e-Bikes – Let’s talk

[Brett L.]

@Steve O 163508 wrote:

The absolute last thing we want to do is throw obstacles in the way of getting people out of their 2800+ pound steel maiming machines. So we need to throw our efforts at figuring out how we can all co-exist. That almost certainly means adjustments and changes to our current infrastructure. Is it a smooth path from our current (few and far between) 10-foot wide MUPs and (everywhere else) multi-lane roads and highways to the utopian multi-modal future? Of course not. But crowding our trails is actually a way to get the attention of decision makers and move along this path.
The trail counters count e-bikes and regular bikes the same. Bump those numbers up, up, up I say.

I would love to see some kind of widespread implementation of that middle ground. I would love to see more separation of foot traffic and vehicular traffic (including bikes in that sense), and additionally separation of bike traffic from motor vehicle traffic. It would be fantastic to see widespread adoption of NEVs (which I wholeheartedly believe that the ELF SHOULD be characterized as) instead of cars for those not able to ride bikes or need to haul things beyond what they feel is reasonable on a bike. I believe something like that would get more people out of cars, and might even act as a transition towards bikes. We have too much polarization in infrastructure right now and that middle ground is super hazy. How we implement that, how we set aside the space and money for this infrastructure, that’s beyond me. More of an utopian fantasy really at this point. Perhaps banning current vehicular traffic from inside corporate limits, reserving it for NEVs, bikes, etc might be a good start. Have excessive amounts of parking outside of corporate limits, similar to what you see at metro stations. IDK, more just rambling at this point. Would be interesting to see….

[lordofthemark]

@cvcalhoun 163464 wrote:

Seriously, dude? Let’s see who uses e-bikes?

* Pregnant women.
* People using box bikes to carry small children.
* 80-year-olds who can’t make it up those steep hills.

None of these people would be safe on the roads.

I am a little troubled by this. I am no hard core VCer, but I also know there is no way we are going to get MUTs (or even decent MUPs) everywhere. Much or even most seg infra strategy is focused on in road bike lanes (PBLs where possible, but not always). I can see the special concern for the small kids in trailers (though I have seen those on streets) but I am not entirely sure why being pregnant or being 80 YO, but riding a bike that makes it relatively easy to get up steep hills, in the road, is inherently dangerous.

OTOH I also know that for the foreseeable future there are many places where the only alternatives to MUTs are high speed arterials with no bike infra. Of course that even impacts healthy young adult riders. Which is why for now ebike usage on trails is not a big concern for me, but I am reluctant to establish the expectation that it will always be good policy, as ebike adoption increases on the one hand, and as we get more PBLs (and better bike policies, traffic enforcement, etc) on the other hand. And very reluctant to encourage the idea that biking in the road is dangerous in general.

[lordofthemark]

@cvcalhoun 163479 wrote:

Well, the CCT has a 15 mph speed limit. Enforcing that would be more useful than limiting the class of vehicle.

Yes, but that is not easy. For one, we don’t have that many cops on bikes around the region. For another, most riders I think do not have speedometers (forgive me, I don’t use a garmin, so not sure if that would work) and cannot always know how fast they are going – certainly not as easily as a driver.

[lordofthemark]

@cvcalhoun 163512 wrote:

As for cyclists going 20 mph+, there are a lot of them that are not e-bikes. Is there some reason you care about the ones that are e-bikes more than the ones that are regular bikes?

Well I would say because the total number of people who can go that fast on a regular bike is intrinsically limited, and unlikely to change all that much. While the number of potential Ebike users is far higher.

As for banning peds from MULTIUSETRAILs that is absolutely not going to happen. They are a huge part of the constituency for the trails, which in many cases were built as ways to access nature, not as commuter routes (also not sure how that would work when say, someone on a bike has a mechanical problem, etc – we all became peds then). Pushing peds off the trails to accommodate bikes (absent an adjacent peds only trail) would be politically explosive – we just ain’t that popular. (Heck, I don’t think actually keeping peds out of in road PBLs is even politically feasible now, and probably not politically wise, as those users add to support for PBLs).

