You are correct, they are more dangerous. But the way the EuroNCAP test is constructed doesn't capture that danger. Leading to perverse, bogus results where SUVs are rated more safe for pedestrian collisions than small cars due to the artificial standard being applied.
If you want to keep a light pulse on national news without the clickbait and doomscrolling, I recommend https://text.npr.org
It’s text-only, no photos or videos. Updates only once or twice a day. No comments section or any other distractions.
That’s been my main change to my news diet. Deleting the NYTimes app and replacing it with that site has made me much happier.
I still read a lot of local news (San Francisco things that affect my life) but I just realize that national political news is not something I need to track 24/7
I was previously a long time listener and donator to NPR (similarly for NYT), but their progressive bias for the last decade has seriously degraded the quality of their reporting. I remember when their articles and radio coverage was much more balanced.
For that, I think The Economist is much better. It has more direct reporting, with seemingly less editorializing. Try their news in brief to keep up.
I think the main reason I've pulled back from the consuming mainstream media is directly tied with the change in reporting style rather than the news fundamentally being more depressing or anxiety-inducing.
For example, I was listening to Left Right and Center until a few weeks ago when Sarah Isgur departed. The show really should have been called Left Left and Center, because if anything Sarah Isgur was more center leaning while Steve Inskeep is definitely quite progressive. Now the show feels even more lopsided. It's as if journalists are so entrenched with their point of view that they can't see the wider landscape. I truly wonder if social media has clouded journalists' perception as well, which might be contributing to this phenomenon.
I really do want balanced coverage. I want to know what each side of the political debate actually thinks, from their own mouth. It turns out that a lot of the people I was indoctrinated to vilify, were in fact people who believed differently than I did, but certainly weren't so toxic as to be simply pilloried for their beliefs. That approach is tiresome and I've lost hope that such reporting will return. That's why I've given up.
What I've observed is similar to what you describe, but in my view the cause is different. NPR's reporting is much the same as it has always been; what's happened is there has been a huge shift to the far right the last decade, and reporting on where the right used to be now looks like left leaning bias.
The same is not true of the left. What's labeled "progressive" really isn't; the left has moved right too. 15 years ago, the US was on the verge of passing universal healthcare. That's not even on the radar today.
Media orcs have not all kept up with these changes. Something that was "left right and center in 2015, would look as though it was mostly leftist today, because the ground has moved.
NPR is definitely not the same as it was in 2005-2010. I was a heavy listener and donated for many years. But, now most of the time I have to turn it off - too much virtue signaling over critical thinking.
I'm not saying you're doing this, but often when people say something is "virtue signalling" it's actually "critical thinking but with either base values or a conclusion I do not agree with"
Actually, it's exactly that: they completely omit the values or conclusions that they don't agree with or understand. I hear it every day. They dismiss half of the country as 'extremist', 'far-right', 'uneducated' - those are the actual words I heard used today to describe the types of people who make up over half of my neighborhood.
A couple of days ago, I heard a host and a reporter literally mock and make fun of RFK Jr. when they should have been trying to educate him and his supporters. Trust in institutions (including the news) has completely eroded, and instead of trying to build it back, they double down on what hasn't worked.
This is exactly a good example though, because they wouldn't have made fun of a right wing politician way back when- RFK jr is just that ridiculous. Linking vaccines to autism, stopping vaccine and cancer research which is going to cost millions of lives, and more.
You're asking the impossible, such a person can't be reasoned with, and will certainly not listen to education from NPR. Mocking is the correct response. To me, your example exactly underlies the point that NPR didn't get more extreme, but the news they cover did.
Take that thought process to the logical conclusion and you may see why people on the right are justified in being scared of you. I.e. what happens when most people are incapable of following your "reasonable" rules? Virtue Signaling leads to Pharisees which leads to Totalitarianism
> what happens when most people are incapable of following your "reasonable" rules?
The black death returns? I am only half joking. RFK jr believes in miasma theory of illness and thinks the germs theory is wrong. If all of us start to act like him, we will have millions of deaths. I vehemently dislike the "believe in science" ~crowd~ [e: I should say dogma], and on other issues I've said virtually the same thing as you've said in this comment.
