The safety organisation VeiligheidNL estimates that 5,000 fatbike riders are treated in A&E [ i.e Accident & Emergency] departments each year, on the basis of a recent sample of hospitals. “And we also see that especially these young people aged from 12 to 15 have the most accidents,” said the spokesperson Tom de Beus.
Now Amsterdam’s head of transport, Melanie van der Horst, has said “unorthodox measures” are needed and has announced that she will ban these heavy electric bikes from city parks, starting in the Vondelpark. Like the city of Enschede, which is also drawing up a city centre ban, she is acting on a stream of requests “begging me to ban the fatbikes”.
Make it so they have to be licensed, insured and are legal on the roads. But then allow for the bikes to have speed increases.
Basically a really cheap electric motorcycle.
These are not fatbikes. Fatbikes are normal pedal bikes with big tires that are good in snow.
These are Fat Tire e-bikes. You should always be calling them ebikes when discussing them in English. Perhaps this is a mis translation.
e-bike is also horribly misused. It’s everything from a bike with a little battery that kicks in a bit when you pedal, to what can only be described as an electric powered motorbike.
Maybe you should not be such an anglosphere-centric snob, especially in an eurocentric community.
It’s good to use the correct terminology though, especially when translating.
Okay, let’s correct some things then. Let’s start with chips, crisps and fries. Or what exactly an appartment is, bangers, boilers, entrée, first floor, etc.
As far as I can see, most people having issues with the term fatbike come from north american instances. Europeans here absolutely know what kind of vehicle is meant.
That surprises me. I’m not American and when I hear ‘fatbike’ I don’t think of the e-bike version but the regular bicycle with fat tires. The former are not common around where I live.
Have a look through this thread then. Nobody had issues with the term until someone from an NA instance brought it up.
It’s in the first par. of the article.
" … thick-tyred electric bikes… the Dutch call “fatbikes”
Yea, so a mis-translation. That’s not what we call them in english.
ITS IN ENGLISH.
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Agreed. Tyre is a city in Lebanon. Tire is the round rubber thing that encircles a wheel.
Only in American English. Everywhere else, to tire is to become tired, and a tyre is what goes around a wheel.
If we gonna just be weird about what shits called it’s a aerial wheel so fuck your Tyre or tire bullshit
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Why are 12 year olds even allowed to drive what is essentially a motorbike?
A question the Dutch government won’t answer.
Idk how it is in there but In my country, you need only a moped license if it’s limited to 45 and no license if 25 km/h. The latter is considered a bicycle with assistance motor.
Let’s give motorcycles with insane torque to children, What could go wrong?
Most of those even don’t need you to pedal (which where I live is a prerequisite for e-bikes).
Also motors are limited to 250W which seriously limits the danger.
Mine is 750W still (from before laws were made, now illegal) and still can’t accelerate fast enough to be dangerous, but without my limiter the top speed is like 45 km/h.
You sound like someone not understanding they can absolutely be dangerous.
A college of mine was in a normal bicycle / rollerskate accident, he spent many months before walking well again and was away from work for several weeks.
human powered locomotion (foot, bike, skate, etc) and mobility assist devices, should be completely separate from motorized vehicles (electric bike, scooter, cars, combustion,etc). simple as.
That is sort of true. Electric bikes are allowed because they provide assistance only when humans are riding (pedal assist), never autonomously. The initial idea was to help elderly people cycle. The category has been abused over the years in such a way that we now have bikes that compete with motorized vehicles and unsafe import that is easy to tweak, pushing bikes way beyond their legally intended limits.
I think the laws where I am in Germany are stricter than the Netherlands. But it’s always worth trying more granular rules. Such as age limit, helmets for kids, fines for increasing performance, speed limit or ban in parks. This is fairer, but much harder to police than an outright ban. But big enough fines should be a deterrent. And might be preferred by fat bikers.
Why fine increased performance instead of reckless behavior
Yes. Also good. But if someone has hacked their bike so its no longer safe or it enters a category where it needs different insurance or registration, it is easier to enforce before any dangerous behaviour has occurred. Otherwise its often too late, after an accident.