While adding parallel bike and ped lanes is a great idea, there are huge areas of our trails where it is absolutely not feasible and many where it might be feasible but would be cost prohibitive. Ultimately the trails need to belong to the peds and the slower and less confident cyclists, and the faster and more confident cyclists belong on the roads (with improvements of all kinds – infra, enforcement, etc, to make that more feasible for more riders) . Meanwhile the addition of large numbers of fast but not confident riders to the trails is potentially problematic.

[Tania]

@zsionakides 163476 wrote:

The e-bike users I see on the MUPs in Virginia are not seniors, pregnant women, or box bikes. They are overwhelmingly commuters, many of whom ride very fast, some up to the 28mph limit the e-bikes go. They are taking advantage of e-bikes to essentially get a scooter on to the MUPs and avoid traffic on the roadways.

I would be supportive of e-bikes on MUPs if you could separate those who actually need assistance riding, from those that are just using loopholes in the law to get around traffic. Unfortunately, that would probably involved some kind of licensing or policing system which would be very hard to implement and burdensome on all bicyclists.

YES YES YES. Well, maybe not the licensing part. Most of the e-bikes I encounter aren’t good bike citizens. Most, not all. A few are starting to ring a bell before they whiz past me but they’re still whizzing past me at too fast a speed and dodging in and out of pedestrians. The way they are being used isn’t safe.

I have no beef with e-bikes. In fact I’m trying to persuade a coworker to buy one since she lives in Barcroft (? I think that’s her neighborhood or maybe it’s the one just east of Barcroft; I know she has a major hill to climb right out of her house) and would commute into DC meaning she’d also have to climb back up a hill to come home. She cannot currently do this because of fitness/health issues but she really wants to be able to start exercising and wants to commute via bike. But she’s going to need help for a few months to tackle those hills without getting discouraged and then quitting.

The dude who rides on W&OD in the am (and has a ridiculous strava name but all of his rides are private now) commented on a public FB post the other day. I’ll try to find it. He was basically defending his right to bike like a jerk. (Mark K something or other?)

[lordofthemark]

@Steve O 163508 wrote:

The absolute last thing we want to do is throw obstacles in the way of getting people out of their 2800+ pound steel maiming machines. So we need to throw our efforts at figuring out how we can all co-exist. That almost certainly means adjustments and changes to our current infrastructure. Is it a smooth path from our current (few and far between) 10-foot wide MUPs and (everywhere else) multi-lane roads and highways to the utopian multi-modal future? Of course not. But crowding our trails is actually a way to get the attention of decision makers and move along this path.
The trail counters count e-bikes and regular bikes the same. Bump those numbers up, up, up I say.

No. We already have crowded trails, sometimes parallel to underutilized (if imperfect) in road bike infrastructure. Case in point, the multimodal horror of the MVT on a beautiful weekday evening, and the almost emptiness of the Eads Street PBLs (I said if imperfect, okay?) . What we need to bump up are the number of riders on the PBLs (which are a lot easier and cheaper to place than new off road MUTs– assume you do mean in park MUTs, not street adjacent MUPs, which have issues at street crossings and probably shouldn’t be used by really fast cyclists, and IIUC, are not so used in the NL) That is a reason to keep ebike riders OFF the trails. Again, I realize this is very geographically specific – our old pal solarbikeman rides a section of the WOD that has no parallel PBLs that I know of – I recall asking in that discussion for the hive mind here to try to come up with a relatively high comfort alternative route, but I don’t think anything came of that.

[EasyRider]

Actually, I didn’t bring it up. The distinction between able-bodied and otherwise was in the editorial that sparked this latest conversation, and in cvcalhoun’s claim that it’s mostly pregnant women, parents, and seniors who ride e-bikes.

The editorial’s quotes from e-bike manufacturers makes it pretty clear that they the industry wants to frame the politics of e-bikes as of one of access for less-mobile groups, such as those cvcalhoun listed. But I think in the future, it’ll be mostly able-bodied people riding e-bikes, if they aren’t the majority already. I have no beef with the able-bodied riding an e-bikes, but since I think there will be A LOT of them, it does mean that I don’t think that “fingers-crossed”, or a “let’s wait till things get really bad and then we’ll get the infrastructure we want” are practical approaches to the issue of expanding e-bike use.

