Project Drawdown has characterized a set of 93 technologies and practices that together can reduce concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It’s a gigantic project with a lot of data and analyses.
In the linked video, the author goes through the measures to find which one is the most cost effective in terms of ratio of rCO2 reduction and economic cost
The maybe surprising result is that building bike infrastructure to shift a not even big percentage of travels from cars to bicycles or ebikes, is very cheap and has a huge effect on emissions.
The premise is that all solutions should be implemented to have a significant effect, but some are easier done than other.
In the US, it’s pretty easy to build one that can go that fast. Just get a bafang bbshd mid drive kit without the limiter and you can use the throttle to that speed if you want. Costs ~$1k and an afternoon to install (or get a local shop to do it).
It’s illegal in my area to ride that fast, but not illegal to own it. In my area, the law is no assist after 20mph (32kph). If you have a speedometer, you can have assist up to 28mph (45kph). I haven’t seen a retail ebike at the 28mph limit (since that varies region to region), so if you want to go faster than 20mph or want to climb mountains, you probably have an aftermarket one, so why not open it up all the way on the bike paths?
I’m planning on doing that soon, but I’ll either slow down around other path users or move into the road if I’m going faster than 20mph. Other cyclists aren’t as considerate in my area.
That said, I’ve gotten to 50mph-ish (80kph) on my regular bike going down a mountain (on a road). It was incredible stupid, and I’ve never gone above 30mph since, I just wanted to see how fast I could go, and I got scared when I almost overtook a car…
Anything custom/aftermarket/DIY is such a small portion of the market as to be functionally irrelevant in terms of policy considerations.
(In other words, anybody opposing expansion of bike infrastructure on the grounds of boogeymen riding at illegally-high speeds on custom e-bikes is arguing in bad faith.)
Agreed.
My point is that they exist and are relatively easy to get, not that they’re a problem. We should encourage such things because they get people who wouldn’t otherwise be interested in cycling to get interested. If it becomes a problem, we can push them into the street.