Nicholas Hellen, Transport Editor
Sunday August 21 2022, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
In the summer of 2020, Boris Johnson announced a “revolutionary” plan to build thousands of miles of Dutch-style bike lanes as a haven from motor traffic.
Two years on questions are being raised about who should be using them, as a new wave of more than a million e-scooters and micro-cars, known as light quadricycles, prepare to join ordinary cyclists, fast e-bikes and delivery riders with cargo in the already crowded lanes.
Duncan Dollimore, the head of campaigns at Cycling UK, a membership charity of 70,000, said that problems were starting to emerge in larger cities — and were likely to spread in future. He said he was most concerned about the speed and acceleration of the new vehicles, and that the government must be ready to police breaches and to ban certain vehicles if necessary.
Last week Trudy Harrison, the transport minister, was in the Netherlands to seek answers on how to avoid future chaos. She was told how a sharp rise in the popularity of e-bikes, travelling at 15.5mph, has led to clashes with riders on traditional Dutch “sit up and beg” bikes with average speeds of about 9mph.
They are already widening cycle lanes from 2, to a minimum of 2m 30cm. Robert van Asten, deputy mayor of the Hague, said: “It is getting crowded on the cycleways and that is dangerous for the elderly and young children.”
They are also considering getting rid of cycle lanes in areas that have a low speed limit of 20mph — where cars and bikes will essentially be travelling at the same speed.
“If you create a street which is based on the most vulnerable, then you have your cycling infrastructure,” van Asten said. “When we create a road with a limit of 30km/h [18mph] and there is a separate cycling lane, we will remove the cycling lane because we want to have everybody on the same piece of road.” About 80 per cent of built-up areas have a speed limit of 30km/h and this is the default for new roads.
In Britain cyclists are having to cope with newcomers encroaching on their space. New regulations in the forthcoming Transport Bill will decide which vehicles can use cycle lanes, based on their maximum speed. This autumn the government is expected to set out plans to allow private e-scooters into cycle lanes. There are about 1 million private e-scooters in in the UK, even though they are illegal on the road.
Vehicles that look like micro-cars are already permitted. The CityQ e-bike, described by its makers as a “car-ebike”, has a top speed of 15.5mph and can carry two adults. It weighs 70kg and is due to go on sale in the UK at the end of the year.
E-scooters pose a more immediate problem. Those permitted in the official rental trials, such as Lime, Voi and Tier, have rapid acceleration because their motors have twice the power output, at 500W, of e-bikes, which have 250W. By comparison, a Tour de France cyclist typically produces 250-300 watts.
Another booming sector is delivery via cargo bike, which has in some cases supplanted the use of vans thanks to low cost and manoeuvrability. Bikes can deliver bulky items as well as parcels. Sam Keam, the co-founder of Zedify UK, which has 130 cargo bikes delivering loads of up to 200kg, said: “The cycle lanes are not wide enough or too disjointed so we train our drivers not to [use them].”
Delivery riders for fast food and groceries are also causing problems. Richard Jordan, the chief executive of GreenMo, which manages about 17,500 e-bikes across Britain and Europe for clients such as Just Eat and Domino’s Pizza, said that many operators were using illegally adapted bikes with powerful motors and throttles and were putting riders and pedestrians in danger.
Tories don’t often like bicycles, as Grant Shapps is making clear. Boris does like bicycles, Tories decided they didn’t like Boris as much as they used to. enjoy Boris’s replacement, anything that would have been spent on this is turning into tax cuts.
​
I’m still more worried about 1-2 ton metal boxes being driven around badly in places with no cycle lanes, I can’t see hitting an electric scooterist as being as bad as some giant thing with bull-bars knocking you off.
In the Netherlands e-bikes, e-scooters and light mopeds under 50cc and fitted with a 25km/h speed limiter are allowed on most bike lanes.
Although the infrastructure is much better there and bike lanes are wider. In the UK most streets are too narrow to have wide bike lanes.
I didnt realise the scooters had 500W motors – that explains why it’so hard for me to catch them on my ebike!
The problem, of course, is not this manufactured conflict between cycles and scooters, but the fact that there are not enough cycle lanes and they are often too narrow.
There’s the possibility that e-scooters will outnumber cars on our city roads at some point. Already in some places you see more scooters than bicycles.
People under 20 love e-scooters and see push bikes as an archaic thing.
This is the future we’re just going to have to get used to, when everybody who wants a Personal Electric Transport can have one, they’ll be everywhere.
Especially with e-mopeds/motorbikes becoming such a big trend in America, where they’re as fast as other road vehicles. We’re usually a few years behind them on trends.
Has there been a change I’ve missed about quadricycles or are they still legally just cars and need a full licence, insurance etc?
“Dutch-style bike lanes”
Sadly they insist on inventing new BRITISH ways of doing things instead of just copying the people that know what they’re doing.