[semperiden]

I haven’t had a lot of bad experiences with e-bikers and have found most of them ride them responsibly. It is even hard to tell they are using them, until you see their speed with little riding effort. I do have reservations with the 10% of them that ride them like crazy though. You will think that it would be easier for them to gain the momentum lost when going around people or slowing on blind curves, but I guess they just love to be jerks.

I remember the first time I saw the Gearcrusher. He attempted to go through a red light in Rosslyn going downhill, when a car that came out of nowhere almost hit him. “Pheww!” he exclaimed laughing. Two blocks later, a car was going to turn just before he was passing and he burst into expletives. Interesting character.

[bentbike33]

Today on the little piece of Westmorland St. that becomes 19th near Banneker Park I passed someone riding a Vespa-looking thing with a 2-stroke motor. What a stink! No way I would ever want those on the trails even if they can’t seem to exceed 15 mph on level ground.

[dasgeh]

@Tania 163518 wrote:

YES YES YES. Well, maybe not the licensing part. Most of the e-bikes I encounter aren’t good bike citizens. Most, not all. A few are starting to ring a bell before they whiz past me but they’re still whizzing past me at too fast a speed and dodging in and out of pedestrians.

It’s possible that’s true, but it’s also possible this is confirmation bias. Ie. you think “Phew, that person passed really close and is weaving like a jerk — oh, look it’s an ebike.” while 5 ebikes pass responsibly or ride on behind you and are not noticed.

Today I was at the intersection of the Custis and Fort Myer, stopped at red with a total of 3 ebikes and 2 normal bikes. 2 normals and 1 ebike run the red. You could look at that and say 100% of normal bikes are scofflaws and only 33% of ebikes, but it’s all anecdotal. It also doesn’t change the fact that the problem is the behavior, not the bike.

@lordofthemark 163520 wrote:

No. We already have crowded trails, sometimes parallel to underutilized (if imperfect) in road bike infrastructure. Case in point, the multimodal horror of the MVT on a beautiful weekday evening, and the almost emptiness of the Eads Street PBLs (I said if imperfect, okay?) . What we need to bump up are the number of riders on the PBLs (which are a lot easier and cheaper to place than new off road MUTs– assume you do mean in park MUTs, not street adjacent MUPs, which have issues at street crossings and probably shouldn’t be used by really fast cyclists, and IIUC, are not so used in the NL) That is a reason to keep ebike riders OFF the trails. Again, I realize this is very geographically specific – our old pal solarbikeman rides a section of the WOD that has no parallel PBLs that I know of – I recall asking in that discussion for the hive mind here to try to come up with a relatively high comfort alternative route, but I don’t think anything came of that.

I ride the Custis daily. Even on “crowded” days. It’s not crowded. I’ve never missed a light, even with the short timing at Lynn.

@EasyRider 163523 wrote:

it does mean that I don’t think that “fingers-crossed”, or a “let’s wait till things get really bad and then we’ll get the infrastructure we want” are practical approaches to the issue of expanding e-bike use.

No one in this forum is saying this. We are saying “it’s the behavior, not the bike”. And we’re saying that more bikes in the wild make all of us safer.

@lordofthemark 163520 wrote:

No. We already have crowded trails, sometimes parallel to underutilized (if imperfect) in road bike infrastructure. Case in point, the multimodal horror of the MVT on a beautiful weekday evening, and the almost emptiness of the Eads Street PBLs (I said if imperfect, okay?) . What we need to bump up are the number of riders on the PBLs (which are a lot easier and cheaper to place than new off road MUTs– assume you do mean in park MUTs, not street adjacent MUPs, which have issues at street crossings and probably shouldn’t be used by really fast cyclists, and IIUC, are not so used in the NL) That is a reason to keep ebike riders OFF the trails. Again, I realize this is very geographically specific – our old pal solarbikeman rides a section of the WOD that has no parallel PBLs that I know of – I recall asking in that discussion for the hive mind here to try to come up with a relatively high comfort alternative route, but I don’t think anything came of that.

