You are comparing apples to oranges.
A high-visibility vest does not protect you at all. Its only purpose is to make drivers pay more attention to you instead of actually protecting you.
A helmet actually protects you. Also not just from some specific danger that shouldn’t be there in the first place (cars) but from the results of every possible fall no matter what caused it.
Fortunately I have never experienced some other than these:
Far from perfect but usually already better than average cracks and potholes found at the edge of a road.
It’s also got drainage grates that your wheels can catch in
Wait… grates parallel to the driving direction are legal where you live? That’s insanely stupid… And not just for the safety of bikes (and other narrow tires) but just purely because of physics and load-bearing capacity.
“Concrete barriers are a safety issue for cars, unlike the soft squishy people on bikes we would hit instead!”
We should probably be impressed that they only say the first part loud for now and we haven’t reached the point yet where terminal car brains openly advocate for killing people in the name of their 4-wheeled metal gods.
One of those evil SUVs again…
When will they finally be required to be controlled by an actual human being who takes on the responsibility? Ohh, wait…
What do the cars say about that war on cars? After all I learned from news reports that cars constantly drive alone when causing accidents (and are also often just passively involved in “collisions”) with no driver actually responsible in sight. So they should be able to justify themselves by now… Maybe we are just misinterpreting those cars intentions and could solve all conflicts peacefully.
Says the guy who is either lying or has never actually commuted by bike… because no, you don’t regularly do 30mph, and if you’d do everyone else on an urban bike lane becomes an obstacle.
The whole argument OK is making is that such a “class 3 electric bicycle” should be treated like a totally normal bike, because it’s somehow, magically not much faster and much heavier than normal bikes as everyone is totally driving at 30mph in regular bike commute…
Which indeed is wrong and a pile of shit argument.
I never said that an 28mph ebike is legally a motorcycle. I argued that a “class 3 electric vehicle” with the weight and speed of a moped (just electric) should be treated as one and not as a bike. And since that statement OP tries to convince me how 28mph is a total normal everyday thing in casual biking even for unfit people. As someone actually commuting by bike daily… that’s insane.
Sure, electric motorcycles driving at car speeds are totally not motorcycles and should drive between much slower and lighter bikes (and ebikes with sane speeds) on bike infrastructure, without a license of course. And if you want them to be regulated you are somehow just hating regular bikes, ebikes and pedelecs. 🤣
But OP is already argueing how every unfit regular biker casually drives above 28mph in urban areas (which Incidently is above the car speed limit where I live…), so sanity has left the room long ago…
Ebikes are motorcycles, just not with combustion motors for once.
So why treat them like otherwise when they have weights and speeds matching those smaller motorcycles and mopeds? Oh, I know… to terrorize actual bikers on their infrastructure with your license-free much heavier and much faster vehicles.
Those ebike users (preferably with oversized impractical fat bikes they would never voluntarily move without that equally oversized motor) that cry if they can’t use bike lanes at car speeds and without any license are the modern version of those “the best bike infrastructure is no bike infrastructure because we should just drive between cars” idiots amd MAMILs… somehow fighting against biking in the name of biking.
You can drive at speeds that are around (or in dense urban areas above) the general speed limit? That’s nice for you every time you are on a race track but totally irrelevant for biking as a general mode of personal mobility.
Even with gears anyone can hit those speeds on a flat
Sure, but we are talking about bikes and ebikes as a mode of transportation, not as a professional sport. Nobody is casually biking above 20 miles per hour on a flat, much less in actual urban and suburban traffic.
If you want a moped or motorbike, although an electric one, that’s fine. Get a license, insurance and ride it at the matching speeds between the cars but not in bike lanes normally intentionally protected from that traffic.
This is about registration for 20mph limited ebikes and 28mph limited pedal-assist bikes, with only 20mph pedal-assist staying free.
I don’t actually get why ebike vs. pedelec should make a huge difference. But the speed limits to require registration don’t actually look unreasonable high. At least I don’t know many people casually biking at 28mph (or even 20mph…).
And all because impractically wide and heavy bikes you wouldn’t even want to ride on urban streets make it cheaper to install oversized motors and batteries. Impressive how bikes and ebikes are still fighting to be taken seriously but the idiots have already found a way to exploit it for their quasi-legal dream competely unregulated motorbikes.
Oh… seems like Startpage has heavily changed how long their anonymous search results are kept… Guess from now on I need to do the addtional clicks again to actually go to the original sources and directly pictures again. Sorry about that…
It were all picture of oversized fatbikes but on normal bike lanes, where there are zero benefits to use a heavier and more cumbersome bike. Those are used in normal urban environment for only one reason: it’s cheaper to install an oversized battery and oversized motor in an oversized bike, to then terrorize normal bikers with speeds you shouldn’t drive between other bikes (and the weight to match).
Where I live that is actually illegal as ebikes have indeed limits. Which is just ignored by those morons, as the speed limiters making those abominations legal are purely software (and can of course be deactivated if you know how). And as there is -rightfully so- no widespread mandatory checkup for “bikes” they won’t rarely get caught anyway.
I’m impressed that they managed to write “was hit” in “a collision” instead of telling the story of how he actively collided with the car.
If we could also establish the fact that cars do not actually move on their own now, we were a small step closer to reality again.
Okay, it’s still a step into the right direction.
Sabotaging EVs, crippling charging infrastructure, spreading desinformation, all with every clear political signs that they will intensify their insane fight against superior technology to protect the fossil fuel income of their donors… to then frame the reduced demand as a buuble bursting is so insane it’s actually funny again.
As someone who have seen someone fall at walking speed without any outside influence and end with a basal skull fracture, I call bullshit.
Yes, there is. I am however not advocating for wearing heavy proctive gear that would make a difference in such a case, but for helmets. And hitting your unprotected head can simply heavily injure or even kill you -no matter the circumstances or speed- just by hitting an edge, a curb, a random pebble or just aspllated ground at a bad angle.
If basic anatomy would allow for humans to fall over and hit their heads while standing or walking around normally, we would already be wearing helmets all the time, just like we are causally protecting our feet with shoes.