But not here. If we truly can't agree that something as stupid as reviving the miasma theory of illness ought to be mocked, then we are lost.
You're assuming the left stays static. The left lost interest in economic issues after 1990 and shifted to cultural issues. The modern Democrats are not more right wing than they used to be unless you ignore all the issues they've taken up that wouldn't have been recognized by Bill Clinton era Democrats.
Totally disagree. The left has absolutely moved further right.
Firstly, the example above with healthcare.
Secondly, deregulating things like zoning are rather popular with the modern left, and generally free-market approaches to housing. Dems are less friendly to unions than they were, lip service aside.
I don't think there's much that wouldn't be recognizable to a Clinton dem. The identity politics around trans rights etc are the same civil rights the left has been supporting for a century. Abortion is the same debate we've been having since the 60s.
The left has either not changed stance, or moved right, on all issues.
We're in agreement. The mainstream left abandoned their economic agenda because their economic agenda was stupid and as the 20th century progressed that became ever clearer, until the steady collapse of the USSR in the 1980s finally made even the dimmest of voters lose their appetite for it.
So by 1990 the left lost interest in economics, and began the pivot to race/gender/sexual intersectionalism. They even explicitly rebranded themselves. Clinton's Third Way campaign was adopted with vigor by Tony Blair, who even renamed his party New Labour to emphasize the break with the past. And Third Way/New Labour leftism was not particularly committed to intersectionalism at that time, even though such tendencies did exist on the left since the 1950s. In fact intersectionalism was rejected by mainstream left wing parties - look at the treatment of Sister Souljah then vs what would happen now - but it kept ramping up and by 2012 that had turned into full blown culture war. The new left went all-in on things like "defund the police" that would have been mystifying to a typical 1950s leftist.
None of this means the left moved right, unless you only care about economics in which case it's true. They simply dropped one set of causes and picked up another, with exactly the same kinds of tactics and aggression that characterized their campaigns 100 years ago.
> I remember when their articles and radio coverage was much more balanced. For that, I think The Economist is much better. It has more direct reporting, with seemingly less editorializing.
The Economist definitely has bias. All reality has a bias. You may not like some topics, that's fair. But to call a report "good journalism", it should exclude fabrications and baseless accusations. The latter are tools of propaganda.
> For that, I think The Economist is much better. It has more direct reporting, with seemingly less editorializing.
I appreciate The Economist, but I find that they do editorialize, they're just up front about it. They use the word "should" regularly. They have a pretty clear and consistent viewpoint advocating for classical liberalism, but they're honest and unashamed about having a stance.
The last decade has brought us Trump, which has broken countless political (and other) norms -- that has made passive observation a lot more challenging.
I've listened to NPR for decades and the only thing I've noticed as far as "progressivism" is that the weekends include shows that speak to non-white audiences (Black and Latino).
I'm curious as to what you think was "too progressive".
I think in this age of information wars where my country's administration is unironically posting memes about their policy: it's almost as important to be informed of the "pulse" people have towards news as it is to understand the news itself. In a increasingly post-truth society, being informed of reality isn't enough.
I prefer GroundNews and in particular the blindspot. I gave up on NPR around 2022 because it was pushing extremely biased takes. I say this as someone whose news came primarily via NPR from ~1993-2022. I just can't stand them anymore. If there's a way to tie literally everything to some stupid social movement, that's all they can do nowadays. The best thing our local NPR station does is run BBC very early in the morning.
I’ve been using The Economist’s “The World in Brief”, which sounds like much the same thing. I’m six weeks in to the news diet, and am much less angry all the time.
I used to read the UK Financial Times ("the pink 'un") as a source of world news rather than fincancial news - it was always a lot more sober and objective.
The FT isn't objective. It doesn't even pretend it's objective these days. It literally flew the EU flag outside its offices for years after the UK left, and its editorial line was exactly what you'd expect.
The FT has a bias towards Finance of course, but it is read by people who make financial decisions based on world economic events and these people need it to represent reality.
The reason they were pro-EU is that there were no realistic arguments where Brexit would benefit The UK’s businesses, finance sector or economy as a whole.