There are some places where there are parallel routes that have PBLs, but I can’t think of any where the entire parallel route is safe. You mention Eads — The problems with the construction and the conflict at the maintenance facility are well documented, and the recent issue with the blocked PBL. Not to mention that Eads doesn’t have a PBL for the entire length, and Eads won’t get you into to the District. The choices are either to take the CC connector back to the MVT, which means a significant detour that doesn’t even avoid the most crowded part of the trail, or to go through the Pentagon, over the LBJ wooden bridge and through the Marina parking lot to the MVT. That route is not obvious or well marked, or really all that easy to navigate (curb cuts around the bridge, anyone)?

And aside from Eads, I can’t think of one route that has PBLs near trails. This is certainly a reason to add PBLs to Wilson (to provide an alternative to the Bluemont) and Lee (alternative to Custis), but instead of banning ebikes from trails, we should build alternative routes that will attract the faster riders (on ebikes or not).

[lordofthemark]

@dasgeh 163533 wrote:

It’s possible that’s true, but it’s also possible this is confirmation bias. Ie. you think “Phew, that person passed really close and is weaving like a jerk — oh, look it’s an ebike.” while 5 ebikes pass responsibly or ride on behind you and are not noticed.

Today I was at the intersection of the Custis and Fort Myer, stopped at red with a total of 3 ebikes and 2 normal bikes. 2 normals and 1 ebike run the red. You could look at that and say 100% of normal bikes are scofflaws and only 33% of ebikes, but it’s all anecdotal. It also doesn’t change the fact that the problem is the behavior, not the bike.

I ride the Custis daily. Even on “crowded” days. It’s not crowded. I’ve never missed a light, even with the short timing at Lynn.

No one in this forum is saying this. We are saying “it’s the behavior, not the bike”. And we’re saying that more bikes in the wild make all of us safer.

There are some places where there are parallel routes that have PBLs, but I can’t think of any where the entire parallel route is safe. You mention Eads — The problems with the construction and the conflict at the maintenance facility are well documented, and the recent issue with the blocked PBL. Not to mention that Eads doesn’t have a PBL for the entire length, and Eads won’t get you into to the District. The choices are either to take the CC connector back to the MVT, which means a significant detour that doesn’t even avoid the most crowded part of the trail, or to go through the Pentagon, over the LBJ wooden bridge and through the Marina parking lot to the MVT. That route is not obvious or well marked, or really all that easy to navigate (curb cuts around the bridge, anyone)?

And aside from Eads, I can’t think of one route that has PBLs near trails. This is certainly a reason to add PBLs to Wilson (to provide an alternative to the Bluemont) and Lee (alternative to Custis), but instead of banning ebikes from trails, we should build alternative routes that will attract the faster riders (on ebikes or not).

I guess the Custis is less crowded than I thought. I think the MVT from 14th Street Bridge to 4MRT is almost always crowded (as I define it) on a nice day at PM rush hour (I guess the difference in appeal, especially to pedestrians, of a river view vs a highway sound wall). Lots of riders at varying speeds, runners, and pedestrians. Not congested to the point where folks are forced to slow down, like I395 at rush hour, but congested to the point where its a deterrent to many riders. I also know at least one pedestrian who will not walk on the MVT (in the presumably less congested part in Alexandria, between 4MRT and Old Town) because of the cyclists (behavior, but I think also sheer numbers).

There are clearly MUTs where more users would be helpful – ones that have had security issues, like the MBT or even Holmes Run. But for the most part I don’t think “critical mass” really applies to the more popular trails. They are already really popular enough to make it clear to the powers that be that more trails would be great – but there are lots of calls on funds, and building new MUTs is not cheap or simple.

As I already implied, Eads is not perfect. The connection to Boundary Channel is already scheduled for improvement. Improving enforcement against parked vehicles, and improving the connection to 14th Street, is I guess a heavy lift when not many people are using it. And I know that PBLs and buffered lanes are still too scarce, though there are also conventional bike lanes (not all of which are terrible) in many places that are parallel, and in many places in road low stress bikeways, and some that should be low stress to people capable of going over 20MPH uphill without breaking a sweat.