That was sadly exactly what I was expecting from the electric motorization of bicycles. It is a history that has repeated itself many times in the last 70 or 80 years since the first combustion engine mopeds.
The fact is that the human-powered bike is at a sweet spot of efficiency and safety. Once you go faster, you need a helmet, a heavier frame, wider tyres, better brakes, wider lanes, protective clothing, protection against cold, a heavier motor for propelling all the extra weight, and so on. The energy input from you the human dwindles.
It is not any more a bicycle.
You need a helmet on purely muscle-powered bicycles, too. A helmet saved both mine and my father’s life in accidents that would not had happened were we not riding bikes that moment.
A majority of bicycle accident fatalities could have been prevented with helmets.
Wear helmets. There are cool models, too, don’t try that excuse.The annoying part is having to carry the helmet around with you when bike is parked.
I vaguelly remember a study in Denmark (which has roughly 50/50 of people cycling with and without helmets) that showed that cyclists who wear helmets were more likely to have serious accidents than those who did not, though by a small percentage.
There are several factors that are believed to be behind such an unexpected statistic:
- Drivers actually act more dangerously around cyclists who seem better protected than around those who do not and the cyclists themselves are more reckless when they feel they’re better protected (the latter being a much broader and well known phenomenon)
- The weight of the helmet, even though it’s quite low, will on a high speed collision pull the head more towards colliding with something than otherwise - in other words, if you fall the helmet actually unbalances your head and makes it more likely your head will hit the ground.
- The human brain is much more resilient to linear shock than rotational shock - basically when something makes your head rotate the brain inside will also rotate though not instantly since it not part of the bone of your cranium, so it will instead get pulled to rotate and similarly when the head stops be pulled to stop rotating, all of which can cause tearing which can kill a person. Cycling helmets tend to make the head rotate on a collision.
- Cycling helmets are only rated to protect from collisions up to (if I remember it correctly) 15km/h
- Cycling helmets do not protect anything else than the head (which links back to the first point)
Anyways, the point being that at the kind of speed and the environment that people cycle in when just commuting in a city, bicyle helmets can actually make it slightly more dangerous.
Mind you, this doesn’t at all mean that in different situations - such as mountain biking or speed cycling - helmets aren’t a must.
In places like The Netherlands pretty much nobody uses a helmet when just cycling in the city.
I would really like to see that study. Because I have studies showing the opposite.
Here is an article (in German, sorry) summarizing and contextualising several studies. One showed that wearing a helmet resulted in car drivers keeping five centimetres less distance when overtaking the cyclist, but that study’s method was flawed and a study conducted in Berlin with better equipment and better method (bigger sample size, different routes, women being actually test subjects and not just represented by a guy with a wig, etc) that showed helmet wearing bicyclists being overtaken with more distance.
Here (again German, sorry) is a research report comparing 543 accidents with injured bicyclists in University Hospitals of Munich and Münster and 117 accudent fatality from a database. From the 117 fatalities, 50% died of traumatic brain injury and six wore a helmet. Furthermore, from those injured (not the 117 fatalities) and with traumatic brain injury, none wore helmets.
Here (this time in english) is a meta analysis of studies about the safety of wearing helmets when cycling, concluding the discussed studies show a benefit for safety when wearing a helmet while cycling (too much for.me to summarize).
Sadly I read about this over a decade ago and don’t have a link for it anymore.
I looked around and all I could find were studies pointing out that helmets protect against head injury, which was never in dispute and you yourself linked studies for that - my the point was not about helmets reducing head injuries (though the whole rotational vs linear collisions thing means good helmet design is important) but about how as per risk compensation theory if there is an overal increase in risk due to increased perception of safety it might offset the increased in protection from helmets since helmets only protect the head.
Also found lots of things about how mandatory helmet use for cyclists in overall causes more deaths (for example and another example) because it reduces the number of people who take up cycling and the overall negative health outcomes of fewer people cycling add up to to higher mortality that the increased risk of head injury from cycling without a helmet given the low baseline risk of cycling in general.
Here’s a pretty good summary from the views in the EU.
