20 km/hr*, we don’t use miles
Thank you. I was wondering what it meant
12 mph = 20 km/h or kph
A woman told the programme: “This is all about cyclists on motorised bicycles, so I should think you would do something about motorised cyclists. Make a rule for them and not for all cyclists.”
+1
Half of the issue is that many motorised bicycles go faster than the 25 km/h they’re allowed to, anyway, plus all the old people who don’t have the reflexes, eyesight etc. anymore to safely control a 25 km/h vehicle on a bicycle path. It’s very rare that people that go fast on regular bicycles are a serious issue.
There doesn’t need to be a new rule for motorized bikes on bike lanes because there are already very clear rules. Max 25 km/h, not allowed to have autonomous support, max 250W, manufacturer has an obligation to prevent tampering.
Those rules are legislative in the whole of the EU.
The issue is with the enforcement of the rules. Not only in the streets, but also at the importer.
The issue is also with how the rules are written.
The max 250W refer to continuous motor power over 30 minutes.
Here’s how that is measured to determine if a motor is legal:- The motor has a temperature of 25+/-5°C at the start of the test.
- It is then supplied with the power the manufacturer says is closest to its maximum continuous power.
- The power at the crank is measured and its average must not exceed 250W during the test.
- After 30 minutes, the motor must not have warmed up by more than 20K.
So a manufacturer can have their motor tested at 250W and passed, even though it can supply 1000W peak power.
And all they need to do (legally, mind you) to supply 1000W continuously is add some cooling fins.You are correct that the power of 250W is not very strictly defined in the standards. However, for the maximum speed there is a clear specification or 25 km/h with a maximum tolerance of 10%.
Regarding the power, yes it’s true that the bike standard EN15194 allows for some creativity to boost the power (not the speed) and many ebike systems do this. However, it seems that lately this is getting out of hand with some system manufacturers offering motors with more than 1000W of peak power. This raises the question if the way the standard describes it, might be modified in the future to better align the product with the vehicle class. The whole epac vehicle class was initially meant to help people who need pedal support to cycle. The epac class was intentionally created and classified as a bike instead of a motor vehicle to promote public mobility and health. And you could make an argument that a 1000W electric bike abuses that class for a different purpose.
The movement to tighten the regulation is already underway.
And it has a good chance of succeeding, since Bosch is greasing palms to get it passed.
Of course they’ll design their proposal in a way that’ll also shut out their Chinese competition.
There is no way for a manufacturer to completely prevent tampering. There should be a fine if you’re caught bypassing safety guards.
For manufacturers, there is a difference between making something hard to tamper with, and not preventing it at all.
For instance, you can speed up a Bosch equipped bike but you need to install an add-on module from a controversial third party that messes with the CAN bus data.
Whilst on some Chinese import, you can just set the maximum speed in the display of the bike.
If it’s not designed to go faster, tampering with it wouldn’t do anything. The problem is these bikes are built for the fastest market and kneecapped, instead of having its own new model.
E-bikes are allowed to go faster than 25 km/h, it’s just that the motor has to stop helping beyond that speed. Important difference.
I don’t think that a general 20 km/h speed limit is the best choice. Maybe add tiers based on the type of path. Bike lanes on roads and bike paths without immediately adjacent foot paths could go pretty fast, bike paths separated from foot paths only by a line on the ground a bit slower, and shared foot/bike paths even slower. Maybe something like 30/20/15 km/h.
Before someone comments “but bike lanes on roads are also immediately adjacent to foot paths”: Yes, but so are roads without bike paths and cars are allowed 30 or even 50 km/h on those. It’s generally understood that roads are dangerous and need special consideration so I’d be willing to allow 30 km/h on bike lanes.
This is all about cyclists on motorised bicycles,
When I used to bike daily I would routinely hit almost 30 km/h. Today being older and wiser, I don’t see why that should be allowed in city bikelanes. We have many narrow bikelanes where there is only barely room for passing, on such lanes 20 km/h absolutely sound like a good idea for all, including people in good shape on race bikes and small mopeds that are allowed in the bikelanes.
Fair, roadracers and the like can certainly get fast enough to become a nuisance. The bike lane in the article looks fairly wide, though.
The bike lane in the article looks fairly wide, though.
Not all bikelanes are like that.
You can have more than one speed limit. e.g. 20 for narrow lanes, 25 for wide lanes.
“This is all about cyclists on motorised bicycles
I don’t think so. I regularly go 25 km/h on my normal bike without trying. 35 km/h if I try. And it’s not a racing bike in any way, it’s a regular used 300€ bicycle
People like you have existed in NL for decades, it’s clearly e-bikes that inspired this speed limit experiment.
E-bikes already aren’t allowed to go faster than 25km/h.
They are allowed. They just may not provide electric assistance above 25. But you can drive them 30 on muscle power perfectly legally
Sure but for most e-bikes it’s impractical to so so since they tend to be quite a bit heavier to pedal at that point than a regular bike.
Yes comrade chairman O7
Most countries have a ~10% tolerance anyway so even legal e-bikes are probably going 27/28. And there’s quite a lot of illegal ones.
And there’s a differenc between young+fit people going 25+ km/h, and 70+ people going that fast. Even a relatively healthy old person has generally worse reflexes and eyesight than a young person, and lots of old people are quite unhealthy.
For context, this is the place they’re testing the 20km/h speed limit at. There’s no reasonable explanation to go faster than 20 km/h there anyway, regardless of legal limits.
