micromobility - Ebikes, scooters, longboards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
Ebikes, bicycles, scooters, skateboards, longboards, eboards, motorcycles, skates, unicycles: Whatever floats your goat, this is all things micromobility!
"Transportation using lightweight vehicles such as bicycles or scooters, especially electric ones that may be borrowed as part of a self-service rental program in which people rent vehicles for short-term use within a town or city.
micromobility is seen as a potential solution to moving people more efficiently around cities"
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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.
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.