In the past, yes, the FT was like that. But not for a long time. It's like thinking professional economists all read The Economist. I know professional investors, a few of them read the WSJ but not yet met one who cared about what the FT think. Mostly they get info from more specialized publications.
They were pro-EU for ideological reasons. Leaving had no effect on the British economy, which isn't what they predicted.
Look up the data for yourself. Imports/exports glitched briefly then went right back to their prior levels and trends. There's no observable Brexit impact in economic performance: Britain has continued to roughly follow its neighbours in terms of GDP growth etc.
The UK has suffered massively due to Brexit - many industries such as construction and hospitality (hotels, restaurants) are still heavily understaffed due to the fallout of foreigners leaving.
Sitting on the fence, giving equal time to both sides, and ignoring reality is not being objective.
If being a member of the EU was objectively a benefit to most UK businesses then that is what I would hope to read in an FT editorial, not some Kumbaya "it's all good, we have no opinion".
Is any news site these days even pretending to be objective? The best news sites these days are aggregating all the biased sources together and presenting the full spectrum.
Something like Ground News, but even there I'm not sure I trust their algorithmic weighing.
I see there is a sporting / football newspaper (or former newspaper - now web site) also called the pink 'un, and apparently there had also been a green 'un focusing on horse racing, but growing up in the UK I had never head of these.
The FT post-dates the original pink 'un sporting newspaper, but was also, and still is, commonly referred to as "the pink 'un".
Thanks. I'm not a USian but thats a nice summary to have. I might whip up a quick greasemonkey script to strip out the links so it's just a set of simple summaries.
Ofc NPR may not be reliable, or even exist, soon due to Trump's retaliatory budget cuts. But meanwhile, nicw to have. Thanks again.
Part of the anxiety is the bias of the media and their attempts to get attention by sensationalizing the news, and often by lying.
Having the lies in text without photos does not fix the issue.
Edit: if you find yourself disagree, then it's because of your political position. I did not see it was NPR when posting this. replace NPR with Fox News and then read my comment again, see how you feel.
>if you find yourself disagree, then it's because of your political position
How does your political leanings affect how you react to clickbait? NPR makes clickbait, Fox makes clickbait. Images make it easier but text can still be effective.
I don't see the spin here. Yes, news across the spectrum is lying more and more. Or at least severly downplaying some heinous events. That shouldn't be a partisan stance.
The stock spent over a year in the $100-200 range, implying that this was a 5-10B company. I was dumb enough to buy it then. Then it just fell off a cliff and never recovered.
Does anyone specifically know what went wrong? Why was it ever thought to be such a good business and what happened to make it effectively worthless now?
So I only use Instagram for the DMs with friends. I don’t follow anyone at all, so my feed should be empty. For years it was.
Then at some point Instagram decided I must not know what I want, they should show me recommended posts from random accounts.
There’s a setting to turn this off … but instead of being a normal toggle I can only “snooze” the posts for 30 days. 30 days of peace and then the spam comes back.
No matter how many times I make it clear what I want, they don’t care. Just gross.
Dude if you only want to use insta for dms, try bleeper. I swear, most of my school friends only use / are active on insta and I never used insta because I Hated reels / insta in general (my personal opinion, never found it appealing)
So my friend suggested me to use bleeper, I had heard of it ofc but I mean I always thought eh it would be too much of an hassle, then when my friend did it and said its easy so I actually downloaded bleeper created an insta with a password on private incognito and then just pasted the password to my phone's bleeper in insta and then gave it to friend and boom I am now in insta dms without using insta.
And its all free. and they even run on matrix protocol and are pushing to be even more self hosted (ie. currently the account gets in their server, (i think) afterwards, it would be on your local device)
Seriously man, I think I am sort of a shill of bleeper even though they don't even know who I am or I have an incentive to, but I genuinely like their product. I genuinely hope that they don't ever enshitten it man. Bleeper team if you are reading this, that's my only request, don't add power creep, keep on focusing on local as you are doing right now and just don't ever enshitten your product.
You’re at a bar. You meet someone. They ask for your insta username to follow/message you.
