Bike-loving Dutch grapple with illegal electric 'fatbike' craze gripping the Netherlands
Bike-loving Dutch grapple with illegal electric 'fatbike' craze gripping the Netherlands
Some 17,500 fatbikes imported from China have been held by Dutch authorities over concerns about speed manipulation and safety risks.
Some 17,500 fatbikes imported from China have been held by Dutch authorities over concerns about speed manipulation and safety risks.
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I'm going full old man yells at cloud here, but here goes. I have no problem with E-bikes. They are great, green modes of transportation. Having said that, they are motorized, and imo basically an electric Vespa. To ride one you should be required to be licensed in the state. I see a bunch of 12 -15 year old boys ripping these through the park. Imo this is wildly irresponsible parenting, and going to cause a ton of broken bones and deaths. Kids treat these as toys and have 0 regard for the law. I have seen far too many near collisions when taking my kids to the local park. I think (don't quote me on this) you don't need to be licensed for E-bikes and they are treated the same as bicycles here. I'm just assuming because I've seen cops look the other way. When I was a kid, go-ped scooters with 2 stroke engines were all the rage among this age group, and eventually the law caught up and I stopped seeing kids riding them. Now it's the same with E-bikes. I get that kids in this age group want some kind of transportation to go hang out and all, but it's dangerous having underage, unlicensed people operating them.
You don't need a licence if they are in the category of electric bike, meaning they cannot be self propelled (you need to peddle) and they have a limiter limiting the speed to 25 km/h.
Unfortunately, these things are wicked easy to circumvent. Many retailers will sell you a throttle (meant for moving the bike while walking with it) and changing the speed limiter and peddle requirement is as easy as going into the software settings. This results into what is effectively an electric moped without the licence plate and requirement. According to the law, such a vehicle requires you have a license and wear a helmet, but of course nobody does.
Ebikes are regulated in the EU, they're nothing like Vespa. What you're referring to is an electric motorbike and already requires a license. What is needed is enforcement.
Technically you are right.
The fat bike is considered to be a normal electric 25km/h bike (here in NL).
What changed (our view) on it was that some Chinese brands made it possible to raise the speed by doing a trivial change (either hardware or software) allowing speeds upto 45km/h.
In some extreme cases even higher.
Combine this with 12 year olds with soft skulls and you have the reason why the legal age is going to be raised to 16 years old and wearing a helmet.
And the old man in me screams: also require some training and a license for it.
And yes, I hate those things with a vengeance and have an opinion on everyone on such a vehicle. They are noisy, tent to break the speed limits and attract a certain type of people.
Old man signing off.
Is there a requirement for how much assistance the bike can give. Because I see kids hardly pedaling and still going 25km/h.
And yeah, these bikes are upgraded by people and not following code. But enforcement has started. The police needed new Rollerbanks.. and these have now been distributed. They can now check mopeds and e-bikes on the same device.
But then, I'd be for age restricting e-bikes and possibly even giving them tags and requiring bike helmets... so...
I may be wrong, but IIRC the assistance limit was 1:1.
There are a lot of electric mopeds that look like assisted bicycles but aren't. Those are a bit of a problem and shouldn't be in bike paths.
I agree, licensure is appropriate for electric bikes that work like petrol powered bikes. If you use a hand control or foot control to make the bike accelerate it is a vehicle with similar enough properties to a motorbike or motorised scooter that it should require a license plate, registration, and driver's license.
That said, anything that does assist only is more like a mobility scooter or bike with training wheels. You may not be able to go as long as you can with the electric bike by yourself, but if the drive characteristics are similar then it should be a bike. Those characteristics are speed, stop distance, involvement with the generation of motion, and how the weight is balanced.
So a bike that assists when going up a hill but won't help you go faster past a certain speed is not fundamentally changing how you behave on the bike, but if you can twist the handle and get acceleration beyond your personal max speed it is clearly different.
If we could have many more people riding electric bikes which behave like supported push bikes then there would be fewer cars on the road, more exercise for people, and no massive increase in risk, actually probably a decrease due to fewer bikes being hit by the reduced number of cars.
Simply require ALL electric powered two wheel vehicles that aren't motorcycles--whether nominally assistive or not--to comply with the same regulations as scooters. Easy, done.