Well, first, you did try to make points about brain injuries caused by wearing helmets. Now you claim you never argued about that, so what is it?
Second, it is IMHO not quite intelligent to make an argument about head protection not protectng other body parts. That’s like saying a stab protection vest is useless because you can get shot in the head.
Third, the first article I linked talks about a systematic comparative analysis of 23 studies examining risk homeostasis hypothesis, of which 18 could not confirm the hypothesis, three showing inconclusive results and only two being arguments for the hypothesis, the analysis concluding there is little to no evidence for bicycle helmets leading to riskier behavior.I know the studies about mandatory helmet rules (something I actually never talked about), I find people’s behavior in this case utterly incomprehensible and stupid, but again, it’s not something I argued for. It just shows me we need to encourage helmet use in different ways. Mandatory for children maybe so that they get used to it, normalizing and encouraging wearing helmets by advertisements etc. IDK, but such efforts can be quite successful if funded and supportes sufficiently.
Ovoid shapes will cause rotational forces on perpendicular impacts, whilst spherical shapes do not. This is just Maths.
Notice how motorcycle helmets are actually spherical.
In my experience the traditional bicycle helmets are half ovoids.
That said I drilled down to the comparative analisys linked from the study you indicated and it basically concludes that people who are more fearful tend to wear helmets when cycling, so the reverse causality relationship of the risk compensation theory (which would be that a person that starts wearing a helmet when cycling becomes more risk taking).
So you make a good point that advising people to wear helmets is not a bad idea.
IMHO, as long as it doesn’t turn people away from a more compreensive risk reduction form of cycling (which is how I personally tackled changing from cycling in The Netherlands to cycling in London, which at the time had much worse cycling infrastructure and were motorists weren’t used to cyclists when I started doing it - by having quite a lot of tricks to keep me safe from the innatention and error of not just motorists but also pedestrians, most of which were not at all needed in The Netherlands were other road users always expect cyclists to be around), it’s fine.
As for mandatory cycling helmets, I’m against it because it severely lowers the uptake of cycling which ultimatelly is worse for people because of worse health outcomes. Also my experience cycling in London during the period were it went from quite atypical to more normalized, is that more cyclists around results in more motorists and pedestrians being naturally aware of and careful towards cyclists (an effect I also noticed from the other side in myself as both a motorist and a pedestrian when I moved from a country with no cycling culture to The Netherlands and got used to lots of cyclists around) which in turn makes cycling safer for everybody - in other words, more cycling adoption makes cycling safer. This seems to be aligned with the most common position in The Netherlands as per my last link:
The Dutch government, private safety organizations and cyclists’ groups all tend to agree on the following propositions: Promoting the use of bicycle helmets runs counter to present government policies that are aimed at the primary prevention of crashes (as opposed to secondary prevention) and at stimulating the use of the bicycle as a general health measure.
Ovoid shapes will cause rotational forces on perpendicular impacts, whilst spherical shapes do not. This is just Maths.
Notice how motorcycle helmets are actually spherical.
In my experience the traditional bicycle helmets are half ovoids.
Bruh, it’s not that deep. Statistics show that wearing a helmet reduces chances to severe head and brain injuries.
As for mandatory cycling helmets, I’m against it
I don’t care since I am not discussing helmet mandates.
As for the rest, obviously it’s better to prevent accidents in the first place and obviously we need to reduce the number of cars on our streets for multiple reasons. But that’s all policy while wearing a helmet is a cheap and easy way to protect yourself against unavoidable accidents and avoidable accidents while waiting and advocating for policy change.
Helmet studies typically have a bias for or against from the start. The reality is wearing a helmet is always safer, and would save lives of pedestrians and car drivers. However, making cycling as easy as walking means no helmet laws. In Netherlands, helmeted riders have more injuries because they tend to be the riders on expensive road race bikes going considerably faster in car traffic.
Helmet studies typically have a bias for or against from the start.
The reality is wearing a helmet is always safer
You writting one after the other just makes clear you’re hugely biased in this as you basically put forward an absolute statement of yours “wearing a helmet is always safe” as objective truth whilst studies “typically are biased” or in other words, you know better than studies.