That’s rather important context.
The problem would then only be if they take a test made in a specific place with narrow paths and much traffic and apply it to all bikes everywhere.
Limiting cyclists to 12mph is like forcing people to crawl. It’s going to make cycling practically useless for transportation and exercise.
Seriously, I have to make a sustained conscious effort to ride under 12mph, it just feels unnatural, and I’m a fat out of shape old guy.
City roads are for transportation, not exercise. And 20 km/h is a little on the slow side, but hardly “useless” for transportation.
Ok, we can play that game. You are no longer allowed to drive anywhere faster than 12mph.
TBH I don’t like arriving sweaty, so I’d be fine with 20 kph, but only if it’s a general rule and not just me holding up traffic for no reason.
I’m rarely ever going below 21 kmh average (!) on my 16km commute. Of course I am going slow where it’s necessary and dangerous and try to be as responsible as possible. Nobody wants to get hurt. But using 20 km/h speed limits beyond local hot spots would be very unrealistic given a road bike easily reaches 40+ kmh on flat terrain without a mandatory speed gauge. And the latter is also a crucial obstacle. How should speed limits be enforced when people are not forced to mow their speed? And if they are not, what’s a number on a sign worth? I am guessing not much.
While I agree that a 20 km/h limit is too strict on a good bicycle path, no one should be doing 40 km/h on a path that’s shared with people going 10-15 km/h. Where I live, most roadracers just drive on the road.
Cycling on the road is not allowed in most cases in the Netherlands, if a bike path exists. Bike paths are usually signed with a round blue sign, which means the bikepath is mandatory for all cyclists.
Same in Germany but I agree nonetheless. Where there’s people, one (including me) should drive responsibly. It’s no different from car driving. We don’t speed in a narrow alley either.
For once the Italians have a reasonable rule that using bike lanes is mandatory only if they are not shared with pedestrians. Now to get them to stop walking on the separated bike paths…
Shared bike/pedestian paths are very uncommon in the Netherlands, and I don’t think there are any mandatory bikepaths that are explicitely shared with pedestrians.
I haven’t been able to bike for years because of health problems but my daily commute on a bad day with uphill in both directions was over 20 km/h on my old manual iron horse refurbished with internal gears.
It would be like putting a speed limit on promenades that you can only leisurely stroll and not even do a brisk walk.
That said, I think 20km/h sounds reasonable for e-scooters.
As a Dutchman, I’m not a fan of this proposed speed limit.
My natural speed at which I comfortably cycle is around 25 km/h, which is perfectly safe if you pay attention and slow down when it is necessary in order not to hinder your fellow road users. The issue is people who cycle recklessly without keeping other cyclists in mind, in my opinion.
Enforcement is the key. And we already have reckless road usage laws.
I much prefer the Belgian method, where they set a recommended speed limit with signs of 25 km/h on the bikepath. You can cycle faster, but that’s at your own risk.
Edit: E-scooters are not normally road legal on Dutch roads, so you don’t see many of them.
Technically there is a path for a manufacturer to get an e-scooter tested for compliance, making them road legal. But virtually no manufacturers go through that process, making them defacto illegal (with some rare exceptions here and there)
What is 20mph in sane units?
That seems ridiculously slow. I’m not a strong biker and I could easily do that for many miles. Especially somewhere as flat as the Netherlands.
The place where I live has a speed limit for bike streets, so entire streets that are designated for biking only, of 30 km/h. Maybe annoying to some, but if you think that 30 plus 30 equals 60 when two people approach each other, I mean that can do some serious damage. Most people I see driving bikes regularly travel only 15 km/h anyway.
Funniest thing though is, even if I drive 50 with my bike on a normal road, cars will still overtake me out of principle, even though that’s exactly the posted speed limit. And speed limits apply to bikes here as well.
To be honest 20 km/h sounds like a reasonable limit. But considering small mopeds here are allowed to drive 30 km/h in bike lanes, it just doesn’t seem like reasonable at all.
IDK if Netherlands have small mopeds that are allowed in bicycle lanes that can drive 30 or faster, but if they have, I don’t really see a rational argument why bicycles should have stricter rules?But for more fragile bicyclists the faster traffic from e-bikes or mopeds are absolutely a danger. My own 89 year old father has been hit by passing fast traffic in the bike lane a few times resulting in him crashing, one time resulting in a week long hospital stay.
It is only lucky that he didn’t break anything, effectively terminating his life as a healthy senior citizen.There really shouldn’t be 30 km/h motorized vehicles on bicycle lanes. That’s the speed limit for cars on many city roads, which are usually much wider.
There really shouldn’t be 30 km/h motorized vehicles on bicycle lanes.
I agree, especially not with how crowded bike lanes often are in for instance Copenhagen.
In the Netherlands there are two kinds of mopeds.
- Blue plates, which are (should be) capped at 25 km/h.
They generally go where cyclists go (with the exception of Amsterdam where they have to go on the road) and are effectively treated as motorized bicycles. - Yellow plates, which are (should be) capped at 45 km/h.
They are supposed to go on the road, unless signs indicate otherwise. If they are on a shared bike/moped path (which is mostly found in rural areas) then the speed limit is 30 km/h in cities and 40 km/h outside cities.
OK that’s much like here in Denmark, except the small ones are allowed to go 30.
- Blue plates, which are (should be) capped at 25 km/h.