7 comments
Nicholas Hellen, Transport Editor
Sunday August 21 2022, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
In the summer of 2020, Boris Johnson announced a “revolutionary” plan to build thousands of miles of Dutch-style bike lanes as a haven from motor traffic.
Two years on questions are being raised about who should be using them, as a new wave of more than a million e-scooters and micro-cars, known as light quadricycles, prepare to join ordinary cyclists, fast e-bikes and delivery riders with cargo in the already crowded lanes.
Duncan Dollimore, the head of campaigns at Cycling UK, a membership charity of 70,000, said that problems were starting to emerge in larger cities — and were likely to spread in future. He said he was most concerned about the speed and acceleration of the new vehicles, and that the government must be ready to police breaches and to ban certain vehicles if necessary.
Last week Trudy Harrison, the transport minister, was in the Netherlands to seek answers on how to avoid future chaos. She was told how a sharp rise in the popularity of e-bikes, travelling at 15.5mph, has led to clashes with riders on traditional Dutch “sit up and beg” bikes with average speeds of about 9mph.
They are already widening cycle lanes from 2, to a minimum of 2m 30cm. Robert van Asten, deputy mayor of the Hague, said: “It is getting crowded on the cycleways and that is dangerous for the elderly and young children.”
They are also considering getting rid of cycle lanes in areas that have a low speed limit of 20mph — where cars and bikes will essentially be travelling at the same speed.
“If you create a street which is based on the most vulnerable, then you have your cycling infrastructure,” van Asten said. “When we create a road with a limit of 30km/h [18mph] and there is a separate cycling lane, we will remove the cycling lane because we want to have everybody on the same piece of road.” About 80 per cent of built-up areas have a speed limit of 30km/h and this is the default for new roads.
In Britain cyclists are having to cope with newcomers encroaching on their space. New regulations in the forthcoming Transport Bill will decide which vehicles can use cycle lanes, based on their maximum speed. This autumn the government is expected to set out plans to allow private e-scooters into cycle lanes. There are about 1 million private e-scooters in in the UK, even though they are illegal on the road.
Vehicles that look like micro-cars are already permitted. The CityQ e-bike, described by its makers as a “car-ebike”, has a top speed of 15.5mph and can carry two adults. It weighs 70kg and is due to go on sale in the UK at the end of the year.
E-scooters pose a more immediate problem. Those permitted in the official rental trials, such as Lime, Voi and Tier, have rapid acceleration because their motors have twice the power output, at 500W, of e-bikes, which have 250W. By comparison, a Tour de France cyclist typically produces 250-300 watts.
Another booming sector is delivery via cargo bike, which has in some cases supplanted the use of vans thanks to low cost and manoeuvrability. Bikes can deliver bulky items as well as parcels. Sam Keam, the co-founder of Zedify UK, which has 130 cargo bikes delivering loads of up to 200kg, said: “The cycle lanes are not wide enough or too disjointed so we train our drivers not to [use them].”
Delivery riders for fast food and groceries are also causing problems. Richard Jordan, the chief executive of GreenMo, which manages about 17,500 e-bikes across Britain and Europe for clients such as Just Eat and Domino’s Pizza, said that many operators were using illegally adapted bikes with powerful motors and throttles and were putting riders and pedestrians in danger.
Tories don’t often like bicycles, as Grant Shapps is making clear. Boris does like bicycles, Tories decided they didn’t like Boris as much as they used to. enjoy Boris’s replacement, anything that would have been spent on this is turning into tax cuts.
​
I’m still more worried about 1-2 ton metal boxes being driven around badly in places with no cycle lanes, I can’t see hitting an electric scooterist as being as bad as some giant thing with bull-bars knocking you off.
In the Netherlands e-bikes, e-scooters and light mopeds under 50cc and fitted with a 25km/h speed limiter are allowed on most bike lanes.
Although the infrastructure is much better there and bike lanes are wider. In the UK most streets are too narrow to have wide bike lanes.
I didnt realise the scooters had 500W motors – that explains why it’so hard for me to catch them on my ebike!
The problem, of course, is not this manufactured conflict between cycles and scooters, but the fact that there are not enough cycle lanes and they are often too narrow.
There’s the possibility that e-scooters will outnumber cars on our city roads at some point. Already in some places you see more scooters than bicycles.
People under 20 love e-scooters and see push bikes as an archaic thing.
This is the future we’re just going to have to get used to, when everybody who wants a Personal Electric Transport can have one, they’ll be everywhere.
Especially with e-mopeds/motorbikes becoming such a big trend in America, where they’re as fast as other road vehicles. We’re usually a few years behind them on trends.
Has there been a change I’ve missed about quadricycles or are they still legally just cars and need a full licence, insurance etc?
“Dutch-style bike lanes”
Sadly they insist on inventing new BRITISH ways of doing things instead of just copying the people that know what they’re doing.