Definitelly agree that using numbers from injuries of cyclists with helmets in The Netherlands without any further considerations yields biased results for the reasons you described. It’s not by chance that I did not quote such figures at all and in fact explicitly said from the start that people doing things like speed cycling and mountain biking should wear a helmet.
No idea were you pulled that specific argument you decided to counter in a response to my posts.
Specifically for The Netherlands and from the last link in my previous post, the only thing about them is the general belief there that “Promoting the use of bicycle helmets runs counter to present government policies that are aimed at the primary prevention of crashes (as opposed to secondary prevention) and at stimulating the use of the bicycle as a general health measure” which is really about not having mandatory helmet laws because it reduces cycling in general and how it’s more important to push for safe cycling conditions (such as good cycle paths) than for cyclists wearing protection, all of which makes sense.
Personally I think that wearing a helmet or not should be down to each cyclist and should take in account the conditions they are cycling under, always remembering that wearing a helmet is not a silver bullet. My own experience of cycling in different countries (The Netherlands, England, Germany, Portugal) and different conditions is that the level of risk can be very different sometimes even from city to city, making helmet use more or less important relative to other things.
Again and above all, always keep in mind that wearing a helmet is not going to make you totally or even mostly safe, if only to avoid the increase risk taking due to a sense of increase safety exceeding the actual amount of increased safety from a helmet - as per risk compensation theory - which ultimatelly can make you less safe.
In my view your whole “wearing a helmet is always safer” absolutist posture is a needlessly dangerous mindset to have - it’s far better to have a far more general approach to cycling safety in city traffic (which is basically what I went with when I moved from cycling in the far safer Dutch conditions to cycling in London, meaning that I ran around with all sorts of risk mitigation practices not just towards motorists on the road but even towards pedestrians in the sidewalk that were even adjusted depending in the area of London I was in) that thinking that just a helmet will make you safe.
Oh man I got a concussion while wearing a bike helmet I probably would have died if I wasnt wearing it. And we were just kids makings jumps in the driveway…
No we don’t need helmets. Cars must be kicked out of the bicycle’s areas instead. Fuck that carbrained propaganda.
This reads like you fell on your head without wearing a helmet a few times too often.
Yes, right.
But: A bike helmet won’t help you much if you have a collision at 50 km/h. If you go at moped / light motorcycle speed, you need a motorcycle helmet, too.
Yeah, obviously you need different helmets for different speeds. But the comment I responded to was worded like you wouldn’t need a helmet on bicycles at all.
In principle, this is correct. But the need for a helmet increases massively with speed.
Consider the end speed of free fall when falling a certain height - or the inverse, height in meters versus speed in kilometer per hour. It is:
10 km/h ..... 0.39 meter 20 km/h ..... 1.57 meter 30 km/h ..... 3.54 meter 40 km/h ..... 6.29 meter 50 km/h ..... 9.83 meterWould you jump from ten meters height into a concrete surface? Few people would, because it is almost certain that you die. But the frame pillar of a car is equally hard as such a surface.
Another data point: In the center of Copenhagen, not so many people use a helmet, but the speed is typically between 10 and 15 km/h - so many bikes there ! - and the number of serious accidents is very low. The contrary is the case for Germany.
And just to make a point: Using a helmet is always safer.
So? Nobody is arguing about this but you. Again, my point is not about speeds or certain types of helmets. I just said you should wear a helmrt on bikes FFS!
most ebikes already go slower, or on par at max speed with an amateur/relatively fit cyclist. roughly 25 to 30kmph.
going after fat tire bikes specifically doesnt really make sense considering they offer more traction for stopping power. if they legally limit the speed it should be on par with elite level cyclists at most. which is about 50 to 60kmph. depending on the area. nobody wants to wipe out and hurt themselves or somebody else.
this is a way for them to add tickets and licensing for people who wish to circumvent owning a vehicle or taking public transit. which the government and corporations directly benefit from financially.
