Dear RCC members
A couple of years ago I bought an e-bike conversion kit which I installed on my town bike, but I never really got used to it and certainly never fell in love with it. The cadence sensor would feed in the power far too quickly and the handlebar mounted battery and front wheel motor meant that the whole bike became front heavy and nowhere near as nimble as before.
One day at Horizon Micromobility at Hare Hatch I found this lime green beauty with a step through Dutch style frame, and it was love at first sight.
The torque sensor fed in the power smoothly and I could pedal as gently or as hard as I wanted and gone was the pattern of pedal, brake and freewheel I had got to used to with the conversion. The clincher was the price, and they still have a red one listed on their site as I write. You could fall in love as well.
As you will read elsewhere in this issue, we have been focusing on delivery riders and the fact that the vast majority of them use an e-bike of some kind.
So e-bikes have been at the forefront of my attention recently. Indeed, there is a letter in this month’s cycle magazine from Cycling UK, querying the legality of these bikes and asking if the police were doing anything about it.
The answer, of course, is that they are almost all illegal – the rules are pretty clear – and the police are doing what little they can and will confiscate a few bikes every so often. But it seems to me that this is just one of the areas where legislators have been caught napping.
Artificial Intelligence is another area, but currently this is outside the remit of the RCC.
The shops and websites that are selling these bikes and conversion kits are able to disclaim all responsibility by having a little notice pointing out that they can only be used on private ground and not on public roads and, of course, not on pavements in the case of e-scooters.
Halfords and Decathlon sell lots of e-scooters and you can buy a fully equipped 25mph road illegal bike for £1400 on Amazon or a 1000W rear wheel conversion kit for £210.99. Matt Touw tells me that they can be ‘adjusted’ to do 40mph or more.
Perhaps if retailers were targeted rather than individual users, the police would get better results, although PR and lobbying machines of the big companies would quickly roll into action once their profits were threatened.
There is a great deal of concern about the way these bikes are ridden and the fact that many of them are little different to mopeds. Yet there is no requirement for any registration, insurance, basic riding or safety training and we see this every day on the roads.
For me there is a bigger issue and that is it further weakens everyone’s attitude to the rule of law. When you see one group of people flagrantly breaking the law, a little something at the back of the mind says “well it won’t matter if I …”. and that “if I …” can be anything from sneaking through the red light in the car, or not picking up your own litter, to much more serious transgressions.
I am not for a moment saying things were perfect in the past and getting a clip round the ear from the village bobby created a perfect law-abiding population.
What I think I am saying is by allowing simple things like the sale of illegal bikes, this makes it progressively harder to tackle some of the really big issues facing the country, such as climate change and growing widespread poverty and hunger.
Joe Edwards
RCC Chairman