Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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In Germany they're limited to bicycle infrastructure and neither sidewalks nor highways are that, 20km/h (hardware limit, 12.4274mph in colonial units), no license but minimum age is 14, same DUI laws as for cars, and you need insurance. Which, granted, is quite cheap at 30-60 Euro a year and comes with a cute little license plate in fashionable colours (as in: changes every year). There's also some signalling requirements mostly mirroring bikes, minimum standards for brakes, such stuff. No regular technical inspection, though.
The morale? If you want to go fast get a bike 30km/h aren't that hard.
Do the police actually speedcheck you? It's also 20km/h maximum in Sweden, but the police haven't stopped me yet when I routinely go 35+ for many years now.
Driving faster would mean unlocking it which means it's not street-legal any more which isn't much of a fine, 70 Euros, but it also means that the insurance is invalid which means up to one year prison/fine and might cost you your driving license.
They really went all-in on the insurance thing because apparently people behave like pedestrians with the thing, but at bicycle speeds and above which isn't a good mix.
The police here caught a guy going 70km/h on a heavily "optimized" scooter recently. He admitted that he didn't know how fast he went, as the speed indicator only goes up to a speed of 30km/h.
I'm a bit to the south! Hello from Portugal!
We allowed those contraptions with the same restrictions as bicycles but because the tourist industry is wild here, they became sort of a fever and soon we were having people modifying those things to reach 80km/h or more.
Accidents have been crazy and bloody.
20 is pretty slow, that's going to cause conflicts with cyclists that want to go 30.
Cyclists wanting to go 30 clash with the majority of cyclists, we're used to it. The outdated infrastructure doesn't help, either, some of it is literally the ~50cm asphalt lanes Nazis more or less painted on sidewalks to get bicycles off the streets, "to not hinder progress". Luckily you're not required to use them if they're intolerable, which they generally are. Especially in Hamburg. The kind of annoying thing is that the large concrete pavers they used for the sidewalk actually do last ages, even roots pushing them up don't really do damage pedestrians would care about, and many municipalities bill property owners for street refurbishments and politicians don't want to face pitchforks or change the statutes (and spend municipal money) so nothing gets done.
Not so much with ebikes, although I understand that those are also hobbled by speed restrictions. It seems ironic that the country of unlimited speed limits for cars has such slow speed limits for safe transport, but I guess that's what carbrained thinking does
Fast ebikes are classed as mopeds as such you'll have to use the roads and are banned from bicycle infrastructure. Pedelecs are classed as bikes and they're not limited to 25km/h, they just won't assist past that point. And frankly e-scooters at 20km/h are already plenty fast with those tiny wheels, ideally you don't want to drive faster than you can sprint and while athletes are faster (Usain Bolt sprints 44km/h), 20 is a good estimate for your average moderately out of shape human.
What's actually nuts about the speed limits 45km/h for mopeds and the like. 50km/h is ordinary city speeds and having people drive just a bit slower is inviting all kinds of unnecessary take-over manoeuvres.
Also just for completeness' sake there's plenty of speed limits for cars, also on the Autobahn, only about 57% are unlimited, 13% switch back and forth, unlimited doesn't mean unlimited and the safety record isn't bad in comparison to other countries. It could be improved but whether more limits would help is questionable.
e-kickscooters, e-bikes and pedelecs can actually go faster here, but they would need to be classified as motorscooter/moped (<45km/h, drivers license, operating license, no use of sidewalks or bike lanes, mandatory helmet) or motorbikes (motorbike license, registered plate not just insurance plate, mandatory inspections)