Making friends and meeting people is hard enough for most people. The added friction of not being reachable on the platforms people use every day for messaging isn’t ideal. It’s not ideal to say “Sorry, I’m philosophically against social media so I can’t give you a username, you’ll have to text me” - and then you risk alienating them.
(You’d be surprised the percentage of people who rarely if ever use SMS these days, all the young people I know use Snap or Insta to talk to each other)
For me, email has become a cesspool of garbage. It’s like receiving letters in a dumpster parked in front of your house that the whole neighborhood dumps their trash into.
I loved email. It was perfect. Now, for me, it’s basically unusable. I can unsubscribe from ten garbage subscriptions a day, and it doesn’t even make a dent.
This question feels out of touch and I'm in my mid-forties.
Yesterday, I saw a couple moving musical equipment into my building and asked who was the musician. The person said I could find them on Insta. I had hoped they'd be on Soundcloud, as I'm a musician and post my music there. Insta is what a lot of young people use.
Before the pan, someone I matched with on a dating app rejected me when I told them I don't have social media accounts. She accused me of being a psycho (saved me from a bad first date). This is how a lot of younger people (she was like 10y younger than me) see the world.
Email is for corpses, at least that's what I think they'd say if you suggested it. Someone up the chain talked about classmates. I'd expect they are a younger demographic and the email stink would apply.
I welcome being out of touch. The current trends seem ridiculous to me.
There's no practical difference between sending a message via Instagram vs via email. It's all just marketing. You probably can't even get an Instagram account without first getting an email account.
> rejected me when I told them I don't have social media accounts. She accused me of being a psycho (saved me from a bad first date). This is how a lot of younger people (she was like 10y younger than me) see the world.
> If they're on Instagram, aren't they necessarily also on SMS
Many people have friends in different countries, and while intra-country SMS is usually free, cross-country ones usually aren't. I think out of my current friend circle, literally all of them have at least one friend outside of the country where they live, but as an immigrant I'm probably biased too.
SMS is stuck in the past, even with RCS. Apple has used SMS as the wall of their walled garden for years. As an android user, it was extremely annoying to text to Apple devices (and still is to some degree)
If they’re on instagram they’re already in the Facebook ecosystem which means WhatsApp should not be objectionable and it covers the messaging aspect quite well.
Because Instagram is specifically the place that those people already are. It really isn't hard to understand why others join it. They weren't even first, just the place where people ended up being, until they won't be there anymore and instead it'll be another place.
Also matters what niche/community you're a part of, some of them already left Instagram for other places (like furries seems to have gone to Mastodon/Bluesky as far as I can tell [but not a furry, so please don't sue me if I'm wrong]) while others are still there, like most musicians/artists still seem to prefer Instagram, even non-mainstream ones.
I think that's because that for me personally, I am genz and my generation / my school friends are just hooked up onto it. Literally 99% of my schoolmates were there.
It was the only way that I can keep in touch with my schoolmates / friends for years and though I have their number, we don't have any group chat aside from instagram and I use beeper to actually make it sane to use
Bleeper or Beeper (https://www.beeper.com)? Beeper is an app like you describe, can't find Bleeper. And it's by Automattic which I think have an OK reputation for not destroying their products.
Keep in mind that using Beeper for Instagram breaks their ToS and often gets your account suspended or banned. This happens with both cloud and local bridges.
oh I meant beeper, I don't know why I said it to be bleeper. My bad, I don't really know why my brain actually just thought of bleeper instead of beeper, no reason lol..
Sometimes you have to choose between not talking to someone and talking to them on such a platform. For friends, sure, just says that you want to switch to something e2e. But for people you don't really know that well it's kind of unreasonable to expect them to switch for you. LinkedIn is a good example, I don't like using the platform but I also have no interest in adding loads of random old colleages I might talk to occasionally to any e2e platform I use.
That is so real man. I was a massive push in pushing everyone to use signal but I could only convince 2-3 of my friends and literally now there is only 1 single friend of mine who is on signal..
