Interesting day out at Hornsby this afternoon. As I rode in from the train station, I passed a man and 3 kids unloading a panel van. They had 3 large electric bikes, with 200mm forks and a shock from a small moto, and an entry level regular hard tail. My first thought was “well those are clearly illegal”, but I just rode past and rode down into the valley.
Later on, I saw them riding around, not excessively quickly or anything, but sometimes going the wrong way down a trail. For a lot of it, I couldn’t hear the motors and so it seemed like they were just pedalling. However, these bikes probably weighed more than 30 kg, and one kid couldn’t push it up a mild incline under his own power (walking). They looked like they were struggling a bit. The kid on the regular bike seemed to be doing okay.
They went up the new climb that goes below the TAFE, and I could tell the kids were struggling to get the bikes up the hill in some spots. At one point, I saw one kid on the bike with the motor pushing him up the hill, and then spinning the wheel right where it gets steepest. To be fair, I probably would have spun my wheels too if I was going up that slope at such a low speed. The bikes had inverted semislick tyres, like for dirt jumping. They then went the wrong way down the single track climb to the fire trail and made their way up to the road.
At the top, I had a quick chat with the father. He commented on my scuffed arm (I had a fun lowside, eh) and the nice trails to explore, and I agreed. I then said “Sir, are you aware that riding these motorised bikes here is illegal?”
He said “No, its legal. Its legal on the road so it must be legal here”
I asked “Its legal on the road?” as I thought I might have misheard him.
“Yeah, 200 watts”
Which was clearly a lie. The hub motors were in the 2-5 kW range, the AC drives that were mounted on the “downtube” were as big as medium size car amplifiers, and the batteries were enclosed in the large body of the bike.
I said “Uh, 200 watts huh?”
“Yeah. Are you the police?”
“No. Look, I think you guys are riding fairly responsibly”
“Yeah, we are”, in kinda a standoffish way, as they rode away down the new connector trail beside the road (it didn’t have anything taping it off, though).
I’m kinda conflicted about what I think of this guy. I didn’t see any real damage on the trails, nothing more that what I can do with my own legs, so its not like he was actually vandalising the trail. And being a mechatronics student, I actually think the tech is really cool, and I much prefer it to an obnoxiously loud motorbike, and would own one myself if I had a big property to ride it on.
But I can’t agree with him riding it on these trails, because they’re clearly much more powerful than 200 watts or any person, and that simple ends up causing much accelerated trail wear. And the kids seemed to be struggling and I think they would have much more fun on a regular bike. Clearly the guy is loaded, so he could buy them really nice (light) bikes and they would have a blast and get some actual exercise.
He knows he’s breaking the law because he mentioned the 200 watt thing. Whether or not he actually had them limited to 200 watts is kind of irrelevant because a bike that heavy would still have a worse power to weight ratio than a rider on a regular bike, so no one would actually limit them to 200 watts.
I think electric bikes are actually really cool and should be promoted over petrol motorised transport, but I only agree with pedelec designs, which can only add power in proportion to the riders pedaling (no pedalling = no electric assist), and something that is limited, like 1 kW peak assist, 500 W max average over 30 seconds (max 15 kJ in 30 s) and max 200 watt average over 5 minutes (max 60 kJ in 5 minutes). This means that the electric bike still significantly boosts the rider, but doesn’t dissipate much more energy than a really fit rider would.
What would you guys have done?