i just dont see the point besides fear mongering in a place where virtuallly everyone has a bike, and cycling accidents are less lethal than vehicular ones. it just seems like an unfair represention of statistics to prop up a bottom line that only serves to extract wealth from the poor, less well off, environementally or financially concious.
if parents dont want their kids to take those risks, then dont buy them an ebike. buy them a regular one, or tell them to take public tranist if they cant offer it themselves.
they always use children as a way to shoe in control with fear tactics.
as an bike/ebike rider. i have a bike that can go about 45kmph and never go over 25 personally, as that feels like a safe speed in my city with the infrastructure and crossings that we have. every incident that has happened to me has come from vehicles doing illegal turns, crossings, or not looking where traffic is coming from before pulling out into the street.
if anything they should focus on getting more people to ride bikes/ebikes, and offering safety courses for those who wish to own ebikes. free of charge.
if they want to regulate them, regulate braking power vs speed potential. and helmets. and create separated concrete barrier bike lanes with covers for weather and wind to avoid ice buildup and snow. fat tire bikes are nearly a necessity for cyclists in colder climate.
They are talking about banning fat “bikes” not fat tire bikes. They are basically electric motorcycles disguised as an e-bike.
Like this one:
There is already regulation and they should be speed limited. But these bikes are designed to unlock the limit very easily.
These are fucking motorcycles.
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More than 10000 death per year are due to air pollution. About half are due to traffic emission (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5564403_Long-Term_Effects_of_Traffic-Related_Air_Pollution_on_Mortality_in_a_Dutch_Cohort_NLCS-AIR_Study)
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74% of households in the netherlands have a car. Only 6% of cars are electric
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Most road fatalities are cyclists. Most road deaths occur in crashes involving a car: single-car crashes, car-car crashes and bicycle-car crashes (https://swov.nl/en/fact-sheet/road-deaths-netherlands).
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Boomers: woW ThoSe ElecTriC BikEs ArE Very DangerOus
Nothing’s worse than vroomers, polluting the earth and spreading lung cancer to little children while comfortably lying in their fatzo mover, whining about kids having bikes. It’s a social panick, and the proof is that there is no studies, no figures, nothing in the article. Just testimonies and vibes-based moralism.
And yes, I know you, yes, you, are getting mad at reading this because deep down you know you are a polluter and a piece of shit.
Well, stay mad, idiot.
This is such a dumb argument to make. “Worse problems exist, so let’s not do anything about this one”. Who did you think you’d convince by writing all this out? What a waste of time.
Check the user name and the account age, then stop feeding the troll.
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Anyone notice how these are mostly prevalent among right-wingers?
Who knew that reinventing the motorcycle for like the third time was going to have the exact same result.
When are cars banned?
Believe it or not, cars are already banned from bikelanes and parks in Amsterdam. I hope this helps.
They’re allowed everywhere else and they make up most of the fatalities.
They should be banned from the city.
You just need to build a public transpotation system that can render cars useless for every use (shopping, commute, free time activities and so on) and that is usable from evertwhere to everywhere, even outside big (and small) cities.
They already have it. Yet 78% of household have one.
Public transit is one aspect, another one is walkable cities where everything you need in your daily life is just a short walk away. Also, sensible laws regarding rights to work from home for applicable jobs etc.
Having everything you need daily at a walkable distance only works in big cities, in small towns it do not work.
Of course that can work as well.
Only up to a point. Small cities have not the critical mass of inhabitants to make certain services logical or even sustainable.
Throttle controlled electric bicycles have revolutionized individual mobility in Chinese major cities. They are low cost, low emission, and can be used by a wide demographic, for example, teenagers, who also want individual mobility.
By banning them “because they’re unsafe”, western governments are missing an opportunity to modernize the way in which people move around. Instead, they should figure out how to have people use these safely.
I think they’d all be happy to classify them as electric motorbikes.
Requiring registration plates, training, a license, insurance, safety gear, and making them road only.
They don’t belong on cycling or pedestrian infrastructure. They shouldn’t be ridden by children.
I’d settle for a moped classification with cheap registration and basic licencing for kids that teaches them, “only use the throttle in bike lanes, and we’ll take the bike away if we see you do it anywhere else.”