Whereas on insta dm, literally all of my friends are there, mostly 24x7 active. I just used bleeper to sometimes interact with them. I think it made my mental health definitely more saner/net gain
I care about my privacy enough but I can't have it make me lonely. I hate meta with my guts but the sacrifice that I found was using bleeper or something that doesn't have anything extra of insta related except just chats
If your friends can’t install a free app and type in their phone number and an auth code (literally takes 30 seconds) to talk to you privately, they aren’t your friends.
(I have no other messengers and have recruited about a hundred people to use Signal, including much of the Vegas cash game poker scene.)
Quality over quantity is important always, but is of utmost importance when it comes to personal associations.
Delete your Meta accounts, find out who your real friends are.
The Signal desktop app is awful. I refuse to use it for this reason alone, because any time I need to write a lot, I switch to a computer because I can write 100 times faster on an actual keyboard.
I guess there is a difference between expect and assume. It would be weird for me to assume that the vast majority of people care deeply about digital privacy when clearly that's not true. Its pretty reasonable for them to assume I have Instagram or whatever when the vast majority of people do.
From their perspective, they assume I already have an Instagram account and if I say I don't then they aren't really going to understand why I wouldn't want to make one. For someone who isn't well informed on issues of digital privacy, I think this is a reasonable way to behave. From their perspective, someone demanding they download and use some random app they haven't heard of for reasons about encryption they don't understand is not reasonable.
Of course it is very worthwhile trying to educate people on issues of digital privacy. If you are able to educate them, then they will see that you perpective is reasonable. However, you aren't going to change everyone's minds
They didn't even consider what you want or anyone other than the way to make profit of the app. Sometimes those goals align, many times not. The reason they show you random accounts is because they want you to get hooked and watch the ads they sell.
It’s like X reverting to “For you” from “Following” no matter how intently you ask them to show less often. It’s like X telling you - “don’t ever install our app, it’ll be worse”.
By the way, Meta then must add a paid plan “Messaging Only” mode for Instagram :)
Can vouch for beeper. My mind was blown when it JUST WORKED.
I use beeper to chat with my friends on insta and its definitely a really good method to communicate with the insta friends instead of using the app. Though when they send reel I can't really see it natively and it opens web browser but that's what I want and I don't watch the reels the guys send anyway.
Is there any account that just shows boring stuff every day? Because now it says when I snooze that I won't see recommended posts unless I've scrolled past my friends' posts. So it seems I need to follow something that I'm totally uninterested in (I'm thinking gray boxes of unvarying sizes would be good), and that posts quite often.
OOh I found a use for AI slop! Getting me off instagram!
Alaska guarantees bags within 20m of landing. It’s not impossible, most airlines just don’t give a shit because people tend to mentally blame the airport not the airline for baggage experience issues.
The budget carriers in Europe (RyanAir, EasyJet, etc) all have fees for carry on bags that are almost as high as checked bags and they only even offer those fees to people who have purchased the “up front” premium seats.
They board and deboard planes insanely quickly. Just about the only good thing about those airlines is that they are super dedicated to on-time operations and not wasting time. They can’t afford to waste any time when they’re offering $25 international flights.
Of course, not having 9 boarding groups of various status levels helps a lot too.
Every business building on LLMs should also have a contingency plan for if they needed to go to an all open-weights model strategy. OpenAI / Anthropic / Google have nothing stopping them from 100x-ing the price or limiting access or dropping old models or outright competing with their customers. Building your whole business on top of them will prove to be as foolish as all of the media companies that built on top of Facebook and got crushed later.
Couldn't you also make this argument about cloud infrastructure from the standard hyperscaler cloud providers (AWS, GCP, ...)? For that matter, couldn't you make this argument about dependency your business has which it purchases from other businesses which are competing against each other to provide it?
In general, you are right, but AI as a field is pretty volatile still. Token producers are still pivoting and are generally losing money. They will have to change their strategy sooner or later, and there is a good chance that the users will not be happy about it.
AWS/GCP are at least making money with their current pricing model.
When your provider is dumping at a loss, it's their way of saying that the business plan is to maximize lock-in/monopoly effects followed by the infamous "enshittification".
