I've been experimenting with adding power assist to bicycles for a number of years now. Before that I rode pedal bicycles many miles in a season. Age caught up with me and I still like to pedal for the exercise but I also have found small assist motors are a real boon as the advancing years catch up with. Simply put I would ride a lot less without them. In other words, LSVs or low speed vehicles. Many of those details are explained elsewhere in this blog.
What this blog is not about is what many people think of as stupid, noisy, smelly and obnoxious additions to what a bicycle is supposed to be. I happen to agree with that and NONE of my bikes fit those categories. What is happening in some, maybe the majority, of instances is that the whole idea of MABs, motor assisted bicycles, is quickly being overrun with what I'll call infantilization. People, supposedly adult men many of an age who should know better, get a whiff of teen spirit, riding without a helmet, buzzing neighborhoods, blowing through stop signs and generally acting like jerks. What is it about American men that fantasize everything to be like race week in Indianapolis? Grow up or get a motorcycle. What a way to ruin what should be a good thing. Why have we seemingly lost the ability to recognize a good thing and know when enough is enough. And where the hell are the adults?
The imminent danger to any continued legality and public acceptance of motor assisted bicycles will not come from under-powering of MABs, but that mission creep will continue to push them toward becoming little more than fake, illegal motorcycles and transparently viewed as a way of skirting the law. Look around, it's already happening.
IMHO, it's also a shame that organizations, groups and domains don't take an official position, it would be refreshing to see them ignore the perceived risks and bite the bullet looking instead to earnestly furthering the long term legal status of MABs as legitimate alternatives. Commonsense is universal. Likewise, why acquiesce to the lowest common denominator and not look to broaden the demographic when fitness is something the whole of the US could use a lot more of.
There are 60 million people who use bicycles in the US according to USBL. One will be hard put to find the number of people who use MABs but my guess would be somewhere around low single digit percentage of that. It might be fair to assume many of those 60M would think any assist on a bicycle a novelty, but not all, particularly considering an aging population might well consider assist a way to stay active. But labeling something a novelty would be simply a semantic way of framing a discussion. For example, making bicycles look like motorcycles at the expense of of inhibiting their function as bicycles could easily be labeled nothing more than supreme novelty. If we were to even tacitly include the rational that MABs might have a role as a serious transportation alternative, they would need move on past the toy status that largely exists or be perpetually relegated to something close to that of ATVs.
The legally defined moped/motor assist bike regs are 25 mph max in my state, I can live with that and find it quite reasonable. The average person will pedal a bicycle 10 mph for sustained periods, so doubling it with little human power input is an enormous advantage. In fact, just being able to maintain the non-assist average pedal speed with no pedaling input could be viewed as a gift. Try doing that pedaling a standard moped.
