this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
1 points (100.0% liked)
Brisbane
1150 readers
6 users here now
Home of the bin chicken. Visit our friends:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Alert: Viral Ragebait
Type: Faulty Argument
Alert: Faulty Reasoning
Type: Fallacy
A bike going 10km faster than an ebike is not more dangerous than the ebike.
The reverse is also true: An ebike going 10km slower than a bike does not make the ebike safer.
Reason: The ebike has more mass, which means there's a lot more inertia getting transferred during a collision.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
Ebikes are not more dangerous than regular bikes. Or if they are, the burden of proof is on you. The physics is not, per se, relevant. The physics could explain why they're more dangerous, if they are, but the actual relevant factor is how many injuries they are causing in the real world. You need to show the public that data if you want to support regulating them.
All the data that's been publicly shared so far points to the problem being PMDs and illegal electric motorbikes. Not compliant ebikes.
If we're going to talk physics though, the relevant figure is energy, not inertia. Inertia is a meaningless stat. It remains constant regardless of velocity. Energy scales with the square of velocity, and because of that, a 30 km/h push bike (80 kg total mass) has significantly more KE than a 25 km/h ebike (100 kg total mass). The difference in mass of an ebike is not a significant factor. Heck, even if we decided to use momentum rather than KE (though KE is the relevant stat for damage done in a crash), the difference is miniscule. 2400 kgms^-1^ vs 2500.
I will forever remember this day, the 8th of April 2026 when Zagorath discovered that when it came to traffic collisions: physics was not relevant.
Please remember me, the little person, in your acceptance speech to the Nobel Committee.
So are you wilfully ignoring the entire context because you want to "win" the argument, or just naturally stupid? Because this reply is an impressive level of stupid in context.
You replied to someone establishing a premise (ebikes are not dangerous), then built a whole wall of text built upon that premise. If the premise is removed, everything else built upon it falls down.
The premise was flawed.
I pointed that out.
Anything built upon it becomes irrelevant. There's as much point to go through the text built upon the flawed premise, as there is to keep trying to build upon it.
What part of it was wrong?
Yes, a heavier vehicle has more kinetic energy at the same speed. That's...obvious. It's so obvious it's basically pointless to feel the need to specify it.
But if that extra kinetic energy is not translating to more injuries in the real world, it's completely irrelevant. The reasons that it doesn't translate into real-world effects might be interesting academic discussions to be had—maybe it's the fact that they aren't actually that much heavier, maybe they tend to go slower (because of that 25 km/h cap on motor assist), maybe their owners actually tend to be more careful, or something entirely different—but from a practical point of view, when it comes to answering the question "should there be regulation here?", it doesn't matter. The answer remains "no". Because there is no evidence to date indicating that safe, legal ebikes are causing more damage than regular bikes.