OpenAI / Anthropic / Google have nothing stopping them from 100x-ing the price
There is also nothing stopping this silly world from breaking out into a dispute where chips are embargoed. Then we'll have high API prices and hardware prices (if there's any hardware at all). Even for the individual it's worth having that 2-3k AI machine around, perhaps two.
Wow I really didn’t think this would happen any time soon, they seem to have more to lose than to gain.
If you’re a company building AI into your product right now I think you would be irresponsible to not investigate how much you can do on open weights models. The big AI labs are going to pull the ladder up eventually, building your business on the APIs long term is foolish. These open models will always be there for you to run though (if you can get GPUs anyway).
I don’t like this because it inspires my relatives to keep sending me links to these stories and asking why I’m not going to work at Meta and getting my billions. Mark, please do this stuff quietly so I can continue in my quiet mediocrity.
I ride my ebike to work every day. I love it, it's a lot more convenient than my old manual bike was (more durable, less sweating in hilly SF). I really try hard to be conscientious and not do anything on it that a very strong normal cyclist wouldn't/couldn't do. I almost never have any occasion to top 20mph on it, except maybe when going down a steep hill.
I don't want to advocate for more regulations on biking but ... people are assholes. I see so many people ripping on those moped-style ebikes. Going 30mph+ in a crowded bike lane, riding the wrong way against traffic, riding on sidewalks, texting, etc. Yes people _could_ do all of those things on regular bikes but in my experience they mostly didn't.
I would be in favor of a law limiting pedal assist to 20mph and below. You can go faster than that, but the motor won't help you. 30mph is where most bikes top out right now and in a city that's faster than most car traffic. Way too fast for anything that follows bicycle laws (use of the bike lane, rolling stops allowed at stop signs, etc).
FYI, there are actual laws setting limits on bikes. Generally most places in the USA will allow a Class 1 or Class 2 e-bike to be ridden anywhere a bike can be ridden legally and some allow Class 3 with more restrictions. Class 1 is pedal assist maximum 20 mph assisted and class 2 throttle assist up to 20 mph with pedal assist allowed and if you pedal harder yourself it’s okay. Class 3 is pedal assist up to 28 mph, but this is not accepted as a bike in many places or has more restrictions. Anything else would likely be a motorcycle or moped and subject to licensing/insurance/lights & mirrors/etc requirements and would not be allowed in most park/trails/bike paths/etc or only usable on private property like a go kart.
However, in practice, no one is enforcing these laws and it’s difficult, because there is no easy way for the police to determine what class a bike is and no authority providing you with a license plate to verify the class that would limit your access if you didn’t have it. The government has basically accepted that most ebikes conform to the ebike laws most of the time. However, I believe many rental e-bikes like Lime/Bird/etc do conform to the law and are Class 1 or Class 2 bikes.
Agreed. To be fair though, I think the purpose of the laws was to make it clear that e-bikes could be operated legally anywhere you can legally operate a bicycle, and that you could own and operate them in public without fear of police intervention or seizure like a go kart or other unregulated powered vehicle is subject to.
Enforcement needs to be on the sales side, as enforcement at the consumer level is obviously impossible to scale. Also, class 2 (and 3) should not be allowed in bike lanes. If you have a throttle, you're not a bike; you're a motorcycle or moped. I see a clear difference in awareness and safety between pedal and throttle usage.
I ride a (regular human-powered) bike everyday through a paved mixed-use trail. While I'm able to hit 25+ MPH under ideal conditions, I average closer to 13 MPH just due to the physical realities of manually pedalling a bike. The problem with e-bikes is that they make those fast speeds routine, and attainable in places where you wouldn't otherwise expect them (e.g., going up a hill). They break the expectations for speed and reaction times in places designed for pedestrians and human-powered bikes.
I'm all for people having easier access to the joys of getting around without a car. But sometimes I wonder if that accessibility makes it easy to bring car-like speeding mentality in places where it wasn't before.
I sometimes sit in sidewalk seating at a restaurant in Cambridge near a small theater I have a subscription to. The (protected) bike lane in front is a pretty horrifying combination of conventional bikes, ebikes, things that I assume are high powered ebikes but look almost like motor scooters, escooters, pedestrians caught in the crosshairs, etc. And a ton of the vehicles just blowing through the lights at the next intersection because they're more or less bikes and that's pretty common behavior.