And note, I am not calling for enforcing bans on ebikes on the trails (I think the bans are already in place legally in at least some jurisdictions?). I am taking issue with applying the “critical mass is good” logic to the MUTs (as Steve O suggested), at least the most popular ones. I strongly believe in that approach in general – that more riders, of any kind, for any purpose, on anything that looks like a bike however it is powered helps us in a lot of ways – making cars more likely to expect us, justifying more infra, etc, etc. But I think most of those ways apply less, if at all to the more popular MUTs.

It is of course possible that I am overly focused on the issues with MVT – the part north of 4MRT is on my usual commute (as well as lots of my weekend rides) and the part in Alexandria is of great concern to me as an advocate. Aside from the 4MRT east of Shirlington I seldom ride any other MUTs except on weekends. IME the W&OD is an issue in the Town of Vienna at least. I don’t ride the CCT much but I do get the impression that there is a good bit of conflict associated with the volume and behavior of high speed cyclists there.

So in general I think we are better off encouraging more people to ride off the MUTs. The people who can do so most easily are generally the fastest riders, either ebikes or regular bikes.

[Steve O]

@lordofthemark 163520 wrote:

No. We already have crowded trails,
………..
That is a reason to keep ebike riders OFF the trails.

Disagree. Keep in mind that each e-bike rider is a person who will then make another decision. Keeping e-bikes off the trails does not make those humans vanish.
They will either:
– Find another place to ride that may or may not exist or may or may not feel safe and comfortable
– Get back in their car

I don’t like the second option.

[lordofthemark]

@dasgeh 163533 wrote:

There are some places where there are parallel routes that have PBLs, but I can’t think of any where the entire parallel route is safe. You mention Eads — The problems with the construction and the conflict at the maintenance facility are well documented, and the recent issue with the blocked PBL

The MVT has had recurring issues with broken glass. One of our rare bike fatalities in the last couple of years was to a rider on the Henson Trail. Don’t think we have yet had any fatalaties on a PBL (we must have had one on a conventional bike lane, there are so many more, but I can’t recall hearing of any) I never feel as anxious riding in the Eads lanes as I do crossing Shirlington Road on the 4MRT. In addition to my disagreement about the effect of critical mass on the trails from a policy and outreach POV, I want to push back on the “roads, VC style or in bike lanes are dangerous, while trails are safe” There is a lot that can go wrong on the trails (someone I know from BPAC was recently injured on the MVT- my wife was injured riding a CaBi on the MVT, etc) and its quite possible to ride very safely even on imperfect in road infra.

[lordofthemark]

@Steve O 163537 wrote:

Disagree. Keep in mind that each e-bike rider is a person who will then make another decision. Keeping e-bikes off the trails does not make those humans vanish.
They will either:
– Find another place to ride that may or may not exist or may or may not feel safe and comfortable
– Get back in their car

I don’t like the second option.

At this point there are still not enough Ebike riders to really matter (I think). As their numbers increase, we need to use that to make the case for more in road infra (both seg infra and more rideable “bikeways”, and also encourage ebike riders (as well as others) to take it.

I just don’t think that lots of new ebike riders>crowded trails>wider trails is really a likely path to the promised multimodal future. Widening other than a few spots is too hard (trails pressed against water features and bridge underpasses, wetlands, permeable surface issues, as well as costs). And the intermediate stage – trails crowded enough to get the attention of policy makers – will piss off too many non bike trail users. Which is not good.

Put people in bike lanes and you use infra that is A. relatively cheap B. something planners often like for traffic calming anyway C. that has no legal pedestrian usage.

Now I am still pushing for MUT expansion where possible – we have a couple still under discussion in the City, with some new state funding, IIUC, and I am happy about the proposed widening on the W&OD, and would love to see it where possible on the MVT, and really want to see the bridge on the W&OD and the underpass at Shirlington Road. But all of those things are not “the future” In road, IMO, is the future.

[AFHokie]

Why hasnt any of energy poured into these 26 pages discussed teaching/training responsible e-bike ownership instead of banning them?

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