Did you hear? A cyclist got hit by a car
Dutch cycling advocate: oh no! bloody cars, we ought to ban them! I hate them so much!
The cyclist was on an e-bike by the way
Dutch cycling advocate: they should have worn a helmet! I bet they were going over 20 km/h, irresponsibly fast! How dare they traumatize that poor driver by causing an accident like that! The driver may have even thought they hit a *real* cyclist!
@marlies I'm still wondering where this "e-bikes are dangerous" narrative comes from, whose interests it is serving, because it makes zero sense looking at the data
@joepie91 @marlies It's because young people ride them, and it's (mostly) about fatbikes.
Now, I've seen some incidents that gave me pause - when a 12-year-old rides an adult fatbike, that can be more than they can handle, and there are some statistics that show fatbike users to be a vulnerable category. But a lot of people don't like seeing young folks simply enjoy what is, to those youngsters, a sick ride, and take up space using them. So they want to take that fun away from them.
@reinderdijkhuis @marlies This predates the existence of fatbikes, though. Previously it was "seniors on e-bikes" that were blamed as dangerous road users, with a bunch of very ageist and ableist rhetoric
@joepie91
I've had some dangerous near-accidents with seniors on ebikes, and those are quite memorable, in part because I am a lot more worried about a senior falling than pretty much anyone else
so I think that that might contribute, and an assumption that seniors are blameless might shift the blame to the bike instead
and i also think that people with slow reaction speed going really fast can be quite dangerous, though this of course only applies to a very small amount of people on ebikes
@joepie91 and I think the fatbike stuff is at least 90% people being concerned about "de jeugd van tegenwoordig" and at most 10% genuine concerns about safety and irresponsibly (and illegally) strong/fast bikes
@joepie91 @reinderdijkhuis yup. I go no faster on my ebike than I did on my regular bike before I got sick but everyone still insists I wear a helmet
@marlies @joepie91 @reinderdijkhuis and the maximum speed is decidedly lower (it is 25)
@marlies @joepie91 @reinderdijkhuis same here, I got an ebike just to be able to keep on cycling, not to go faster. I regularly get overtaken by senior citizens (some of them are even on 'normal' bikes 🤣), but I can cycle again for more than once a week because it's not as big a problem for me knees anymore 🙃
@joepie91 @marlies Sure, but subjectively I do think the rhetoric ramped up when the focus shifted from seniors on e-bikes to teens on fatbikes.
Looking at it more broadly, I get it, up to a point. An e-bike handles differently from a regular bike, is heavier and has a higher cruising speed even if the max speed is no different.
But it's still not a two-tonne death machine like a car is.