Can we just start calling e-bikes “motorcycles” and be done with it? Barely anyone I see riding one around town here—and there are a lot of them—is actually using the pedals.
They are just motorcycles with electric motors.
To be clear, it is much better to have a bunch of electric motorcycles driving around than a bunch of gas-powered cars. Or even, for that matter, a bunch of electric cars. Bikes are smaller, slower, quieter, and vastly less likely to kill people than cars.
Still, I feel like putting them in the same category as bikes does not make a lot of sense. They go a bunch faster than bikes but people tend to ride them in the same places as they ride bikes, mixing with actual bikes and pedestrians.
I mean, they’re great and we should be promoting them far and wide, but thinking about them just as bicycles seems like a category error to me.