look at this discussion, people want to pretend even mopeds should still be called "just bikes" so they stay unregulated. The whole point of a bicycle is to be a simple unregulated vehicle with minimal capabilities. Not multi kilowatt motor vehicle that can carry heavy loads up a hill at speeds that most people barely cycle on the flat.

> You can't (for example) operate a motorcycle in California without a helmet.

Who said anything about motorcycles? You can operate a bicycle without a helmet because people weren't fine with mandatory helmet laws. Just like it will happen with "mandatory liability insurance and telemetry" for bikes. It might happen when we all live in a dystopia where everything you do is tracked, or for some bicycles that aren't really bicycles (mopeds and higher categories).

Whoever wants powerful motors or high carrying capacity should stop calling it "a bicycle" and call it a "moped" or "S-Pedelec". These already require insurance and a license plate. There are enough categories here [0] to cover all needs. Pretending everything on 2 wheels is a bicycle does cyclists a disservice and is like calling my car "an umbrella" so I'm allowed to take it everywhere with me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_category#EU_classifica...