I don’t think that a sweeping speed limit ban is helpful. FWIW, I don’t own an e-bike and have only borrowed them from other people a few times.
In the more rural, even suburban areas, it might be totally safe, even safer to go 25-30mph instead of 20, if you’re on a road with 35mph car traffic.
I agree with you for major cities, I’ve had to deal with the antisocial people who rip through crowds.. but a sweeping ban like that will limit usefulness outside of cities.
I’ve hit 30+mph on a regular bike with a strong wind at my back, and it felt fast. But not dangerous by any means - I was out on a rural country road. It’d be nice to get that “wind” from electricity, regardless of the weather, to greatly reduce the commute time between towns, without needing to drive a (more dangerous) car.
I think higher speeds should be allowed, but they should be liscensed like any other motocycle (perhaps they're their own class with their own rules, but they should be registered with a license).
I can hit that speed on a regular bike with a good wind, which is perfectly legal. Adding an extra licensing step could slow the adoption of people switching from cars to e-bikes for commutes (a very positive step in my opinion).
A coworker of mine has a medium-speed e-bike, maybe goes 25-30mph in the (mostly empty) bike lane of a 45mph road for a lot of the journey. Tries to take 35mph side roads for the rest. It’s a very suburban/stroad-y area.
His commute is about 4-5 miles, so he gets to work in ~10 minutes. This is a great solution for all - less cars, more efficient vehicle, less stressful for him not needing to drive.
Any impediment to that reduces the likelihood of other people catching on to what he does.
Maybe those medium-speed e-bikes should have a license in the same way as a fishing license. It’s trivial to obtain, but if you violate certain rules, the license acts as a means to revoke your privileges. I’d be perfectly ok with that.
Does that bike lane go next to parked cars? You can imagine that even conscientious drivers could fail to see a bike approaching that fast and open their door into its path.
I admit I rode my bike up to 35-45 MPH sometimes in my youth, just with pedaling and gravity. But, I was wise enough to realize I belong in a normal traffic lane at that point, not flying along the edge near pedestrians, parked cars, etc. And I wasn't exceeding the posted speed limit for that road.
I had a less wise friend, with a very aerodynamic road bike, who hit ~60 MPH (in a 25 MPH zone) and T-boned a car because they did not consider unsafe it was with the limited sight lines. I felt sorry for the driver who, by all accounts, didn't do anything wrong.
Bringing these points back to ones made in the previous comments:
- Is there a meaningful difference of some people being able to actively hit 30 mph vs everyone being able to passively go 30 mph the whole way
- Should vehicles capable of those speeds just be licensed in some way based on that rather than whether or not they have an ICE and 4 wheels
- Is there a way to separate the classifications so devices which are more truly "e-bike" in typical speed do not need to follow the same regulations as something more "electronic motorcycle".
Your friend going to work and back bike lanes and streets at 30 mph sounds a lot closer to the "electronic motorcycle" side of things, so doesn't necessarily say one thing or the other about more truly "e-bike" types of devices or why they should be considered the same.
The operative word here is "I". It's not people who are experienced enough cyclists to be able to go fast that are the problem. It's novices that are able to go super fast without all that experience you've gained over time.
Can you hit that speed on a regular bike on a regular street? Can you break quick enough when people or cars get into your path while at that speed? E-bikes I see around here are operated by people who don't use the front brake and wipe out all the time at <20 mph. It would be fine if they just hurt themselves but they also run into pedestrians and cars, causing bodily harm and property damage.
I don’t even like regular bikes at speed (10+ mph) on mixed use paths, because kids, pets, and inattentive pedestrians (or cyclists) are a horrific combination, but now I get to watch assholes with headphones on ripping down sidewalks at 20-30 miles an hour while flipping through their phones. It’s fucking idiotic.
IMO better to enforce the rules (no idea how) since there will be always rule breakers and I'd legit want a fast bike when driving among the cars on main road (i.e. where there are no bike lanes).
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-v...
Not to mention how much bigger the blind spot is now:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna52109