Requiring registration plates, training, a license, insurance, safety gear, and making them road only.
That’s the thing, these things are light enough they’re perfectly fine anywhere a bicycle can go. If you need speed limits, enforce speed limits.
If it’s limited to what you’d expect in a bicycle lane, sure. But they’re not. There’s nobody to enforce it.
UK rules are they can only be pedal assisted and can only go up to 15mph (at which point the motor cuts out and if you want to go faster then grow some leg muscles).
That feels reasonable to me. I just don’t want to be mown down on a canal towpath by some 13 year-old, balaclava-wearing scrote doing 30mph on his Temu motorbike.
mown down on a canal towpath by some 13 year-old, balaclava-wearing scrote
How bad are things over there?? In Vietnam, all the kids use high-powered electrics until they’re like 14 or so and can get on a 125cc, it shocks me when I see kids on major roads, but it doesn’t create the danger to the public you’re describing.
There isn’t much to figure out. Treat them as what they are: Small motorcycles, and as a consequence, require a license, insurance, mandate helmets, ban them from roadways reserved for non-motorised traffic, and enforce minimal technical standards.
I disagree, I think they have other properties than small motorcycles. Motorcycles drive faster than 30-45 kph, are more expensive to buy and maintain, and they’re noisy, whereas electric bikes are noise-free.
Requiring an insurance and license makes them needlessly expensive - in China, neither is required, except for wearing a helmet. (on paper, they require license & insurance, but police doesn’t enforce this).
I think teenagers riding them would be disastrous, otherwise I agree.
Yeah, I disagree – I think teenagers are one of the most miserable demographic group in western societies, think teenage depression.
They aren’t allowed to vote, they have limited agency, because they have limited money, they have limited mobility, because they aren’t allowed to drive. I think they should be empowered, and I think electric scooters empower them somewhat.
Pretty much everyone grew up just fine having much less than today’s teenagers.
Lack of dangerous vehicles is certainly not the cause of their depression.
Look around you. Do people look just fine?
“If everyone had access to a fatbike, we would live in utopia. No fascists, no pedophiles, no corruption, no billionaires, no climate change!”
It won’t create a utopia, but displacing cars with 2-wheelers and giving kids more independence is good for everyone’s mental health.
Riding a motorbike in Hanoi is infinitely less stressful than driving a car on any stroad in America. In China on an ebike you get the unique ability to ride both where cars or bicycles go.
The issue here isn’t ebikes, its unsafe behavior. If you need speed limits, put in speed limits. It would be silly to limit cars and trucks to 20 horsepower instead of setting the appropriate speed limit for where they’re driving.
Am I understanding this correctly, that they want to ban bicycles based on the width of their tires?
“fatbike” means something different in The Netherlands than it means in North America.
In North America, fat bikes are mountain bikes with 4 inch wide or wider tires, generally designed for use on snow and sand. E.g.: https://surlybikes.com/products/wednesday-og-algae
In The Netherlands, fatbikes are throttle-controlled e-bikes with 4-5" wide tires with a smaller diameter than typical bikes. They come with pedals, but the gearing and seat position makes the pedals essentially useless; many people remove them. They do not handle well. They do not stop well. They are popular because they are cheap. E.g.: https://www.fatbikeskopen.nl/products/qm-wheels-v20-pro-mini-zwart
So they’re banning electric bicycles based on tire width? That doesn’t really make any more sense to me. Also weird that throttle controlled e-bikes are allowed, but fat tires aren’t. (Especially considering that EU regulation 168/2013 implies that pedal assistance is mandatory.)
The second I saw the first fat bike I knew it was a bad idea
It’s literally a worst of all worlds type vehicle, why are they so popular anyway? Is it just the “cool” factor?
they can go around 45 kph with minimal pedaling and doesn’t require a moped license.
They should require a license…
Throttle controlled ebikes should be banned. Pedal assist only. Article doesn’t say which these are.
Don’t ban them, just make them register as electric motorcycles. Which is a market that could do with more choices…
