micromobility - Bikes, scooters, boards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
Ebikes, bicycles, scooters, skateboards, longboards, eboards, motorcycles, skates, unicycles, heelies, or an office chair: Whatever floats your goat, this is all things micromobility!
"Transportation using lightweight vehicles such as bicycles or scooters, especially electric ones that may be borrowed as part of a self-service rental program in which people rent vehicles for short-term use within a town or city.
micromobility is seen as a potential solution to moving people more efficiently around cities"
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I would probably avoid a folding ebike. Looks like rail companies are starting to ban vehicles with large lithium packs on them here. I assume ebikes get away with it for now by being similar visually to regular bikes and staff not knowing the difference.
All it takes is one of the cheap Chinese ones setting a train on fire and killing people in a tunnel, I think that prompted the scooter ban, though just the battery and it didn't spread to the train.
Quick edit: Just looked it up and not sure if it was on a train actually. But that is the fear about it. They are responsible for a lot of house fires. All houses near us that burnt down recently were due to lithium batteries, though some are power tools it's not just bikes/scooters.
If this is true, it will be an own goal for sustainability. I for one will be mighty pissed off and will try to do something about it.
A related issue here is the EU's 250W motor limit for ebikes, which means that even a 400W ebike is completely illegal on a public road without a motorbike registration. From what I can tell, most of the ebike companies are either pretending this rule doesn't exist, or obfuscating about it, or putting in switches to throttle the motor to 250W and magically make the thing "legal". I am looking to buy an ebike - which I will attempt to take on a train - and this whole issue is driving me to distraction.
250w nominal or peak? Seeing people has been saying Bosch 250w motor is good enough kinda feels like it's nominal, and i'm using 250w nominal which imo is enough. I also live on hilly area, and my bike is heavy as heck, it's still able to pull me in pedal assist mode, which i wouldn't be able to climb it myself.
The fact that you don't even know is exactly what I'm talking about. It's peak - the regulation is pretty clear that you can't just put a button "Push this to comply", the motor must not be capable of outputting more than 250W. Or else stay off the public road, sidewalk included.
It seems that hardly anybody cares because there's all but no enforcement in most countries. But as I understand it from much sleuthing, there's been some cracking down in some places, notably France. So who's to say what's coming next year? Personally I'm not wasting a thousand euro if it's to get pulled over and fined, or to get in trouble trying to cross a border while touring, or (worst of all) to find that I'm uninsured in an accident.
And now this about trains. Hardly surprising there's gonna be problem if people are trying to pass off 1kW motorbikes as ebikes.
In the UK anything over 250w would be considered some kind of motorcycle. To be an ebike the motor can only be pedal assist and cuts out over about 15mph.